China Abroad : Travels, Subjects, Spaces [1 ed.] 9789888052103, 9789622099456

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China Abroad

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.

China Abroad Travels, Subjects, Spaces

Edited by Elaine Yee Lin Ho and Julia Kuehn

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

© Hong Kong University Press 2009 Hardback Paperback

ISBN 978-962-209-945-6 ISBN 978-962-209-989-0

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Secure On-line Ordering http://www.hkupress.org

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound by Lammar Offset Printing Ltd., in Hong Kong, China

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

Contents

List of Illustrations Foreword

vii by Rey Chow

ix

Acknowledgements

xiii

List of Contributors

xv

I

Introduction

1

Elaine Yee Lin Ho

2

Julia Kuehn

II

Translating China

3

Qingsheng Tong

4

Shuang Shen

1 China Abroad: Nation and Diaspora in a Chinese Frame China Abroad: Between Transnation and Translation

3 23 43

Guo Songtao in London: An Unaccomplished Mission of Discovery

45

Lu Xun, Cultural Internationalism, Leftist Periodicals and Literary Translation in the 1930s 63

vi

Contents

III China, Hong Kong, and Beyond 5

6

Elaine Yee Lin Ho

Wendy Gan

Nationalism, Internationalism, the Cold War: Crossing Literary-Cultural Boundaries in 1950s Hong Kong Southwards and Outwards: Representing Chineseness in New Locations in Hong Kong Films

IV Chinese Cartographies in the World

83

85

105 121

7

Weimin Tang

Translating and Transforming the American Dream: Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Gish Jen’s Typical American 123

8

Kenneth Chan

Diasporic Desires: Narrating Sexuality in the Memoirs of Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Li-Young Lee

139

The Sino-Japanese Conflict of Asian American Literature

155

9

Colleen Lye

10 Deborah L. Madsen Travels in the Body: Technologies of Waste in the Chinese Diaspora 173 11 Marie-Paule Ha 12 Tseen Khoo 13 David Parker

The Chinese and the White Man’s Burden in Indochina

191

Affirming Cosmopolitanism? Chineseness and the Chinese Museum of Queensland

209

Our Space? Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Online Life 225

Notes

243

Works Cited

259

Index

279

List of Illustrations

Figure 1: Wong Man ඡඓ, “Indulgence” ᐣͨϬɯ! in Between Two Worlds Εԭ࠯˖‫ވ‬ɾං!. Hong Kong: The Student Book Store ࠗಋነ́࣊֙ˮ‫مخ‬, 1956. 16–19. p. 97. Figure 2: “Cross-cultural Toilet Signage.” Source: “Toiletological Signage.” . p. 176. Figure 3: “Cross-cultural Toilet Signage.” Source: “Toiletological Signage.” . p. 177. Figure 4: “24-carat gold toilet, 3-D Gold Store, 21 Man Lok Street, Hunghom/ Kowloon, Hong Kong, China.” . p. 186. Figure 5: Tseen Khoo, “Chinatown gateway, Ann Street side of the Duncan Street Mall.” p. 215. Figure 6: Tseen Khoo, “Close-up of the first Chinatown storyboard, ‘Heart and soul of Chinatown’.” p. 216. Figure 7: Tseen Khoo, “Second storyboard marker in Brisbane’s Chinatown.” p. 217.

Foreword Rey Chow

The challenge of the phrase “China abroad” is as timely as its richness is inexhaustible, and I want to begin my brief remarks by saluting the editors and contributors of this anthology for opening up this enormously suggestive intellectual space. What they have provided here is nothing short of an ongoing agenda for interdisciplinary research. From the debates on diasporic/ cosmopolitan/transnational identities and the practical and theoretical problems of translation across cultures, to the criticism of literature and film, the work of little-known authors in peripheral enclaves, the strictures and politics of Chinese American writing, and the many scenarios of cross-cultural interaction involving populations of Chinese descent in different parts of the world, the wealth of historical, sociological, and ethnographical materials showcased in these pages is eye-opening. Together, the chapters signal the urgency of a new paradigm for the study of Chineseness as, first and foremost, a type of discursive formation, whereby forces of language, economics, migration, cultural tradition, and socialization coalesce to produce and remold ethnically marked subjects. Reflecting on the collective significance of the chapters, I also want to note that the volume’s deceptively simple title contains an additional challenge, one that deserves a more fully fledged discussion. The elegance of the phrase “China abroad” invites us to imagine what would happen should the two words be made part of some larger statements, such as, for instance, the study of China abroad, China as viewed from abroad, whose China abroad?, and so forth, which do not necessarily amend the phrase but rather supplement it. Once supplemented, however, “China abroad” begins to take on a different level of complexity, not so much in the sense of a possible substantiation with

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Foreword

an ever larger number of contents, as in the sense of a coming-to-the-fore of the phrase’s constructedness — that it is, despite its matter-of-fact appearance, a conceptual assemblage. Let me explain. There is, obviously, no end to the meanings that can be connoted by the word “China.” From the teachings of Confucianism and the travels of Marco Polo, to “Chinese learning for fundamental principle, Western learning for practical use,” that nineteenth-century strategy of dealing with westerners as advocated by the politician Zhang Zhidong; the popular Orientalist phenomenon of chinoiserie; the United States’ anxiety over “the loss of China” during the Cold War; the international recognition of “Chinese cinema” in the late twentieth century; the rise of the People’s Republic of China to the status of economic superpower by the turn of the twenty-first century . . . the list goes on. But that is beside the point. Unlike that fantastical Chinese encyclopedia invented by Jorge Luis Borges and cited by Michel Foucault (at the beginning of Les mots et les choses) to dramatize the foreignness posed by “China” to western thinking, the question at hand is not exactly the limits of western classificatory systems, as Foucault imagines, but rather the very excess of China as a referent for any scholar needing to invoke it in a title. For the readers of this volume, such referential excess means that the following questions are worth keeping in mind: Is “China” (to be regarded as) a geopolitical reality, nation, history, tradition, demography, or all of the above? Is “China” an object of study with well-defined characteristics and boundaries, or is it an imaginary, a collective mode of interpellation which may or may not be securely anchored in a particular location? Should “China” always be equated with those who have sovereignty over the Chinese mainland, with people of “Chinese descent,” or with users of the Chinese language? That said, we are not simply dealing with China but specifically with “China abroad.” The editors and authors of this volume have supplemented “China” with the condition of being in foreign lands. This supplement, the occasion for the many discussions about linguistic, existential, and national/ cultural identitarian movements and transgressions, makes the volume a laudable rejoinder to the studies of travel, exile, migration, translation, and transnationalism that, increasingly, are modifying and reshaping scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. In many ways, the chapters here bear testimony to a worldwide contemporary academic orientation, whereby the researchers of even a seemingly stable referent such as “China,” however inexhaustible its contents, need to become responsive to influences of larger social happenings such as changing demographics. “Abroad” is, in this respect, the rationale for the staging of a certain kind of mobility, what some have called the phenomenon of “trans” in its many traversals, crossings, and

Foreword

polyphonic manifestations. At the same time, as we all know, the logic of the supplement is never quite simple. If, as a supplement, “abroad” has given us a certain perspectival or directional clarity on (how to approach) the amorphous plenitude that is “China,” the two words’ coupling and positions in relation to each other also generate a provocative and potentially unsettling train of associations. For, from where is the condition of being “abroad” meaningful (in the sense of being not-home, of being in a foreign land)? From what vantage point does being “abroad” become significant in so many registers? On what ground is being “abroad” a kind of difference/departure that demands explication, elaboration, and argumentation? Does not “abroad” make sense only if and when “China” is a fixed entity? Once we stop assuming the transparency or naturalness of the phrase “China abroad” and instead focus on it as a conceptual relation—a critical juxtaposition of two terms, to be exact, that may bring each of the terms into crisis—the basic lessons from deconstruction begin to reverberate. Accordingly, as the second and supplementary term, is “abroad” a mere (that is, dispensable) addition to “China” in the sense that “China” can stand alone and remain the same without the “abroad,” but not vice versa? Or, is “abroad” the scene of a radical rewriting—and recasting—of “China” as (a mythified) origin? As the name for the many sites of deterritorialization and differentiation, does “abroad” in this instance simply serve to reaffirm the primariness of “China”—as native soil; as the authentic, self-sufficient homeland; as the root to all routes—or does “abroad” in effect dissemble the moral and sentimental hierarchy by which the primary and secondary terms are arranged in the first place, by showing how what seems to be there “first” may well be a fiction, one that is always historically, retroactively constituted? To repeat all this in more practical terms, my point is that there is a certain conceptual ambivalence, or precariousness even, embedded in the phrase “China abroad,” and for that reason, perhaps, it has to remain implicit rather than being articulated in the pages of the volume. To use conceivably the most obvious example (though I think the same can be said about other examples as well): in the cases of “Chinese American” studies, what exactly is the relation between “China” and “America”? If the significance of “China” is geopolitically determinant, what would be the justification for including “America” and texts written in a language other than Chinese? Do the latter simply belong in an “abroad” in the aforementioned sense of a dispensable addition? Should this be the case, would it follow then that the significance of the “abroad” is, in the final analysis, just secondary and must be re-routed back to the origin that is China? On the other hand, if “China” is not intended

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Foreword

as a geopolitical determinant (in the sense of a first term that preemptively determines the value of a second), then the significance of being “abroad” will need to be seen as being on a par—being genuinely comparable—with that of being (in) “China.” Indeed, one might go so far as to argue that it is by the forces “abroad”—such as those of Asian American writings—that “China” has been preserved and authenticated as an origin; that the foreign, the nothome, in fact offers us a privileged (albeit often belittled and demeaned) way of grasping what “home” and “homeland” are all about. Ultimately, the critical juxtaposition of “China” and “abroad” necessitates a fundamental reformulation of the criteria for the study of China, especially the long-held ideological assumptions that tend to accompany it. One of these assumptions, for instance, is what language(s) belong(s) legitimately in such study. Again, some of the contributors in this volume, by including texts that were written in language(s) other than standard Mandarin Chinese, have de facto declared the ineluctability of a heterolingual approach, an approach that, strictly speaking, should also be applied on the putative unity of the Chinese language itself. And what about those populations of “Chinese descent” who no longer speak, read, write, or understand Chinese? Should they always still be counted as “China abroad”? However we look at it, the supplement “abroad,” once set in motion, makes it clear that “China” can no longer be considered in isolation but must be made part of evolving global demographics, in which the life-worlds of migrants, exiles, and diasporans have as much to teach us about “China” as China itself, and in which the notion of being “abroad” may be unmoored once and for all from the referent of the homeland, and become unnecessary.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the contributors to the volume who responded to our invitations to submit papers with such generosity and promptness, and whose collegiality we have come to rely on in the months that it took us to put this volume together. Special thanks are due to Rey Chow for her encouragement and agreeing to write a Foreword, and to Pheng Cheah and Robert Young for their gracious endorsement. This is very much a joint project, not just for the two of us, but we hope for all whom we have had the good fortune to work with. They include Gaye Gould for her superb editorial work, Eddie Tay for his admirably concise and scholarly reviews, Charlotte Yeung Sin for her diligent investigation in the Hong Kong archives, and Colin Day of HKU Press for his guidance and goodwill. The Small Projects Grant Committee, HKU, has provided funds for the editing and preparation for publication of this volume, and the staff of the School of English their support as always; to both, we are grateful. Elaine Yee Lin Ho Julia Kuehn

Contributors

Kenneth Chan is assistant professor of Film Studies at the University of Northern Colorado. His book on the Chinese in Hollywood is forthcoming with Hong Kong University Press. His essays have also appeared in journals such as Cinema Journal, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Camera Obscura, and Discourse. Volunteering with the Asian Film Archive (Singapore), he chairs the International Advisory Board and is on the Board of Directors. Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown University. Her recent publications include The Age of the World Target (2006) and Sentimental Fabulations: Contemporary Chinese Films (2007). Marie-Paule Ha teaches in the School of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She is working on a project that investigates the colonial experiences of French women in Indochina. Her most recent publications include “On Sartre’s Critique of Assimilation,” Journal of Romance Studies 6.1&2 (2006): 49–60; “Assimilation and Identities in French Indochina” in Diasporas: Movement and Cultures, ed. Nick Hewitt and Dick Geary (2007); and “Double Trouble: Doing Gender in Hong Kong,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 34.2 (2009).

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Elaine Yee Lin Ho is associate professor of the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. She has published book monographs on Timothy Mo (2000) and Anita Desai (2006), and many articles on anglophone world literatures and Hong Kong film, literature, and cultures. Her current research interest is on literature, and literary cultures at the intersections of Hong Kong, mainland China, and the West. Tseen Khoo is a Monash University Research Fellow (2004–09), based in Sociology, School of Political and Social Inquiry. She researches in the areas of minority cultural politics in multicultural societies and comparative diasporic Asian studies, with a current focus on ethnic festivals and public heritage sites. Her book Banana Bending: Asian Australian and Asian Canadian Literatures (2003) was published by Hong Kong and McGill-Queens University Presses. She has also published Diaspora: Negotiating Asian Australia (2000, with Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo), Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English (2005, with Kam Louie), and Locating Asian Australian Cultures (2008). Julia Kuehn is assistant professor in English at the University of Hong Kong, where her research and teaching interests are in nineteenth-century literature and travel writing. Her publications include Glorious Vulgarity: Marie Corelli’s Feminine Sublime in a Popular Context (2004) and the co-edited collections A Century of Travels in China: Critical Essays on Travel Writing from the 1840s to the 1940s (2007) and Travel Writing, Form and Empire: The Poetics and Politics of Mobility (2008). Colleen Lye is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches courses in Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, and American Studies. She is the author of America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (2005). Recently, she co-edited with Christopher Bush a special issue of Representations on “Forms of Asia” (Representations 99, Summer 2007). She serves on the editorial boards of Representations and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Currently, she is working on a project on the problem of constructing Asian American literary history. Deborah L. Madsen is professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Geneva. Her books include Maxine Hong Kingston (2000), Chinese American Writers (2002), Beyond the Borders (ed. 2003), and the Asian American Writers DLB (ed. 2005). Her essays appear in Amerikastudien, Canadian Review of American Studies, Canadian Ethnic Studies, the Journal of Intercultural Studies, and the Yearbook of English Studies. Her chapter, “Asian

Contributors

Australian Literatures” appeared in A Companion to Australian Literature, ed. Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer (2007).

David Parker is a lecturer in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham. His publications include Through Different Eyes: The Cultural Identities of Young Chinese People in Britain (1995) and Rethinking Mixed Race (co-edited with Miri Song, 2001). His research interests include British Chinese identities and social networks, urban life, and social theory. Shuang Shen obtained her B.A. from Beijing University and Ph.D. from the English Department of the City University of New York. She taught in the English Department of several universities in the U.S.A., including the City University of New York and Rutgers University before taking her current job as assistant professor in the Chinese Department of Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Her areas of expertise and interest include postcolonial literature and theory, Chinese diaspora literature, Asian American literature, Hong Kong and modern Chinese literature. She has published several articles in academic journals such as Genre and Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese. She also writes frequently for Chinese-language cultural magazines in mainland China. Her book, Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai is forthcoming with Rutgers University Press (2009). Weimin Tang recently received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Oxford where she also obtained a M.St. (Master of Studies) in Women’s Studies in 2001. Her Oxford education is preceded by her completion of an M.A. at University of Trier, Germany. Her research interests include Chinese and other Asian American literatures, women’s autobigraphical writings, ethnic and postcolonial literary-cultural criticism, theories of cultural translation and psychoanalysis. She had published and taught in the area of Asian American literatures whilst studying at Oxford University. She is now an associate professor at the School of English Studies, Tianjin Foreign Studies University. Qingsheng Tong is associate professor and head of the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. He has been at work on issues and problems of critical significance in cross-cultural studies, with special attention to the historical interactions between China and Britain on different levels, political, cultural, and intellectual. He is an editorial member of several international journals including boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture, and is a founding co-editor of Critical Zone: A Forum of Chinese and Western Knowledge.

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I Introduction

1 China Abroad: Nation and Diaspora in a Chinese Frame Elaine Yee Lin Ho

I As a project, China Abroad is situated within a contemporary scholarly and theoretical dialogue on nation and diaspora and the unstable relations between the two. It seeks to address a number of critical issues raised in this dialogue, and how these issues pertain to the different ways in which China and Chineseness have been imagined and represented in the last century. In so doing, it aims to offer an overview of the debate about Chineseness as it has emerged in different global locations. For more than two decades in the recent past, diaspora has been an important epistemological concept organizing literary and cultural studies. As it emerged, diaspora offered a timely critique to the nation as the structuring concept of individual and collective identities, and drew persuasive force as disillusionment with nationalism’s sanctions of authoritarian rule and uses of violence became widespread. The nation as an oppressive construct against the liberatory movements of diaspora constituted a dominant—and binary—formulation that shaped recent literary and cultural studies. Often perceived as racially and culturally essentialist, the degenerate nation shows up by contrast the positive value of hybrid, multiple, and heterogeneous cultural formations that diaspora conjures.1 Co-ordinated with this, diaspora assumes paradigmatic status in the study of globalization in the late twentieth century, its emphases on mobility, dispersal, and networks beyond national boundaries offering a requisite cultural model that complements the normative understanding of globalization as an economic phenomenon. But even as diaspora territorializes literary and cultural studies, persistent arguments for the epistemological value of the nation are made and heard.

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Paradoxically for some, the excesses of nationalism, which provide diasporic criticism with its rhetorical casus belli and justify its alternative claims, demonstrate precisely why the nation remains, and needs to remain, a mainframe of cultural analyses. In the light of the blood and soil politics in Eastern Europe after 1989, Tom Nairn, for instance, argues for the continued relevance of nationalism for most societies struggling to compete in “the developmental race . . . without being either colonized or annihilated” and the crucial role of ethnos in creating and fomenting the common bond of struggle (Nairn 66). What Stuart Hall, in another context, calls “the old, imperializing, hegemonizing, form of ‘ethnicity’” (Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” from Identity 235) has, as aggressive Balkan nationalism shows, far from disappeared. The violence in Eastern Europe demands urgent critique of primordialized ethnic identity, and its co-ordination with a nationalistic compulsion that actualizes itself through systematic use of coercive force. To Nairn, the acknowledgement of the imperatives of nation and nationalism goes hand in hand with a serious reconceptualization of the nation as a secular and civic entity. Nairn’s study, however, does not really consider the nation as a cultural entity, an issue which the fatal conjunction of ethnicity and nationalism clearly brings to the fore. The democratic nationalism which Nairn champions can derive conceptual strength from referencing the work of Hall and Paul Gilroy (There Ain’t No Black) on the different forms of self and collective cultural identification visible within contemporary Britain. To Hall, the multiple trajectories of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora bear witness to cultural identity as ongoing process, defined “not by essence and purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity” (Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” from Identity 235). Translating this modality of diasporic cultural identity to the nation, both Hall and Gilroy contest monoethnic and monocultural constructions of what it means to be British. In a later work, Gilroy (The Black Atlantic) supplements his study of difference and how to live in difference within the nation with a conceptual narrative of the “black Atlantic” as an open space of diasporic culture where essentialist meanings of race and consecrations of the nation as patria are continually destabilized in popular consciousness and everyday practices. Superseding the antagonistic relations of nation and diaspora, the work of Hall and Gilroy demonstrate how the two terms are mutually constitutive. This enables, in turn, critical re-examination of the totalizing propensity in which each term has been implicated. Diaspora fractures the hegemonic claims of the nation upon identity formation, and diasporic communities have contributed to the deterritorializing of the nation and problematized its traditional political and statist organization.

China Abroad: Nation and Diaspora in a Chinese Frame

Hall and Gilroy have had seminal influence on studies of a number of African diasporas, but their theorizing can also develop trans-ethnic extension. One of the directions this volume takes is to rearticulate their theorizing of the mutual constitution of nation and diaspora within a Chinese frame. However, scholarly work on the Chinese diaspora in the last decade has also thrown up a number of critical questions that do not align with Hall and Gilroy’s overall positive valuation of diaspora. They evince an acute awareness that diaspora is as much subject to critique as the nation, and that diasporic communities are sites where cultural nationalist and absolutist ethnic compulsions circulate. Often, in their ethno-national self-identifications, diasporic communities are responding, in one direction, to the centrifugal politics of a nation of origin and, in another, to the minoritizing strategies of the nation of settlement. Nationalistic or statist interventions into the cultural politics of diasporic communities are not necessarily superseded by new media technologies which facilitate virtual networks and what Arjun Appadurai (in Modernity at Large) has called “global ethnoscapes.” The “diasporized nation” and the “nation-in-diaspora”: the shifting alignments between nation and diaspora these two expressions encode are manifest in how China and Chineseness have been conceived, negotiated, and deconstructed. Much scholarly work in the early 1990s focused on the heterogeneity and hybridity of Chinese diasporic identities and, explicitly or implicitly, on their liberatory value.2 This is framed by literary-cultural theoretical discourses which placed a premium on the disseminatory, mobile and transgressive, and in the specific context of China, the reactions against the state-sanctioned violence that exploded in Tiananmen and its environs in 1989. Later work of the decade continues to explore the salient issues of diasporic transgressiveness, but what is also evident is increasing scholarly concern about the circulation of essentialistic conceptions of Chineseness through diasporic routes. As the images of Tiananmen recede, and China’s global ascendancy appears more and more inexorable, enthusiasm and wariness are evident in equal measure about how Chineseness is generated, and how cultural conceptions of Chinese identities may align with the comingto-prominence of China as a global political and economic force. These issues have provoked intense and ongoing scholarly debates, some of which we will see in Section II of this introduction, and which the interested investigations of Chineseness in the chapters in this volume are all engaged with. All the chapters discuss the textuality of literary-cultural productions from perspectives opened up by the theorizing of China as nation and in diaspora. This textual attention enables the theorizing to become embedded in but also challenged from the experiences and representations of specific locations. In its three parts, this volume wishes to show that the concerns and

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polemics about Chineseness and China are by no means incidental to the recent past but reach back to the earliest years of the twentieth century. The first part, “Translating China,” contains studies of encounters between China and the West in the early twentieth century; the second, “China, Hong Kong, and Beyond,” offers vantages on mid-twentieth-century Hong Kong as the transition between nation and diaspora; in the third part, studies of specific locations attend to the disseminatory semantics of Chineseness in different parts of the modern and contemporary world. In this respect, China Abroad is a project of historicization with two overlapping foci: first, to locate possible antecedents of recent scholarly-theoretical work on diasporic phenomena and their polemics and follow through such possibilities in literary-cultural productions; second, to trace some of the shifting contours in the genealogy of Chineseness as they are configured and reconfigured throughout the long twentieth century. Theoretical, locational, historical: these are the interconnections which characterize the chapters as they explore China and Chineseness so that what each chapter reveals of a specific temporal-spatial context can extend into others to elucidate the many dimensions of “China Abroad.” Some of the chapters focus on actual journeys from China, or between China and a foreign location, or an itinerary involving multiple points of departure and arrival. Travel, embodied and narrated, is also the practice whereby a prior self and collective identity become estranged from a familiar milieu or “home.” This loss of territorial moorings can transpire as self and social alienation, express itself in existential dilemmas, and be symptomatized in psychological disturbances. In this destabilization that runs through a plethora of human activity and their discourses, travel develops symbolic extension as the outstanding trope of our contemporary condition. Not all, however, is lost, so to speak—many of the chapters also show how travel mobilizes epistemological engagements with other cultures and ways of life which double back as momentum for renewed individual and collective self-inquiry. As the chapters demonstrate, travel as tropological discourse moves beyond actual journeys to the historical formation of the Chinese diaspora in the twentieth century and the formulations of China and Chineseness that are provoked by diasporic dispersal and relocation. The chapters in this volume address, from their different locational vantages, the persistence of an essentialistic Chinese identity predicated on centrifugal racial and cultural ideologies. They articulate the flows of these essentializing tendencies and how they gain incorporative power especially over subjects and groups most vulnerable to effects of estrangement, loss, and marginalization. In other words, essentializing forces, contrary to the fixity and stability they promulgate, travel; circulating in the diaspora, they are encountered and countered by subjects of Chinese ancestry. Travel, even as it describes the circulation of essentializing

China Abroad: Nation and Diaspora in a Chinese Frame

Chinese ethnicity, encodes the counter-logic of resistance. The contestations with essentialism develop further profundity and global extension as ethnic Chinese subjects strategize against their minoritization in different nations of settlement. Their strategies put a premium on mobility, and draw upon the imagined, actual, or virtual transnationality of different generations. In my collaborator Julia Kuehn’s introduction (Chapter 2), the epistemology of travel further unravels through two major analytical concepts, transnation and translation, deployed in the volume. Before that, in the next section of this chapter, I will discuss some of the most prominent theoretical discussions of the mutual constitution of “nation” and “diaspora” in a Chinese frame to have emerged in the last decade, while the third section will discuss several issues that pertain specifically to this volume’s Hong Kong location.

II Beginning with Rey Chow’s Writing Diaspora (1993), it is arguable that diaspora discourse has more often been associated with studies of the mobile forces which disseminate Chineseness in different global locations, and how they call into serious question the truth-value of an “authentic” Chinese identity that can be referenced against the bounded territorial entity and single nation state that is China. Aihwa Ong’s 1997 edited collection of essays with Donald M. Nonini begins with a positive valuation of the mobility of diaspora Chinese, which manifests a wildness, danger, and unpredictability that challenges and undermines modern imperial regimes of truth and power. . . . [B]y means of strategies of transnational mobility, Chinese have eluded, taken tactical advantage of, temporized before, redefined, and overcome the disciplining of modern regimes of colonial empires, postcolonial nation-states, and international capitalism. These mobile practices have intersected with the impositions of modern regimes of truth and knowledge to take the form of a guerilla transnationalism. (Ong and Nonini 19)

It is evident from these introductory remarks that, as subjects and agents of global capitalism, diasporic Chinese are seen to fracture the parameters of identity imposed by the nation state or inherited tradition. However, Ong’s own essay—number five in the collection—appears much more circumspect about the disengagement of diaspora from the nation, and this is evident also in her later work. The essay, “Chinese Modernities: Narratives of Nation and of Capitalism,” examines how “Chineseness” is split between fixity and fluidity, that is, between nationalist discourses that

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produce “appropriate national subjects who are culturally homogenized, biopoliticized, and localized within the national territory” and “capitalist narratives of modernity . . . [which] celebrate subjects in diaspora and the ways their hybridity and flexibility suggest transnational solidarities” (Ong, “Chinese Modernities” 173). However, as she goes on to argue, this split cannot be readily mapped onto geopolitical divisions between the Chinese mainland and the Chinese diaspora. To illustrate this, she first observes how Chinese mainland officials are suspicious of the notion of “Greater China,” which denotes the economic networks among China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, even as they appreciate the latter’s economic utility as a source of foreign investment. Capitalistic and nationalistic interests generate contrary pressures on the mainland disposition towards the diaspora. These interests are realigned differently from the perspective of overseas Chinese in Asian states who utilize a discourse that claims continuity with Chinese culture so as to legitimize their capitalist narratives. From such a perspective, the nation is not so much a political and statist entity but culturalized. Ong’s study shows very clearly how nation and diaspora as discourses are mutually implicated, despite realities of historical and territorial separation. What the late twentieth century witnessed, to Ong, is not the demise of the nation and its political organization, the state, but the resurgence of virulent ethno-nationalistic forces that flow through diasporic channels, and which authoritarian states capitalize on to extend their power and influence beyond geographical borders. A second conceptual vantage in Ong’s work is her critique of the process and project of culturalizing China which, in turn, facilitates the reaffiliation of diasporic Chineseness to the mainland and justification of political and economic collaboration. This critique is specifically directed at two recent phenomena: the first is that of “Cultural China” which emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s from efforts by Asian politicians to locate in culture the reasons for the economic success of the so-called “Four little dragons”: Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. As reflected in the speeches of Lee Kuan Yew, “triumphalist capitalist narratives . . . draw symbolic power from claims that overseas Chinese have preserved ‘Confucian’ culture outside China and that it is the genius of Confucian values that accounts for their success in different areas of life” (Ong, “Chinese Modernities” 182). The second is the huaren website (Ong, “Cyberpublics”) which purports to speak out for diasporic Chinese against their victimization by forces of prejudice and discrimination in different parts of the world and whose appeals to ethnic solidarity are often couched in essentialist and racialized terms. While “Cultural China” began as an academic and philosophical discourse, and huaren is a populist forum, both phenomena can be identified with a Chinese national consciousness predicated on “an ideological sense

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of racial and cultural exclusivity” (Ong, Flexible Citizenship 135). Ong contends “contemporary diasporan-Chinese chauvinism, while in tension with the claims of the Chinese nation-state, is also continuous with its racial consciousness” (Flexible Citizenship 56–57). In her critique of sinology’s neoOrientalist or self-orientalizing “static images of China” and its “essentializing notion of Chineseness,” Ong links the culturalization of China specifically to the diasporic—or “Boston”3—Confucianism of Tu Wei-ming (Ong, “Flexible Citizenship” 134; see Tu, The Living Tree). She reiterates this argument when she associates Tu’s Confucianist, culturalized Chineseness with “a nationalist imaginary that emphasizes essentialism, territoriality, and the fixity of the modern state” (Ong, Flexible Citizenship 55). In Ong’s second vantage on the culturalization of China, Confucianism is the hegemonic sign of Chinese cultural tradition that traverses past and present, nation and diaspora, immobile and immobilizing. Against this second vantage, Ong posits a third conceptual vantage captured in the terms “flexible citizenship” and “embedded citizenship.” In the first term, she represents the contrary dynamic of “a modernist imaginary of entrepreneurial capitalism that celebrates hybridity, deterritorialization, and the mobility of state capitalism” (Ong, Flexible Citizenship 55). Ong associates “flexible citizenship” with a Chinese cosmopolitanism that “subvert[s] reigning notions of national self and Other in transnational relations” (Ong, “Flexible Citizenship” 135). The very term “citizenship” acknowledges the territorial delimitations—and the concomitant political, institutional, and statist parameters—that define individual identity. The term is nationally interested rather than nationalistic because the “nation” at stake is no longer just China or any other single nation state, and the paradigmatic inflection “flexible” emphasizes cross-national and cross-boundary movements in identity formation. “Embedded citizenship” is, in significant ways, the contrary term to “flexible citizenship” even as they share a common denominator. Both terms contest the notion of an originary homeland and centrifugal cultural arrangement of the Chinese mainland and the Chinese diaspora. But, in enacting this turn away from China, “embedded citizenship” argues for studies of the specific histories and locationalized struggles which shape many diasporic subjects in their nations of settlement. Against the affluent capitalist subjects and “[p]rivileged émigrés who control the electronic network to shape diaspora politics [and] seek to subvert and bypass the sovereign power of nation-states,” “embedded citizenship” urges renewed attention to the “localized conflicts” of people “situated outside electronic space” (Ong, “Cyberpublics” 94) for whom the kind of ethnic solidarity promoted, for example, in the huaren website, is not a source of encouragement. “A resurgent Chinese cyber-identity based on moral high ground may be welcome in Beijing

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(though not always),” Ong writes, “but is not necessarily welcomed by ethnic Chinese minorities elsewhere” (Ong, “Cyberpublics” 98). The mutual constitution of Chinese national and diasporic discourses, the culturalization of China, the locational struggle of ethnic Chinese subjects— these three related conceptual vantages link Ong’s work to contemporary debates about cultural identity in one direction and China and Chineseness in another. They clearly inform all the chapters in this volume. By focusing on specific cultural struggles at different moments in the long twentieth century, the chapters show how these three concepts travel. Through detailed analyses of textual representations and narratives, each of the chapters explores a temporal-spatial nexus when the formation, or becoming, of the Chinese subject becomes visible. Just as China and Chineseness are subject to variation across time and space, what it means to be Chinese is, as the chapters show, often self-reflexive, critical, relational, and cross-culturally negotiated.

III In Aihwa Ong’s critique of the work of Tu Wei-ming, we see a late-twentiethcentury contest between essentializing discourses that develop nationalistic overtones on the one hand and, on the other, paradigms of subjectivity that constitute Chineseness in relational terms. Because this present volume is interested in historicizing and locationalizing discursive relations between nation and diaspora, I would like to discuss, in this section and the next, two earlier twentieth-century instances of this contemporary contest. Unlike Ong and Tu’s contemporary contest, which begins in the diaspora and develops ambivalent relations with the Chinese mainland, the two earlier instances occurred inside China, but on the periphery, the first in the southern port of Xiamen (Amoy) and the second in what was then colonial Hong Kong. These two instances are significant because first, like Ong’s critique, they are focalized by the problematic issue of Confucianism. Second, they both occurred on the border between China and the world and this geographical marginality captures vividly the cultural dilemma of moving between essential and flexible Chineseness, tradition and modernity. On the Chinese periphery, in transition, little known: these warrant discussion of the two instances in this present volume from Hong Kong in which one of the premises is locationalized study. The first historical instance, which has been chronicled by Wang Gungwu (in “Lu Xun”), is the encounter in 1926–27 between Lu Xun and the Singaporean Chinese Lim Boon Keng, at the university in Xiamen. Then, as now, Confucianism was the ideological ground of struggle, and China’s modernization and future, the horizon. In an illuminating difference, it is Lu Xun, the mainland Chinese subject, who seeks to break up what he sees as

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Confucianism’s traditional hegemony over Chinese education so as to open it to the “abroad,” that is, to western learning, while Lim, the diasporic returnee subject, sees in Confucianism the indigenous cultural resource for modern reform. As Qingsheng Tong’s chapter (Chapter 3) in this volume shows, the reception of western learning by Chinese intellectuals who traveled outside China, and their struggles with the literati on their return, can be traced to late Qing and early Republican times. By the time of Lu Xun’s arrival in Xiamen, his anti-traditional views were already well established and well known in Chinese literary circles. Shuang Shen’s chapter on the literary journals he wrote for, and which translated his work into English (Chapter 4), will offer insights on the national polemics of his leftist views and their connections with the cultural internationalism of his own time. Xiamen University was established with overseas-Chinese capital by the Singaporean Chinese entrepreneur Tan Kah Kee, who invited Lim to become its first president. Lu Xun was employed as one of the luminaries in the new Institute of Sinology to be set up at the university. Shortly after his arrival, he was told that Lim was someone who advocated “‘returning to the ancients’ (fugu), [and] ‘respect for Confucius’ (zun Kong)” (Wang, “Lu Xun” 147). Unmoved by the natural beauty of the southern port, Lu Xun became impatient with what he perceived as the culture of orthodoxy at the university and its veneration of “‘China’s old books’” (148–49), which he had to read to prepare for his lectures. Within three weeks of arrival, he handed in his resignation. Wang’s chapter summarizes a speech by Lim to the university commemorating Confucius’ birthday, and another by Lu Xun a few days later which offered an opposite message that was “clearly directed against Lim” (153). Lim’s speech rehearses the orthodox defense of Confucianism: its emphasis on the practical; the establishment of first principles on the basis of in-depth exploration of historical experiences; the centrality of filial piety in organizing relations of self, family, society, and country; and the value placed on the common people in “Confucian ideas about politics” (151). There is little doubt that Lim believed in the relevance of Confucianism to China’s social reform and its modern future, and saw his task as university president to promote the study of the Confucian classics. In contrast, Lu Xun’s speech was a generalized attack on the ulterior motives of those who advocated classical studies: “[t]hey wanted people to read the Classics so that they would become filial sons and obedient citizens,” he said. Classical texts are not useless, he acknowledged, but the crucial message of his speech is that they must be read critically. At the same time, he urged his audience of students to read more western-language books, “to pay attention . . . to all kinds of knowledge [and in their everyday life to] matters that need a little correction, a little improvement” where they “could do something” (154).

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Two significant issues can be extrapolated from the speeches. The first is that both men focused on what is practical and practicable in social reform, and the individual as reformist agent in everyday life. Second, where Lu Xun differed radically from Lim was in his appeal to multiple resources instead of a single Confucianist origin for reformist inspiration. In Wang Gungwu’s summary comments, he describes as “tragic” (155) the fact that the two men saw each other as opponents, and that their opposition came to be focused on the revival of Confucian learning. While Lim was a life-long Confucian, he was also a dedicated modernizer, vigorously engaged in setting up engineering and medical schools at the university, employing many foreign and foreign-trained teachers, and offering courses on foreign languages. Wang lamented: [t]here seemed to have been no opportunity for a dialogue between two essentially modern men: Lu Xun, the native-born Chinese who grasped the critical importance of modernity from within; and Lim Boon Keng, the Western-educated and foreign-born Chinese who thought he needed the Confucian cloak of respectability to legitimize the extent he wanted China to be transformed by science and technology. (158–59)

There is a distinction between the belief in Confucianism as core Chinese values and the adoption of a Confucian cloak for other designs. And yet, both appear to be embodied in Lim and to constitute the diasporic subject in his ambivalent relation to Chineseness. As for Lu Xun, Confucianism is the cardinal sign of everything that is wrong with China and Chinese heritage. But despite his persistent challenge to this perceived traditional ideology, his own Chineseness, and that of the work he does, is not in doubt, certainly not to himself. In these arguments over Confucianism, we see how the mobile diasporic subject appears to be captured in an ambivalent Chineseness while the national Chinese subject seems culturally mobile and disruptive. This reversal is to become partly visible again in Ong’s critique of the cultural essentialism and chauvinism which flow through the diaspora. As we look beyond individual subjects to what they and their arguments emblematize, relations are further complicated. In this littleknown incident in peripheral China where nation and diaspora meet, what is played out is the contest, at once national and global, between a capitalist and technologized modernity and a socialist modernity. 4 Returning once more to the future, that is, to what we have seen of Ong’s critique of Tu, the shifting identifications of national and diasporic subjects with “authentic” and western cultural discourses and with the contrary ideological constructions of modernity can already be traced in the Xiamen incident. What is absent, at least in Wang Gungwu’s account, is statist or official intervention which the contemporary critique of “Cultural China” foregrounds. The complications of

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such intervention we shall see in the next historical and locational instance: the cultural politics of New Confucianism in 1950s Hong Kong.

IV As far as I am aware, the full story of New Confucianism’s emergence in 1950s Hong Kong has not been told, and the discussion here is a beginning rather than a complete narrative.5 In my own chapter in this volume (Chapter 5), I hope to augment the discussion by exploring 1950s Hong Kong as the space of dialogue between culturalized China and a cultural internationalism through analyses of writing in different genres. Through a study of Hong Kong films from the 1960s, Wendy Gan’s chapter (Chapter 6) further explores the issue of exile and relocation from the Chinese mainland, and the intra-ethnic rivalries between north and south transplanted to Hong Kong, and compares the 1960s with 1980s films on a further diasporic movement from Hong Kong to worldwide locations. Through this section on New Confucianism and the two chapters (5 and 6), this volume offers a vantage on Hong Kong as a crucial historical and geographical transition between the Chinese mainland and the Chinese diaspora, a transition in which a modern Chinese cultural identity and its relations to tradition preoccupy many of the literati, intellectuals, and cultural workers who found themselves, willingly or unwillingly, in the British colony after the Chinese mainland turned Communist and the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan. Supplementing Ong’s critiques of how the Confucian revival in the 1980s is co-opted by Asian nationalisms, this discussion of New Confucianism in 1950s Hong Kong shows an earlier, contrary movement rupturing Confucianism from the state. In this context, the latest revival appears as a double return of Confucianism to Asia and to state sponsorship. Before Ong’s “Chinese Modernities,” Arif Dirlik had studied the genealogy of “Confucianism” as the cultural logic of Chinese capitalism in Asian states like Singapore, where the economy expanded rapidly in the 1980s and early 1990s. The phenomenon of Tu Wei-ming and “Cultural China” are seen by Dirlik as the latest manifestation of Confucian revivals that have been historically linked to the Chinese projects of modernization throughout the twentieth century. Dirlik’s 1995 essay “Confucius in the Borderlands” refers to the Confucian revivals inside China in the first half of the century as reactions to those who advocate China’s modernization through developing a capitalist economy. Confucianism was also manipulated by militarists and unscrupulous politicians during the turmoil of the period. From intellectuals who disputed modernization as wholesale westernization and sought reconciliation between “East” and “West,” New Confucianism emerged as a form of “emotional

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nostalgia” which transpires into “an ethicospiritual system of values . . . [that] called into question the positivism of scientistic modernization” (Dirlik, “Confucius” 234). As the latter became identified with the Communist state which after 1949 branded Confucianism as “feudal” and consigned it to the museum of history, New Confucianism took on critical importance in the diaspora. But this is not an issue that interests Dirlik. Among those who contributed to formalizing New Confucianism are some of the most notable of Chinese intellectuals who went into exile after 1949. These include Tang Junyi, Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang), Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan, the four signatories of the 1958 declaration “A Manifesto to the World on Chinese Culture.”6 In the English translation by the signatories, the declaration is entitled “A Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture” (C. Chang), a much more explicit announcement of its reformist and cultural nationalist agenda.7 Dirlik acknowledges that the Manifesto is “a major statement of New Confucianism” (Dirlik, “Confucius” 235) but, despite this, notes only in passing its publication in 1950s Hong Kong by the exiles from Communist China and pays no attention at all to the Manifesto’s content and arguments. There are good reasons why the Manifesto deserves far greater attention. Its publication by the exiled intellectuals in 1950s Hong Kong registers a seismic territorial shift: for the first time in its long history, Confucianism has become detached from its geographical homeland in the Chinese mainland. Cut loose from its territorial, state, and official bonds, Confucianism assumes protean shapes—as inherited tradition, system of values, cultural imaginary, reformist cause—in a discourse largely constituted by academic interlocutors. In my discussion in this introduction, the declaration as event co-ordinates three interrelated areas of analyses: first, a formal excursus to show how the textual reconstruction of Confucianism as national culture also contains a narrative of its “diasporization”; second, the exilic situation of the signatories and their ambivalent relations with the Chinese nation state; third, the publication of the declaration in the context of Hong Kong as colonial and Cold War entrepôt. First of all, while the Manifesto does show essentializing tendencies, it also delineates how Confucianism, long identified as the ideology of dynastic rule, is re-presented as “authentic” cultural tradition in the diaspora. 8 Furthermore, the momentous departure from the mainland inaugurates a diasporic trajectory where Confucianism as “authentic” Chinese culture and civilization has to renegotiate its recognition and authority in the world beyond China. The two key terms in Carsun Chang’s translated title, “Sinology” and “Chinese Culture,” are soon revealed in the Manifesto as synonymous with the study of Confucianism and Confucian respectively. “[A] nation’s culture,”

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the Manifesto declares, “is the expression of its spiritual life” (C. Chang 465), and this expression is inscribed and codified in Confucianist teachings from their inception through various shifts in emphases in Chinese history. In the Manifesto, there is no obvious lament for a lost homeland that characterizes many exilic discourses; the “emotional nostalgia” which Dirlik notes has been harnessed to reorient Confucianism from an exclusively Chinese to a global discourse. In order to effect this turn towards the here and now and what lies beyond, the Manifesto begins by looking at the past—at the first sustained contacts between Confucianism and European culture since the late seventeenth century and the asymmetrical relations that ensued. 9 In its historical review of Confucianism’s encounter with the West, the Manifesto foregrounds the problems of mistranslation, which it attributes to different belief systems and traditions of scholarship. Such mistranslation is largely responsible for why Confucianism has been misrecognized by the West right from the beginning of the encounter. This misrecognition develops much more serious and material outcomes as European imperialism expands in China and as Chinese modernizers turn against their native tradition.10 Embedded in the epistemological issues focalized by translation and mistranslation is the narrative of how Chinese culture and civilization accede to the position of a world culture and civilization. The past is a Chinese past in that it happened within dynastic and territorial borders, but, in this narrative, the past is also already globalized. The experience of being misrecognized can develop a positive outcome in preparing Confucianism for its future in the world or what the Manifesto calls its “extension” (468). This includes taking “into consideration the ideals of other cultures” (468), and through this, to uncover its own shortcomings and rectify them. The present exilic condition takes its place in the movement of this globalizing Chinese culture. In exile, the possibility opens up for the explanation and theorizing of the historical asymmetry between China and the West and for new bearings in the world to be taken. Thus, in this momentous diasporic turn, exilic separation from the nation state becomes remodalized as the condition of possibility for a discourse of cross-cultural mobility. In many ways, the declaration exemplifies the “double perspective” that Edward Said has observed of the exilic subject: “the exile exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old. . . . Because the exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation” (Said 49, 60). For the signatories, this double perspective entails arguments for continuity with the past, despite physical exile, which, in turn, legitimize their identity as bearers of tradition in the

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world and into the future. The Manifesto makes three strategic moves: first, the identification of Confucian Rationalism as “authentic” Chinese ethnocultural tradition; second, the narrative of continuity which produces a seamless transition between inherited tradition and tradition-in-exile despite the actual experience of disjuncture; third, a palimpsestic rewriting of the past as a history of contact and conflict between the culturalized nation and the West so that the present issue of Chinese ethnicity develops extraterritorial and metanational significance. Co-ordinating and becoming embedded in these strategic moves, New Confucianism functions as what Raymond Williams in Marxism and Literature called the “actively residual,” in a push to reclaim its stronghold over the discourse of Chinese cultural identity as nation is reterritorialized as diaspora. In affirming moral self-realization as the cornerstone and also the constant aim of Confucian Rationalism, the Manifesto is building up to an argument for its contemporary relevance as a socio-political philosophy of both Chinese and global significance. The signatories argue that in cultural reconstruction lies national regeneration. “[I]t is erroneous,” they state, “to think that [China’s] culture contains neither the seeds of democracy nor such tendencies, or that it is hostile to science and technology” (C. Chang 469). This statement aligns Confucianism with the western origins of “democracy” and “science and technology,” and entertains a vision of China’s future in the development of democratic politics and scientific advancement. Furthermore, the declaration seeks to identify in Confucianism the emergence of the modern concept of citizenship, usually regarded as western in origin. Confucianists argue that the nation belongs to the people and government should be for their good. The reliance on monarchical integrity is insufficient for it means the people are put into passive positions and unable to achieve moral self-realization. The Manifesto affirms, instead, “political equality for all the citizens” through the drawing up of a “constitution . . . in accordance with the popular will, to be the basis of the exercise by the people of their political rights” (472). This implicitly acknowledges that Confucian Rationalism can remake itself as a modern philosophy of rule through utilizing the mechanism of constitutionmaking that is of western origin. The authors assert their distance from contemporary politics: to “apprehend the true nature of Chinese culture and its historical changes in order to understand the significance of contemporary Chinese history, cultural and political, and China’s future . . . the researcher must first put aside his subjective views of the political situation . . .” (459). Even more explicitly, they dissociate their democratic, Confucianist socio-political imaginary from both Communist and Taiwan Kuomintang regimes: “Nor can Communist dictatorship in the mainland . . . or Communist and Fascist influences of the

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thought of many Kuomintang party members,” they write, “be adduced as evidence of lack of popular aspiration for a democratic government” (475). This raises a crucial question: how is citizenship to be actualized in the absence of a nation state structure? On this question, it is symbolic and symptomatic of their exile situation that the declaration’s authors remain noticeably silent. What is at stake in this issue, that is, how Chinese citizen-stakeholders emerge in their diasporic locations, is central to Ong’s work as it is to the chapters in Part IV, “Chinese Cartographies in the World,” of this present volume. Beyond formalistic study, we can proceed to the second area of analysis: the diasporic relocation of a culturalized nation in its relations with the nation state. Separation from the Chinese mainland appears to open up an opportunity to transcend the split in the Chinese nation state between two competing regimes, and enable a “third way” cultural self-identification as both ethical and global subjects. In their continued opposition to Communist China, and their different degrees of proximity to Taiwan, the trajectories of the four signatories appear to embody this alternative in practice. The Manifesto was first drafted on the initiative of Tang Junyi, who had moved to Hong Kong after 1949.11 Tang then consulted with Chang, who had been living in the United States since 1952 and never visited Taiwan in his lifetime. The third signatory, Mou Zongsan, was in Taiwan when he signed the Manifesto in 1958 but, two years later, also moved to Hong Kong.12 Of the four, Xu Fuguan was the only one who lived in Taiwan and was the most politically active, but, because of his stringent criticism of the Kuomintang’s record of rule on the mainland and Chiang Kai-shek himself, he was forced to surrender his membership of the Kuomintang in 1956. All four were academics and public intellectuals who wrote frequently for cultural journals and newspapers, and lectured and gave public addresses in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the West. The Manifesto, drafted in Hong Kong, was published simultaneously in the Hong Kong journal Democratic Criticism (), founded by Tang, and Rebirth (), the official newspaper of the China Democratic Socialist Party (民主社會黨) in Taiwan, which was proscribed by the Kuomintang.13 However, in the third area of analysis, we can see how Confucianism’s political entanglements, diverted from the nation of origin, become differently re-embedded in diasporic relocation. New Confucianism’s initial career in Hong Kong bears traces of a negotiated existence in the interstices of colonial rule and the geopolitics of the Asian Cold War. That it should be in colonial Hong Kong, under an imperial power whose aggression had contributed no little to the loss of the mainland to Confucianism, is not without an ironic historical logic of its own. In 1950s Hong Kong, Chinese nationalism of whatever political persuasion was prohibited from open expression, but both right-wing and left-wing publications and writers could find a space for

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creative expression if they steered clear of explicit propagandizing.14 As long as expressions of Chineseness remained within the cultural sector and posed no threat to social order, they were largely tolerated and able to circulate. This is consistent with the colonial government’s long accommodation with “native” social and cultural practices ever since the “Proclamation to the inhabitants of Hong Kong 1841” that they “will be governed, pending Her Majesty’s further pleasure, according to the laws, customs and usages of the Chinese . . . by the Elders of Villages, subject to the control of a British magistrate.”15 A century later, this has produced a situation described by Austin Coates in his memoir of the 1950s, when he served as a magistrate in one of the rural districts of Hong Kong: “Though I was a European, I was not employed to impose European concepts of justice and rights. I was a Chinese Magistrate, expected to deal with matters in a Chinese way . . .” (Coates 83). The colonial government’s active accommodation with “native” tradition, though falling very far short of the indirect rule instituted in other parts of the British empire, helps to elide the failure of Hong Kong to gain progressive selfrule in an age of decolonization.16 The Manifesto’s publication in Hong Kong also lends Chinese cultural authentication to the colony’s strategic positioning as a free trade enclave on Cold War borders, the fluid space of human and cultural traffic.17 The aestheticization of this quasi-official position is orchestrated in a poem by Edmund Blunden, resident poet and academic, in which Hong Kong harbor appears as “liberty-hall” where “from the greatest to least / Like a free lively family merrily all / Are arriving and off again, West or East. . . .”18 This positioning works in complement with the accommodation of “native” tradition to defer decolonization as the historical logic unfolding in the rest of the British empire. Thus, even as Confucianism in exile seeks to disengage with the two competing Chinese state-sponsored nationalisms, it is realigned with the politics of its Hong Kong diasporic location—the imperatives of colonial rule within Hong Kong itself and the contest for power between the Cold War nations. The situation of the Manifesto in 1950s Hong Kong does not follow the linear chronology of departure, exile, and relocation. Instead, what can be extrapolated conceptually is the circulation of nation and diaspora in each other which generates the “nation” and “national” in multiple forms. As we look globally and temporally beyond 1950s Hong Kong, China reemerges both as culturalized nation of origin and also territorialized as different diasporic sites, communities, and as discourses within separate non-Chinese national contexts. As it does so, Confucianism cannot adequately address or manage the kind of theoretical challenges, articulated by Rey Chow (“Foreword”), that Chinese ethnicity raises in global diasporic locations. This has not prevented

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its return as nationalistic cultural imaginary and its being strategized as the fashionable ideology of diasporic Chinese capitalism. In non-Chinese states, as in British colonial Hong Kong of the 1950s, Chinese becomes inflected as ethnic and minoritized; in these states, it engages or is compelled into relation with different others, both majoritarian and minoritarian.

V In the ambivalent discursive spaces where nation and diaspora meet, even Confucianism, which is often perceived and received as the cardinal sign of Chineseness, becomes functionalized for different and opposed aims. In the debate between Lim Boon Keng and Lu Xun, it was the paradoxical sign of a valuable resource of modernization and an unregenerate traditionalism. In 1950s Hong Kong, Confucianism was Chineseness in exile, forcibly separated from its traditional homeland and enforced to seek an alternative existence in the world as a global philosophy. It was both Chinese and in dire need to confirm its Chineseness outside China-under-Communism. An exemplary case was made in 1950s Hong Kong that Confucianism’s Chineseness, at least in its recent dynastic past, was inseparable from its liaison with non-Chinese others. And, following this historical narrative to its logical and organic extension, it was envisaged that Confucianism’s future was therefore global and not just national. In these mobilities of Confucianism as sign of Chineseness, what is played out is the contests of positions in the discursive spaces of nation and diaspora, contests which accrue to different signs and emerge into specific historical contingencies. Sometimes, these contests develop to a level of coerciveness and a condition of emergency because of the intervention of state power. At other times, they are the substance of everyday life, enmeshed with the performances, conscious and unconscious, of self- and collective identity. The emphasis on location and the locational as the enabling condition for rethinking and reimaginations of Chineseness is reiterated in the chapters in this volume. In the last part, “Chinese Cartographies in the World,” the struggles with the cultural nation on the one hand and the national and cultural politics of the diasporic context on the other are studied in detail from a number of locational perspectives. Research and writing on these contests have been much more vigorous in the United States and Australasia than in other parts of the world where diasporic communities live and work. This is reflected in the spread of the chapters themselves which, together, orchestrate a collective dialogue on recurrent themes and concerns rather than offer comprehensive coverage. In these chapters, the “nation” is both China and the diasporic nation as cultural entity and political reality. One also sees how China as cultural tradition and imaginary develops ambivalent relations

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with China as nation state in ways resonant of earlier historical moments. This resonance is disrupted equally frequently as Chinese ethnic subjects are shaped by and confront the very different forces on the ground of their nations of settlement. In her chapter (Chapter 7), Weimin Tang deploys the Raymond Williams concept of the “actively residual” to discuss what happens to “Chineseness” in its challenge to the incorporative power of the American dream. Colleen Lye (Chapter 9) brilliantly illustrates how the imbrication of “Chinese” and “American” develops within a triadic relationship where “Japanese” is a constant historical and conceptual third point of reference. This she sees as generic to the literary discourses of both “Chinese American” and “Japanese American” writers. Kenneth Chan’s chapter (Chapter 8) introduces another complication in sexual desire which, for two Chinese American writers, contests and collaborates with inter-generational affiliations that are construed in exclusively Chinese ethnic terms in the diaspora. Marie-Paule Ha’s study of colonial Indochina (Chapter 11) shows how “Chinese” emerges as an interstitial agential term between francophone colonialism and minoritization in a predominantly Vietnamese nation. Her chapter and that of David Parker (Chapter 13) on online communities of British-born Chinese youth argue strongly that, for ethnic Chinese in different non-Chinese political and national regimes, inherited traditions and cultural practices are not as important to identity formation as the functionalizing of particular ethnic connections in citizenship and other social aims. This contrasts with the essentializing Chinese tendency that Ong sees as dominant in the huaren website. In her chapter (Chapter 12), Tseen Khoo returns to the issue of the culturalization of Chineseness but, again from a perspective different from Ong’s. She narrates how Chineseness is concretized—literally— in the Chinatown and museum project in Queensland, Australia, a material achievement which is both an assertion against the nation state by an ethnic minority and also facilitated and enabled by the nation state. It is significant, and by no means coincidental, that Parker’s and Khoo’s chapters deal with texts and discourses that draw attention to a more recent generation of ethnic Chinese subjects. Their chapters show that, as diasporic settlements transform into national ethnic communities, the de-centering of received and originary Chineseness happens as Chineseness is renegotiated in everyday intra-ethnic and inter-ethnic transactions in specific sites— family, website, street, committee meeting. From another, more planetary, perspective, Deborah L. Madsen discusses (Chapter 10) attitudes toward “waste,” its treatment and disposal as a recurrent theme in Chinese diasporic cultural production. The chapters in Part IV, “Chinese Cartographies in the World,” show how far Chineseness has been and can be transformed as it

China Abroad: Nation and Diaspora in a Chinese Frame

travels from Confucianism to material culture and everyday life, and through the texts, subjects, and spaces in-between. But Confucianism is very far from being a lost cause, as Qingsheng Tong’s chapter (Chapter 3), which refers to its recent vigorous resurgence in the Chinese mainland, shows. Looking at all the contributions to this volume and their insightful analyses of the many transmutations of Chineseness, it is tempting to speculate on whether and how Chineseness under the cardinal sign of Confucianism can develop the non-essentialistic, non-chauvinistic momentum on the mainland that we have seen in the critiques in the diaspora. In an Olympic year when the world’s attention on China is intense, and China itself is keen to unveil its modernity as a finished project, this long-term speculation develops a special topical relevance.

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2 China Abroad: Between Transnation and Translation Julia Kuehn

I China Abroad succeeds a small number of anthologies on the Chinese diaspora, Chinese transnationalism, Chinese travels, migration and cosmopolitanism, and the changing notion of Chineseness throughout history and, especially, in today’s globalized world. This intellectual heritage calls for a rationalization of our own title, as does the seemingly careless conflation of critical concepts in the above list. I want to respond by briefly reviewing the two most recent collections—at the same time returning to other landmark studies—that not only help delineate the conceptual and critical trajectory of our own compilation but also help to demarcate the remarkable academic history of the thematic China Abroad, and of cross-cultural issues in diaspora studies and in debates of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism more generally. The plural forms used in the title of Robbie Goh and Shawn Wong’s collection Asian Diasporas: Cultures, Identities, Representations (2004) indicate, suitably, the dual foci of their collection on the contemporary Chinese and Indian diasporas and their various socio-cultural representations, theorizations, and consciousness. However, at the same time, Goh emphasizes that the anthology transcends the original conception of diaspora—based on the Jewish history of territorial dispersal—and its bipolar rationale of homeaway, sameness-otherness, belonging-alienation. As early as Writing Diaspora, Rey Chow pointed to the problems inherent in such a bounded and binding binary logic—a point later taken up by Ien Ang (Chow, Writing Diaspora 7, 25; Ang, “Together-In-Difference” 142). Goh and Wong’s plural forms thus also mark the conceptual shift from an initially homogeneous, exclusive diaspora operating through a primordialized ethnic identity to one that accentuates

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the deconstruction of such dualism and essentialism. When Goh speaks of the collection’s foregrounding of the “dynamic,” “fluid,” “dialogic,” and “hybrid” nature of diasporic conditions and identities, there is an obvious if not explicit reference to the earlier work by Stuart Hall which also insisted that the diasporic experience is defined “not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity” (Goh 5–6; Hall “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” from Colonial Discourse 402). The volatility of the China Abroad chronotope and the contradictions observable in diasporic populations and identity politics became ever more highlighted by a poststructuralist rhetoric of flux. The discourse of the China Abroad thematic under the rubric of diaspora studies—vide my co-editor Elaine Ho’s elaborations in her introductory chapter— then received new impulses from critiques of cosmopolitanism. Aihwa Ong’s essay “Flexible Citizenship among Chinese Cosmopolitans” in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins’s landmark collection Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (1998) suggests the usefulness of a rethinking of the “China Abroad” thematic through cosmopolitanism’s multi-directional and meta-national composition and compound (identity) politics. At the same time, however, it is revealing that Ong’s essay informed and became part of her monograph now entitled Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999). I will not go into the often tenuous theoretical distinctions between cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, but it seems that, despite the efforts of, among others, James Clifford, Arjun Appadurai, Pheng Cheah, and Bruce Robbins to defend cosmopolitanism against charges of it being western, elitist, a-political, detached, and idealistic (Clifford, “Traveling Cultures”; Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes”; Robbins; Cheah, “Introduction”), cosmopolitanism—although occasionally invoked in the discourse of China Abroad—remained thus “tainted.” A number of Chinese diaspora critics have invoked cosmopolitanism in their discussions, but, more than once, the reductive elitist position which also marks the critic’s own intellectual commitment to discussing cross-national and cross-cultural issues preempts an engagement with a China Abroad existence that is not specifically cosmopolitan and less privileged. The reiteration of elitism and idealism visible in Wang Gungwu’s statement that overseas Chinese living “among non-Chinese” can be considered a modern kind of cosmopolitan literati with Enlightenment ideals of rationality, individual freedom, and democracy (Wang Gungwu, “Among Non-Chinese”) and in Ang’s description of herself as “a member of the cosmopolitan, multicultural elites,” and as someone who, in everyday life, tries to “[establish] cross-cultural rapport” and uses her “cultural capital to act as a translator between different regimes of culture and knowledge” (Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese 158) may be quoted in this context.

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Whilst I certainly do not propose to abandon cosmopolitanism as a concept or intellectual commitment in the context of China Abroad, in the same way that I think we should surely hold on to the theory of “diaspora,” as both have much to commend them, the gradual intellectual shift—see Ong—to the concept of transnationalism is, I believe, revealing.1 Maria Ng and Philip Holden’s collection Reading Chinese Transnationalisms: Society, Literature, Film (2006) is the second collection I want to invoke in this context. Transnationalism, more so than diaspora or cosmopolitanism, seems to offer a framework and rhetoric that is so encompassing in its simultaneous and paradoxical acknowledgement of mobility, flexibility, dispersal, fragmentation, and its tribute to structuring and defining concepts like nation, identity, and culture that it has, indeed, become in Ng and Holden’s words, “very much the concept of the moment in anthropology, literary, and cultural studies” (Ng and Holden, “Introduction” 1). For Ng and Holden, transnationalism’s primary value for contemporary cultural and literary studies lies in its transgression of postcolonial parameters and its rhetoric of race, oppression, resistance, and liberation which have so long dominated cross-cultural debates (“Introduction” 1). I would claim that transnational studies do not always “succeed” in this department—if one speaks with Ng and Holden of a triumphant surmounting of postcolonialism’s frameworks. Tu Wei-ming’s The Living Tree (1994) and Wang Gungwu’s essay in the same collection (1994) may indeed be quoted as examples of the problematic conflation of race and ethnicity in one particular strand of Chinese diaspora studies, which, arguably, invite a reassessment, but the critical unraveling of issues of oppression and liberation in a number of commendable accounts of diaspora and transnationalism complicates Ng and Holden’s argument (Gilroy, Black Atlantic; Clifford, “Diasporas”).2 The rhetoric of liberation and oppression—if unpicked—may remain useful to some debates. However, I understand Ng and Holden’s hesitation to fully subscribe to the occasionally limited and limiting parameters of postcolonial studies particularly in the context of China—a point also made by Lydia Liu in Translingual Practice (xv–xvi)—and the need to develop parameters that we have inherited from postcolonial criticism. This does not, however, mean that I do not find particularly Homi Bhabha’s work in the context of transnationality useful, as I will later explore, but it means that I think we need to use a variety of approaches for the China Abroad thematic. As my own explanation suggests, I see the real theoretical value in transnationalism’s inherently paradoxical combining of essence and antiessence, home and away, self and other, the local and the global, a feature we also wanted to signal in our own title. China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces oscillates between conflicting and opposing poles such as self-other, home-away, nation-transnation. At the same time, it invokes modalities that

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define and stabilize (China, Subjects) and that move and disperse (Abroad, Travels, Spaces): forces that create a force field which causes a constant negotiation of positions, perspectives, and representations. China Abroad can thus be understood as a thematic complex, and diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism as different, yet interlinked, paradigms to analyze its intricacies. All these approaches illuminate the subject matter in a particular way, point to different facets, create certain emphases, structures and antistructures, but combine to a vision as wide-ranging as is possible for a complex theme like China Abroad. This is also where our anthology marks a significant shift from Goh and Wong’s and Ng and Holden’s. First and foremost, we have, in our title, consciously avoided prioritizing one particular critical approach to the China Abroad thematic to encourage multiple and diverse ways of seeing. Second, China Abroad is both more focused than Asian Diasporas and more open than Reading Chinese Transnationalisms. Goh and Wong’s collection includes both the Chinese and Indian diasporas, a courageous attempt at comprehensiveness which must, inevitably and regrettably, lead to silences, gaps, unmade distinctions and connections. But if China Abroad focuses on only one ethnic alignment it promotes cross- and interdisciplinary approaches to the China Abroad thematic. Ng and Holden’s neat construction of genrerelated sub-categories for the Chinese transnational experience—“Society,” “Literature,” “Film”—reaffirms, rather disappointingly, the very disciplinary boundaries of sociology, literary, and film studies which the China Abroad discussion should ideally transcend. The simultaneous gesture of selection and release, unification and dispersal, marks our anthology, and we hope that we, as editors, have succeeded in making the appropriate choices as to where, in terms of contents and methodologies, such a gesture should occur. As such, the title of my introduction also becomes clearer: “Between Transnation and Translation” signals the liminality of and conflicting gravitational pulls at work in China Abroad as a book project, as a concept, and as a field of critical enquiry. Therefore, when I henceforth speak of transnation and translation, I refer to the “transnation zone” and the “translation zone.” These terms are loosely based on Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone” (Pratt, Imperial Eyes; see also Ang, “Beyond Transnational Nationalism” 189), even if the historical framework of colonialism in Pratt’s study and Ang’s rendering are somewhat problematic for the purposes of China Abroad. A term like “transculturation zone,” if in existence, would be preferable as “transculturation” has been put to more convincing critical usage in debates outside colonial discourse analysis and postcolonial theory. In the area of translation, Emily Apter coined the term “translation zone” in her study of the same title (2006). My chapter can also be understood as both a supplement to and translation of my co-editor’s introduction, providing

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through the methodology of the transnation and translation the “excess seeing” that the complex China Abroad thematic requires, and that can only be achieved by providing a multiplicity of approaches which include diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism.

II Transnation In my understanding of transnation, I follow Aihwa Ong’s explications in her body of work that includes a number of essays and, primarily, Flexible Citizenship (1999) as they best illustrate what I have called the contradictory, complex pulls and modalities at work in the force field of the transnation and of China Abroad. Ong’s explanation of transnationality accentuates two conflictual yet complementary movements: one that captures “the horizontal and relational nature of the contemporary economic, social, and cultural processes that stream across spaces” and one that simultaneously stresses “their embeddedness in differently configured regimes of power” (Flexible Citizenship 4). As Ho has elaborated in her introductory chapter, in Flexible Citizenship, the mobile processes of China Abroad are, specifically, population and capital flows among China, Southeast Asia, and the United States; the embedding forces are the many cultural meanings employed to make sense of this mobility, be these the nation or Chineseness at large, which Ong specifies in chapters on the embedding powers of locality, family ties, or personal and guanxi networks, and Confucianism. As such, trans denotes “both moving through space and across lines, as well as changing the nature of something” (Flexible Citizenship 4), that something being such a regime of power or cultural meaning. In structural terms, that which is mobile, fluctuating, dynamic is in constant negotiation with that which exists, structures, defines, disciplines, stabilizes, controls. Transnationality, in Ong, thus implies and incorporates the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behavior and imagination that are “incited, enabled, and regulated” by the changing logics of a late capitalist, globalizing world, but which, in turn and inadvertently, also “incite, enable, and regulate” the logics of today’s world (see Flexible Citizenship 4). As Ong further explains her understanding of transnationality, she follows David Harvey in identifying interconnectedness and flexible relations as the modus operandi of late capitalism (see Harvey). She sets herself off from his work, however, by incorporating and stressing the importance of human agency and “its production and negotiation of cultural meanings within the normative milieus of late capitalism” (Ong, Flexible Citizenship

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3). Her elaboration is also indebted to Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities” of nationality in the modern world (see Anderson); the nation is for Ong one of the “regimes of power” that operate within transnationality (see Ong, “Chinese Modernities”). However, if Anderson argues that an embedding concept like the nation state, which traditionally aligns social habits, culture, attachment, and political participation, “loses out” in importance to the more powerful idea and workings of global capital trade in terms of its control over affiliations and the behavior of its subjects, Ong is more optimistic about the presence and possibilities of the nation and its associates, such as ethnic, familial, cultural, and social ties (Ong, Flexible Citizenship 2–3). With this model—which I would call the complex force field of the transnation, in which tensions between grounding and simultaneous dispersing forces are constantly negotiated by the experiencing subject—Ong sets herself off from another intellectual antecedent, namely Arjun Appadurai. If Ong’s multi-pull, multi-modal concept of the transnation is one of horizontal and relational processes within and across the transnational space, Appadurai’s work on the ways that, specifically, modern travel and electronic media mediate the (imaginary) production of cultural identity, locality, “virtual neighborhoods,” and, more generally, modern subjectivity, is based on a “top-down” premise (see Appadurai, Modernity at Large). According to Ong, Appadurai’s view of the “global production of locality” through people’s imaginative resources for creating communities implies a hierarchical model in which the global space is “macro-political economic and the local is situated, culturally creative, and resistant” (Ong, Flexible Citizenship 4). This rejection of a hierarchical, top-down model characterized by resistance might again explain why some critics, such as Ong, Ng, Holden, and Liu, react strongly against postcolonial theories for an understanding of the diasporic and transnational experience in general, and against Appadurai in particular. Ong’s model convinces and appeals as it enables ambivalence in the force field of the transnation. I want to explore Ong’s sociological contemplations a bit further and ask a question that is perhaps somewhat closer to our heart and our project—how to narrate this double narrative of transnationalism, of trans and the nation, of the negotiation of dispersing and simultaneous grounding forces. Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation” essay (in Bhabha, The Location of Culture) here comes to mind. Prompted by the experiences of postcolonial and diasporic peoples, migrants, exiles, émigrés, and refugees, Bhabha wonders how to adequately narrate the idea of the nation in today’s postmodern world. His central focus may be postcolonial, but his contemplations can be mapped onto the discourse of diaspora, which he does mention, and also transnationalism. Traditional historical representations have characterized the nation as a homogeneous, metropolitan, and modern

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rational construct that exists in linear time and that possesses an origin and a teleology, thereby eliminating the margins and any subversive, dissenting, destabilizing factors. However, the contemporary experiences of diasporic peoples and transnationals clearly suggest the limitations of such a narrative. To take the example of diasporic peoples and to paraphrase Bhabha, their experience of “home abroad” and of “the transnation” does not happen within the relative stability of a Bakhtinian chronotope (which Bhabha sees as a fixed and immediately visible time-space in which the nation is, in a horizontal and linear move, shifted abroad), but must rather be seen as a manifestation of the liminal and spatial narrative of the Freudian uncanny. In the uncanny space of Bhabha’s diaspora, the split narrative of the “heimlich” is at the same time “unheimlich” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 143–44, 165). The same, I argue, could be said for the narrative of the transnation which also calls for what Bhabha calls a “doubleness in writing” (141), and which represents the split logic of a “nationalist pedagogy,” of “authority” and an “originary presence” that is concurrently “surmounted” and “decentered” (143, 145). To again paraphrase Bhabha and translate his theory into the discourse of the transnation, “[i]t is precisely in reading between these borderlines of the [trans]nationspace” (145) that a new double narrative strategy emerges, which—unsurprisingly, as Ong also suggested—also includes a new double narrative of “the people” who exist within this discourse: The people are not simply historical events or parts of a patriotic body politic. They are also a complex rhetorical strategy of social reference: their claim to be representative provokes a crisis within the process of signification and discursive address. We then have a contested conceptual territory where the [trans]nation’s people must be thought in double-time; the people are the historical “objects” of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin in the past; the people are also the “subjects” of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people to demonstrate the prodigious, living principles of the People as contemporaneity: as that sign of the present through which national life is redeemed and iterated as a reproductive process. (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 145)

For people at the margins of or outside a nation, whether these be postcolonial, diasporic, or transnational, the discourse of the nation or of any other embedding “regime of power,” for that matter, is a double one; ambivalent and liminal as it is both “continuist” and “performative” (145); “homogenized and total” but also “specific” (168); “heimlich” and “unheimlich.” Within his discourse of

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rethinking the narrative of the nation, Bhabha concludes that it is only through the “process of dissemiNation—of meaning, time, peoples, cultural boundaries, and historical traditions—that the radical alterity of the national culture will create new forms of living and writing” (166). And what better example than the transnation for an update of Bhabha’s Derridean witticism, to show how the nation is transcended and its meaning changed and yet preserved, its identity undefined and redefined, and, in our case, how Chineseness is de-essentialized, disseminated, and relocalized—in short, to unravel all the ambivalent forces at work and to query the very presumptions on which they seem to be built. The narrative of the transnation must exist inside this double discourse of the liminal and the uncanny, dispersal and fixity, the general and the specific, the progressive and the permanent. To return to our own collection, our contributors, while foregrounding one particular historical event or one individual’s experience, at the same time reveal and contribute towards writing history and the collective narrative of China Abroad; their discussion of one particular cultural meaning’s workings within the space of the transnation is at the same time a performative negotiation of this cultural meaning. In imaginary treatments of the transnational narrative, this crossing of boundaries can also become visible in the transcending and renegotiation of established literary traditions and conventions, as Azade Seyhan has suggested (4). Specifically Tang’s, Chan’s, and Lye’s chapters in our collection reveal the transnational’s liminal position and performative role when s/he (re)writes literary conventions, be these related to genre (bildungsroman, autobiography) or to modality (realism, romance). Bhabha realized that “the people” are a central factor in the double narrative of the (trans)nation, and that it is crucial to analyze how they— as individuals and as a group—situate themselves in relation to and enter the discourse of national, cultural, and ethnic identity and belonging. In the context of China Abroad we have specifically asked contributors to show how Chineseness is performed in their specific texts and contexts, and how this assumed identity marker reveals the struggles and negotiations within the force field of Ong’s transnation and Bhabha’s transnational double narrative. Chineseness, our individual contributions demonstrate, incorporates a number of cultural meanings and is understood differently by different individuals who form a heterogeneous cluster which can only be called “the people” or “the Chinese Abroad” with certain caveats. A question here is whether Chineseness is indeed an open, indeterminate signifier for identity, as Ien Ang has suggested (On Not Speaking Chinese 24, 35). Ang’s work on Chineseness is central in the context of the China Abroad project. Like Rey Chow’s and Aihwa Ong’s works which problematize an essentialist and naturalized Chineseness in the discourse of the Chinese diaspora and Chinese transnationalism—pointing, for

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example, to what they called the Orientalist legacy of the sinologist who holds on to the notion of a distinctive and separate China and a Chinese identity (Chow, Writing Diaspora 1–4; Ong, “Flexible Citizenship” 134–35)—Ang’s work is centered on the deconstruction of a static, essentialist, and totalitarian notion of Chineseness.3 In contemporary cross-cultural studies, Chineseness must be, as Ang writes (quoting Chow), “subject to erasure, ‘not in the sense of being written out of existence but in the sense of being unpacked’” (Ang, “Beyond Transnational Nationalism” 193).4 Prompted by her own biography— a woman of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia, raised in the Netherlands, and working as a diasporic academic in Australia, in a globalized world— Ang’s contemplations in On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West lead to her view of Chineseness as hybridity or, as she also calls it, more appropriately, I believe, “in-betweenness.” It is somewhat unfortunate, I think, that Ang completely discards diaspora as a framework which she still characterizes through “the existence of closed and limited, mutually exclusive universes of ethnic sameness” (Ang, “TogetherIn-Difference” 146). Unfortunate, I say, because of the many attempts—not just Stuart Hall’s—to break up such notions of exclusive, naturalized ethno-cultural markers of belonging and to foreground instead the hybridizing modalities at work in the diasporic space. Instead of a model of “sameness-in-dispersal,” which, according to Ang, enforces rather than transcends difference, she calls for an understanding of transnational Chineseness that “foregrounds complicated entanglement rather than identity, togetherness-in-difference rather than virtual apartheid” (Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese 3). Building on Robert Young, Ang calls for an anti-essentialist Chineseness Abroad that is “suspended-in-between: [and that is, in the case of, say, Australian Asians or Asian Americans] neither truly western nor authentically Asian; embedded in the West yet always partially disengaged from it; disembedded from Asia yet somehow enduringly attached to it emotionally” (Ang, “Together-In-Difference” 150). Hybridity, or in-betweenness, she argues, is the concept that adequately confronts and problematizes boundaries, although it does not erase them. As such, hybridity always implies an unsettling of identities. It is precisely our encounters at the border—where self and other, the local and the global, Asian and Western meet—that make us realize how riven with potential miscommunication and intercultural conflict these encounters can be. This tells us that hybridity, the very condition of in-betweenness, can never be a question of simple shaking hands, of happy, harmonious merge and fusion. Hybridity is not the solution, but alerts us to the difficulty of living with differences, their ultimately irreducible resistance

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to complete dissolution. In other words, hybridity is a heuristic device for analyzing complicated entanglement. (Ang, “Together-InDifference” 149–50)

Ang’s hybridity and in-betweenness—or, as I would prefer, suspension, since this term more clearly emphasizes struggle and the failure to bring the contesting forces into a harmonious solution whereas hybridity still connotes successful fusion despite Ang’s and Bhabha’s deconstructionist moves—echoes what Bhabha called the simultaneous continuist and performative aspect of the transnation and its narrative. In the (narrative) border zone of the transnation, “the actual and symbolic contact zone of inter-cultural encounter and negotiation is where processes of [in-betweenness] transpire on a regular and ordinary basis,” writes Ang (“Beyond Transnational Nationalism” 189). Our own chapters in China Abroad show this unsettling of Chineseness in the transnational space and the constant negotiating stance of the individual and the collective. In his chapter, Tong elaborates how Guo Songtao and Yan Fu’s late nineteenth-century intellectual engagement with western learning made some of their colleagues question whether these two had lost their “Chinese soul” to the admiration of western culture. Transferring this twopull situation into the contemporary, Tong also wonders whether the earlier Qing dynasty uneasiness about combining Chinese and western values— “Chinese learning for the fundamental structure, and Western learning for practical use,” as Zhang Zhidong put it—continues to mark China’s current national policy “solution” regarding the West. Shen’s chapter shows that, surprisingly, contemplations about Chineseness often happened in unexpected quarters, as in the case of Edgar Snow’s careful editing of Mao Dun and Yu Dafu’s short stories for his 1936 anthology (eliminating, among other things, cross-cultural references) to make them both more original and “more Chinese.” In this context, Shen also enquires about the standing of English in Shanghai’s semi-colonial, 1930s, internationalist periodical culture. In order to question the ideological status of language as an identity marker she asks provocatively whether English can indeed here be viewed as “a Chinese language.” Ho’s chapter studies literary culture in 1950s Hong Kong as a crucial twentieth-century site of transition between nation and diaspora. After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, leftist and rightist writers and intellectuals relocated in Hong Kong created contiguous literarycultural spaces where Chineseness is imagined in different ways. This project of imagination also preoccupies indigenous Hong Kong writers or those who have become residents in earlier decades. The boundaries between these spaces and anglophone literary culture are nation-based—People’s Republic,

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Chinese nationalist, British colonial, and the United States during the Cold War. The chapter explores Hong Kong writing which crosses these national and linguistic boundaries, mediating between cultural nationalist and cultural internationalist interests. Further expanding on colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong as a particularly interesting space for negotiations of Chineseness, Gan analyzes a number of films representing the 1950s exodus of Nationalist loyalists to Hong Kong and, then, the run-up to 1997 and Hong Kong’s handover back to China. New locations necessarily press contemplations of identity on travelers, migrants, transnationals, and Gan shows how the diaspora (be this in Hong Kong or New York) is full of cracks in the projection of “Chinese sameness abroad.” Moving issues of Chineseness and “ethnic authenticity” into the realm of Asian-American literature, Tang explicitly returns to Raymond Williams’s idea of the “actively residual”—a latent cross-reference in Ong’s, Ang’s, and my own elaborations on Chineseness in the transnational space—for her elaborations on Chineseness as manifested in central bildungsromane by Jade Wong and Gish Jen. “Within a cross-cultural and translational space, contributing to the at once shifting and merged double consciousness of the bicultural Chinese American subject,” writes Tang, Chineseness is the force that simultaneously negotiates and contests foundational American ideas like the American Dream. Such deconstruction of the binaries of self and other, home and abroad, in- and exclusion in select Chinese American novels yet again manifest the transnation and translation zone. Chan adds desire and identity as meaning-making forces that unsettle Chineseness in Shirley Lim’s Among the White Moonfaces and Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed. Naturalized and culturally ingrained rules of gendered behavior and concepts of sexual conduct are at the heart of what turn out to be the conflictridden life journeys of these two author-protagonists. In the transnational zone, Chineseness can never be anything but a “winged seed.” Lye shows, in her chapter, in a comparative and historicizing reading of Lin Yutang and Toru Matsumoto’s Asian American works that “ethnic authenticity,” such as “Chinese American,” is not only performative, full of internal varieties and a rhetorical construct, but that it must be investigated in interplay with many other “identity” shapers, be these history, another ethnicity like “Japanese American,” genre, or narrative modality. Madsen explores the issue of transnational, and sometimes even transit, Chineseness through the idea of “waste” and, specifically, abjection in which the other of the abject does not complement the self but is so totally foreign to it that it threatens the breakdown of meaning altogether. The negotiation of Chineseness occurs in the liminal space of a materialized uncanny where inside and outside, home and not-home enter into physically painful conflict. Ha foregrounds a

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central issue so far somewhat marginalized in my discussion of the Chinese transnation: the inner-Asian-Chinese diaspora. Her elaborations on the Chinese in French-occupied Indochina yet again suggest the multiplicity of cultural, ethnic, linguistic, nation-interested forces in the negotiation of Chineseness. Khoo’s elaborations on the Brisbane Chinatown and the Chinese Museum of Queensland reveal how Chineseness in the diaspora encounters the conflicting forces of politics, history, the nation, and individual and collective ethno-cultural markers, the careful unpacking of which remains our challenge and responsibility. Her analysis seems to foreshadow what Parker describes as the three dimensions of identity formation. His chapter on the networks of social interaction that have emerged with the Internet, the central transnational, rhizomic communication medium, takes us back to Ong and her critique of the essentializing discourse of the huaren website. In the forums Parker analyzes, however, Chineseness remains fluid and suspended between possessive, positional, and performance modes of identity formation and even transgress the boundaries of virtual versus actual contact.

III Translation Ang’s view of an identity-in-suspension in the transnation zone is useful for many of our contributions, but her quotation about potential miscommunication in the cross-cultural encounter also leads directly to the other focal point of this introduction: the issue of translation. As Sandra Bermann has argued, issues of language and translation are central in an understanding and analysis of cross-cultural interaction in today’s transnational world. “In a world of rapidly transforming populations and technologies, where language and citizenship are caught up in tightly woven webs of economic, military, and cultural power, language and translation operate at every juncture. [L]anguage and translation have become increasingly important in national and international relations, and in the process of ‘globalization’ more generally . . .” (Bermann 1–2). Moreover, an attention to language also helps situate cross-cultural and transnational issues more clearly in literary studies and the humanities—even if we still take many cues from the social sciences—and it has traditionally been the literary discipline of comparative literature that “has defined itself from the first in terms of linguistic, national, and disciplinary border-crossings” (7). Bermann’s entire oeuvre can thus be seen as part of what Lawrence Venuti has called the necessity and challenge to make the mode of translation “visible”

China Abroad: Between Transnation and Translation

in cross-cultural contact (Venuti, “The Translator’s Invisibility” and The Translator’s Invisibility). The translator operates, like the transnational, in a double narrative, suspended between the familiar and the foreign, “indigenous practices and alien cultural forms” (Dingwaney 4). Like Bhabha’s (trans)nation, translation is, for Venuti, “a double writing,” which requires a “double reading” (Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility 312). In order to elucidate this claim further and to show the links between the logic of the transnation and of translation—the zone of the transnation is the zone of translation5— one must return to one of the foundational texts and critics. Returning to Walter Benjamin, I build on Rey Chow’s contemplations in Primitive Passions (1995) on the issue of (cultural) translation in the context of modern Chinese cinema. She reminds us here that translation is not only an interlingual and intercultural translation between China and the West/“abroad” but also, importantly, one between a specific culture or tradition and the modern global culture it participates in—visible, for example, in the use of a modern medium like film. Translation is thus both horizontal and vertical; it happens in a threedimensional space and always moves in various directions—a move that Chow sees already evident in Benjamin’s thoughts on translation. The reader may bear with me through the following elaborations on his familiar essay, which are nevertheless important as the text’s thoughts on the challenges of linguistic translation not only help generate a theory of the cross-cultural encounter and cultural translation more generally, but as its methodologies also serve as a model for our own China Abroad project. The problem any translation faces, writes Walter Benjamin in “The Task of the Translator,” is that it has the difficult task not only to convey information and reproduce meaning from one language to another, as is commonly but mistakenly assumed, but also to express the kinship between languages by offering a glimpse into that sublime realm which unites all individual languages. Benjamin calls this mystical sphere “pure language” (Benjamin 74),6 or, in another essay, the “linguistic being of things” (see Johnson 56). Translation is thus neither meant for the producer of the translation nor its recipient, but is committed to the very object and medium, namely language itself, trying to reveal its very raison d'être. This, Benjamin concedes, is a challenging act, but even if translation cannot fully reveal or establish this latent relationship between languages, it can try to “represent it by realizing it in embryonic or intensive form” (Benjamin 72). The well-known example from Benjamin’s essay may once more illuminate the challenge the translator faces when trying to translate a simple concept like “bread” from French into German with an eye on revealing their kinship and “the pure language” behind it. The French word pain and the German word Brot signify (to use Saussure’s word; Benjamin would say

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“intend”) the same thing. However, while a Frenchman might be thinking of a plain white baguette (perhaps with jam), which he would consume in the morning together with a black coffee whilst reading the day’s newspaper, the German person might think of a hearty noontime luncheon (Brotzeit), where his loaf of rye bread accompanies cold cuts and a beer. Despite or because of such differences, translation “must [try to] lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language” (Benjamin 78). Translation is therefore both an attempt to come to terms with the foreignness of languages, but at the same time an attempt to unite them: An instant and final rather than a temporary and provisional solution of this foreignness remains out of the reach of mankind. . . . In translation the original rises into a higher and purer linguistic air, as it were. It cannot live there permanently, to be sure, and it certainly does not reach it in its entirety. Yet, in a singularly impressive manner, at least it points the way to this region: the predestined, hitherto inaccessible realm of reconciliation and fulfillment of languages. The transfer can never be total, but what reaches this region is that element in translation which goes beyond transmittal of subject matter. This nucleus is best defined as the element that does not lend itself to translation. (Benjamin 75)

It is here that I want to return to my earlier statement that Benjamin’s essay is also a model for our own collection and the China Abroad discourse more generally. Benjamin’s essay in itself is a virtuoso performance in translation in which he moves gracefully between the specific linguistic example and a mystical meta-discourse. In translation studies, the focus on manifest textual or stylistic data and translating such findings of minutiae into the macrodiscourse of theory is difficult indeed. This observation explains not only my return to Benjamin, who mastered the challenge to combine the examination of lived reality with transcendental speculations, but his agenda may also serve as a touchstone for this collection and the China Abroad discourse. The China Abroad experience and discussion, like Benjamin’s essay and the translator, must move between the material and the immaterial, the concrete and the theoretical, material culture and lived reality and a meta-discourse of theory. The scholar’s undertaking to record and to theorize is thus homologous to the method foregrounded by Benjamin. Translation is thus, to return to “The Task of the Translator,” a visit to the very moment in Babel when the primordial language is split up, encounters difference, and consequently confusion. This is a vision of an ur-state— to return to the transnation—before the need for a nation unit that defined

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itself, its culture, its identity in relation to and against others. Translation, in Benjamin’s messianic vision, is a momentary return to wholeness, an attempt in language to reveal the inexpressible within the expressible. Derrida called this liminal sphere, sardonically but appropriately, “entr’expression” (Sturrock 1008). Given the impossibility to ever fully access “pure language” and to catch more than a glimpse of Babelian perfection, the translator’s mission must therefore necessarily be a failure: the “task/ Aufgabe” of the translator is at the same time his “surrender/ Aufgabe.” 7 The reader might think that this bodes rather ill for the individual transnational and translational experience and the description thereof. And, indeed, each of the diasporic, cosmopolitan, transnational scenes in our anthology reveals the double narrative and in-betweenness of the encountering self which these linguistic, cultural, identity-related struggles cause. What is crucial, however, is that we try, with our China Abroad project, to make such translational struggles between Chinese and western and interAsian partners and the world at large visible. Awareness of the difficulties is the first and perhaps only performative step towards something that resembles a “solution.” We can only stay with Benjamin here, who, in the face of such adversity and despite the acknowledgement of its ultimate impossibility, still offers models for what he calls a “good” translation. These, suggests Benjamin, reveal the ongoing negotiation between the expressible and the inexpressible, the familiar and the foreign, self and other and—to go back to an earlier image of mine—indicate the force field of the translation zone, in which contradictory forces pull the translator into a multiplicity of directions, on a multiplicity of levels. Benjamin offers three images for a successful translation of the foreign into the familiar: the arcade, the tangent, and the broken amphora. A translation must be transparent and must not cover the original or block its light; while a wall might brace and conceal the original, the arcade supports while it lets the light shine through and the original show itself. In other words, a translation of a word, a cultural meaning, or a Foucauldian regime of power, must always pay homage to the original as it was “intended” and reveal it despite the rendering into another, foreign, framework. Doing so, the tangent of the translation touches the circle of the original at one point (its “intention”), and, after that, sets off on its own course according “to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux” (Benjamin 80), as the pain/Brot example suggested. A translation must be faithful, but is allowed a certain sovereignty in the new context. It must show that it has been affected by the original in the new direction it takes. And lastly, whatever shape the translation takes, revealing the original and being affected by it in the translated context, there must be a glimpse of the underlying “pure language”

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that unites original and translation. Any two fragments of a broken vessel— matching but not necessarily resembling one another—when glued together offer the vision of the whole vessel, whose complete restoration, however, is eternally postponed. And it is, stresses Johnson, exactly this impossibility to piece together the broken vessel, to show unity in difference, which is at the heart of the translator’s work and which establishes its rationale (Johnson 61–64). Each of the transnationals and translators in our collection enacts in a dramatic performance the impossibility and yet necessity of translation. He or she faces the dilemma of how to translate appropriately the experience of a foreign language, cultural and national frameworks, and identity into words that he or she knows and that make sense to himself or herself, that perhaps make sense for a reader, and also for the act of translation itself. Most literally, the two chapters in the “Translating China” section show how Guo Songtao, Yan Fu, Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, Harold Isaacs, Lu Xun et al. are involved in tangible literary, and with it, cultural and nationalist translation acts when they embark on Chinese-English translation projects in journals or books (Tong and Shen). In our middle part, “China, Hong Kong, and Beyond,” Northern Chinese meet Southern Chinese in 1950s Hong Kong and have to reach intercultural communication and overcome intra-Chinese prejudices (Ho and Gan). Intra-Chinese translation issues are then globalized when Chinese people—of all regions, classes, and dialects—come together “in the world,” all trying to make sense of the foreign and modern experience. This experience, however, is revealed as less homogeneous than this last phrase may suggest, and miscommunications, breaks, fissures, contrasts, conflicts, paradoxes, and ambiguities are revealed. If translation inevitably breeds friction between the native and the foreign language through the differences they embody, the entirety of Part IV on “Chinese Cartographies in the World” shows how varied the issues and manifestations of the China Abroad translation is. Together, the discussions of the Chinese–New York encounter (Gan), of Chinese and Japanese literature in the United States and within an “Asian American tradition” (Lye), select Chinese American literary works (Tang, Chan, Madsen), the Chinese Australian cultural and literary context (Madsen, Khoo), colonial Indochina (Ha), and British Chinese online identities (Parker) show the heterogeneity of our topic, and our individual chapters might therefore even be understood as translations of one theme and of each other (in the same way that my introductory chapter can be understood as a translation of my co-editor’s). In many ways, they thus enact the “teamwork” that André Lefevere sees as characteristic of the Chinese concept of translation, in which a group of translators moves the text from an initial oral interpretation of the original

China Abroad: Between Transnation and Translation

(koushou) through oral instruction, transmission, and recitation (chuanyan) to the inscribed product (bishou), each contributing towards the most adequate rendering (Lefevere 22). All our chapters in this collection help towards rendering the China Abroad theme, its manifestations, variations, its methodologies, and critical approaches. Concerning the challenge of the translator’s task, Benjamin suggests at the end of his essay that an “interlinear translation” is the most appropriate method to show the process—Lydia Liu calls it the “manner of becoming” (16)—of the ambitious trajectory but ultimate failure of translation: an interlinear translation manifests the arcade, the tangent, and the broken vessel. It shows the opposite pulls of the translator towards an original and a translation, a native and a foreign context, the manifest and the metaphysical, catching a glimpse at both ends of the difference of languages but also their common origin and return in “pure language.” John Sturrock takes Benjamin’s cue and elaborates on the liminality of translation and the translated experience in his essay on “Writing between the Lines: The Language of Translation.” An interlinear translation exemplifies the most familiar and deep-rooted model of translation, he argues, in which (in a somewhat simplified description of events from literalism to fluency) the linguistic process is noticeably divided into two stages: the first stage shows how the translator travels from his source to a literal translation of it, and the second marks the transformation of this temporary version into a more finished, edited, and publishable one (see Sturrock 996). The high service, as Sturrock calls it, that the interlinear translation does us is to draw attention to the in-betweenness of the act of translation, and by denying its immediacy. “[T]ranslation is a process,” Sturrock too stresses (998).8 Venuti has called the interlinear method the “foreignizing” method, which does not “domesticate” the source or foreign language but rather unsettles the target or home language. “Foreignizing translation signifies the difference of the foreign text, yet only by disrupting the cultural codes that prevail in the target language. In its efforts to do right abroad, this translation method must do wrong at home, deviating from native norms to state an alien reading experience” (Venuti, “Translation as Cultural Politics” 210). The interlinear version allows itself to be affected by the source language and thus reshapes itself. The final polished translation in the target language then uses the translator’s knowledge of context to create a more presentable version which gives an echo and impression of the original source. Sturrock stresses that it is particularly the alienating, incomplete interlinear version that most clearly suggests to us not only the in-between position of any translator between two languages but also what Benjamin said about the quest for “pure language”: by inserting an interlinear translation into the space between two languages, their differences become even more obvious,

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as does the fact that these two languages may converge but will never merge either formally or semantically. And it is specifically the liminality of the translation zone and the different forces that act upon the translator in the cross-cultural encounter and translation that the individual chapters in our collection, too, point out in their analyses of various texts and contexts.

IV History and representation Let me return to the two anthologies with which I began this discussion on transnation and translation in the China Abroad thematic. Whether working within the theoretical frameworks of diaspora or transnationalism, the editors and contributors of Asian Diasporas: Cultures, Identities, Representations and Reading Chinese Transnationalisms: Society, Literature, Film rightly insist on the necessity to always historicize and contextualize the experience across cultures. Each China Abroad experience must be understood in its chronotopic specificity and through the uncanny double narrative it performs, as suspended between a specific moment and history, a locality and a globalized space, home and abroad. If chronotopic contextualization is crucial for the transnational and translational project, so is the issue of representation. The trajectory of this cross-cultural collection—and in that we resemble Goh and Wong’s, Ng and Holden’s—is to foreground various accounts of lived cultural, linguistic, and literary experience. Theory turns into parody when it loses its historical and cultural embeddedness and its interest in representation. My elaborations on transnation and translation in the China Abroad context also only succeed when they refer, in the individual chapters, to representations of the concrete experiences of agents, whether these experiences are real or imagined. Ong’s definition of transnationalism appealed to me not only through its structural logic as a transnation zone of struggling forces but also through its emphasis on the importance of human agency in the negotiation of cultural meaning within the transnation, and its thesis that any transnational project requires attention to specific histories and geopolitical situations (Ong, Flexible Citizenship 16). The interlinear translation model Benjamin and Sturrock advocated as best conveying the liminality of the translation zone and the translator’s suspension between the familiar and the unfamiliar also worked with concrete linguistic examples, and John Balcom reminds us that awareness of an utterance’s occurrence in a specific historical, cultural context is crucial for a “good” translation (Balcom).

China Abroad: Between Transnation and Translation

The aim of our China Abroad collection is thus to present a historicized and polychronotopic approach by setting against the representations of the transnation/translation paradigms (in literature, translation proper, diaries, blogs, museums, travel accounts, and film) the broader backdrop of the history of an “abroad” shaped by the actual encounter between Chinese and nonChinese forces, by the transplantation of people, money, labor, and ideas, by frustration and exploitation, and by the ever-present attempt to transcend a hierarchy of unequal ethnicities, cultures, and languages to full participatory, polyphonic equality. In terms of its critical and theoretical methods, as my explanation of our title indicated, this collection has adopted an open approach: the frameworks contributors have chosen are eclectic and require the “excess seeing” of the other chapters. In the end, no unifying term can characterize the approaches present in this collection, which are practiced under diverse names and rubrics, permutating certain key terms: postcolonial theory, (comparative) diaspora studies, border theory, interculturalism, cosmopolitanism, subaltern studies, transnationalism, transnational gender studies, critical race theory, revisionist history, comparative literature, crosscultural film studies. Each designation of a methodology casts light on the complexity of China Abroad, and the point is to deploy all approaches and their concepts, and the field of knowledge they designate, in a differential, contingent, and relational manner. The mobility of approaches and foci and the flexible set of disciplinary and cross-cultural lenses, we think, are adequate to the complex politics of the transnation and translation issues at work in China Abroad. Only the sum of a variety of frameworks and experiences can chart the intricate field of China Abroad where the individual critical analysis is shaped by and, in turn, shapes the narrative of the collective and the field; a narrative that is still being written and in which our collection, China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces constitutes one particular chapter.

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II Translating China

3 Guo Songtao in London: An Unaccomplished Mission of Discovery Qingsheng Tong

I Perhaps nothing is more symbolic and representative of a China Abroad than a resident Chinese embassy. On January 21, 1877, after fifty days at sea, Guo Songtao, the first Chinese ambassador to Britain, and his entourage arrived at Southampton. The British public was quick to realize that the establishment of a permanent Chinese embassy in London was an “event unprecedented in the history of the relations between China and foreign countries” and constituted “a proud page of British history.”1 Inaugurating China’s modern diplomacy, Guo’s mission was a diplomatic one, but, in an important sense, it was also a journey of intellectual discovery of the West. A prominent scholar, social critic, and statesman in his time, Guo had long been committed to the constitution and development of an informed and enlightened understanding of the West in China. His appointment as China’s first ambassador to Britain provided an opportunity to experience and to study the West he had so far only observed or imagined from a distance. What would he have to say about Britain and about the West more generally? How would he see his own country in light of his experience and his knowledge of Britain gathered and accumulated during the time of his ambassadorship? In what ways would his views on the West and on China in relation to the West contribute to our understanding of radical social and cultural transformations in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Guo’s intellectual engagement with western learning and the heavy price he had to pay for his liberal attitude towards the West are evidence of the difficulties, complexities, and perils of cross-cultural understanding at a time when so much of it was needed.

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Today, more than a century later, we cannot speak with confidence of China’s discovery of the West, a project that Guo began both symbolically and literally, as finished or complete. Three decades after the implementation of the open-door policy in the early 1980s, China’s economic ascendancy has fulfilled, partially at least, the dream of many of Guo’s contemporaries including those “self-strengtheners” for whom military power and material wealth were the sole objective of state policy. But the question of where and how to position China’s indigenous cultural formations vis-à-vis their western counterparts in the context of globalization continues to demand intelligent responses that may enable a vision of the future for China and an enlightened understanding of the West as the locus of reference for China’s project of modernization. Some of the problems that confront China today are uncannily reminiscent of those with which Guo and his contemporaries—friends and foes alike—were preoccupied. When it comes to China’s understanding of itself in relation to the West, the history of modern China is one of recurrent tautologies. Born in Hunan in 1818, Guo Songtao (Kuo Sung-t’ao 郭嵩燾) received a classical education at the Yuelu Academy (嶽麓書院), a prestigious institute of learning first founded in the twelfth century by the leading neoConfucian scholar Zhu Xi (朱熹) (1130–1200). A distinct aspect of its tradition was its commitment to what is known as “practical statesmanship.” This tradition was to be continued and developed by Guo Songtao under the new circumstances seven hundred years later. During the First Opium War (1840–42), Guo was involved in organizing the defense against the British in Zhejiang Province; China’s defeat, which led to the signing of the Treaty of Nanjing, constituted a turning point in its modern history as well as in Guo’s thinking. In an attempt to understand what had really happened and how it had happened, Guo organized for himself a spate of activities—reading about the West and trying to get in touch with westerners visiting or residing in China for information about the countries they came from. About two decades later, during the Second Opium War (1856–60), he was again involved in building the defense of the Taku Fort against the British and French allied forces under the command of Lord Elgin. As a military secretary to the famous Manchu general Senggelinqin, Guo, however, stood against the use of force in settling the disputes with the British and preferred negotiation to an allout war. His dissenting views not only antagonized the general but angered the whole rank of scholar-officials, though, for this, the British were favorably disposed towards him.2 He had to tender his resignation. Only two months later, however, the Fort fell, with devastating consequences: the fleeing of the Qing Court to Jehol and the burning of the Yuan Ming Yuan. Between then and his departure for England in 1876, Guo served in a number of government

Guo Songtao in London

positions including acting governorship of Guangdong. Although public opinion was divided about him, Guo was generally accepted to be someone unrivalled in knowledge and experience in the sphere of China’s foreign affairs. Guo did not attempt to conceal his gratification with this reputation. He wrote in his diary: “in China today, there is only one person who knows the situations of the foreign states, their strengths, and the ways to deal with them.”3 He was that “one person.” As China’s ambassador to Britain, Guo had two major tasks to perform. On the one hand, he was to advance China’s interests and nurture a positive feeling about it in Britain, and, on the other—and more important for him perhaps— he took on himself the task to push for an enlightened understanding of the West back at home. He succeeded in the first but failed in the second. British public opinion considered Guo’s mission to be “thoroughly successful” in promoting “friendly relations between the two countries.” Guo was perceived as “a liberal-minded man,” not least because he “had studied . . . European politics, and . . . even attempted to learn English.” William Gladstone thought of Guo as “the most genial Oriental he had ever met.” And at the time of his return to China in 1879, “he left a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, both official and otherwise, who sincerely regretted his departure” (Anon., “A Chinaman in London” 492). However, although he was regarded as “the apostle of progress” in Britain (Times, November 30, 1878), to say that Guo had in possession a prophetic wisdom in his diagnosis of the problems of China in the context of its relations with the western powers was only a retrospective recognition of a man who had never been recognized or accepted as such in his own country. On his way to Britain, he kept a detailed record of the journey, and, as required, his journals had to be submitted to the Zongli yamen (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Guo reported with candor what he had observed in the British colonies, including Hong Kong and Singapore, and did not even attempt to conceal his admiration of the legal and educational institutions set up by the British in these places. The publication of his journals met with violent opposition from the officialdom, and some of his comments were interpreted as an expression of his loyalty to Britain and his intention to subject China to it. The Qing government was under so much pressure from an extraordinary solidity of hostility from both within and outside the Court that it had to order the destruction of the printing blocks of the book. Guo learned the news about the banning of his book while in London and was overtaken by a profound feeling of despair (see Diaries iii 272). Indeed, so disheartened was he that he decided to put into print no more of his personal diaries. The collection of the journals he kept on his way to England, available now in English (in Frodsham), constitutes only a small fraction of the massive

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amount of diaries he kept until the very end of his life. It was not until 1982, ninety years after his death, that his diaries were published. 4 Guo was a magnificent diarist. Written in a style combining classical elegance and antique austerity, the oeuvre of his diaries, in four massive volumes, is a unique archive of the life of a remarkable mind: its responses to the unprecedented historical changes taking place in China in the second half of the nineteenth century and its attempts to disclose the secrets of the success of the West and to adumbrate the intellectual, cultural, and social fabrics of western modernity. In his London diary, of more than eight hundred pages in the third volume, Guo commented on a wide range of topics including British politics, law, scholarship, education, industry, diplomacy, defense, literature, philology, and so on; his comments, fragmentary in form as they must be in the genre of diary, often have a keen edge of intellectual depth and cross-cultural sensitivity, rare among even the most accomplished minds of his time in China. Guo’s diaries present both an eyewitness account of his lived experience of the historical moment when China was forced to go abroad and an archive of personal insight into the implications as well as potentialities of the historical transition that China went through in the last few decades of the nineteenth century.

II What is most remarkable about Guo, as revealed in his London diary, is his insatiable curiosity about British institutions, political, intellectual, and educational. Within one month after his arrival in London, for instance, Guo visited the British Parliament and observed the operational procedure of Parliamentary debate (Diaries iii 181–82). Scattered across his London diary are numerous comments on British politics with a special interest in its Parliamentary system that provided constitutional protection of oppositional views and thereby ensured a balance of political power (389). With reference to the historical formation of Britain’s social structure, for example, Guo wrote: At first [the British] didn’t have a long and accumulated tradition of high virtue and culture. For over a century now, their officials and their common people have collaborated in the discussion of national policies, have reported these to the King and put them into application, thereby making daily progress. And now their sovereign is beloved for her wisdom, and their way of life becomes better and better. (Guo, London Letter to [Li Hongzhang] 1877, in Frodsham 97)

Guo Songtao in London

Guo Songtao must be one of the very few who understood the necessity of some form of constitutional democracy as the basis of national strength in China in the late nineteenth century. Guo would take every opportunity to learn about Britain—about the British tradition of knowledge and British institutions—whether it was a conversation with an English friend or a visit to a gallery or library. Even though he possessed no knowledge of English or any other European languages, he was eager to learn about what he called the western tradition of “practical learning,” which, he believed, laid the foundation for the success of western modernity that China was yet to acquire and develop. In England, he wrote, this tradition began with Francis Bacon—with Bacon’s determination to break with the past: “At first, Bacon studied Latin and Greek classics, and after a long while he realized that they were all empty and incapable of practical applicability. That is why he started to develop knowledge about natural laws, which he called ‘new science.’” “Within a matter of two hundred and thirty or forty years,” Guo continued, “the European nations have become wealthy and powerful; and all this is attributable to their learning and knowledge” (356). The success of western modernity could not have been a mere historical accident; neither was it conceivable that the wealth and power of the western nations could continue to grow entirely on the basis of some local and technological strengths: “Western politics, education and manufacture are all based on knowledge” (823). For Guo, English education, like its legal system, was one of the cornerstones of the British Empire. During his stay in London, he managed to visit various educational institutions and carefully studied Britain’s educational system. At the end of November, 1877, Guo made a two-day visit to the University of Oxford at the invitation of James Legge. He entered a detailed account of this visit in his diary. The vice-chancellor received him and rather thoroughly briefed him about the University: its curriculum, its administrative structure, its students’ life, and its history, and he was taken to see the libraries and museums. A high point of his visit was to attend a lecture by Legge on “Imperial Confucianism, or the Sixteen Maxims of the Kangxi Sacred Edict.” Legge had planned to give four lectures on the sixteen maxims. Three lectures had been given; this last one was meant to coincide with the “happy occasion” of the visit by the Chinese Emperor’s envoy. Guo was invited to sit on the stage. Legge began the lecture by reading out, in Chinese, the last four maxims and proceeded to speak about them one by one in English. The solemnity of the lecture was impressive and memorable: “Three hundred people, men and women were in the audience, silent and attentive, and would respond to every excellent point in the lecture by clapping their hands.” So impressed was Guo with Oxford that he found it reminiscent of the intellectual ethos of the “Three

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Dynasties”—the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties (2200?–256 BCE), which were generally considered to be “the golden age” in the intellectual history of China. Guo lost sleep that night (350–51). James Legge once lamented that Chinese ministers and people were all blind to “the fact that China is only one of many independent nations in the world” (in Yang Lien-sheng 22). For centuries, China did not seem to have experienced the need to know, understand, or study the world beyond its boundaries. This national blindness which Legge identified with regard to China’s idea of its centrality in the world system is evidence of a structure of ignorance that persists throughout history, and, in the second half of the nineteenth century, that ignorance became all the more prominent and perhaps embarrassing, especially when contrasted with the efforts the West had made to know and engage China. Li Hongzhang, Guo’s friend and “the most powerful personage in the Chinese Empire” (Times, January 25, 1877) experienced this asymmetry of knowledge between the West and China. “Whenever we have a discussion between Chinese and foreign high officials,” he wrote in 1863, “we depend entirely upon the foreign interpreters for the transmitting of ideas.” Whereas China lacked even qualified interpreters, “there have been quite a few of their [western] leaders who have learned our written and spoken language and the best are able to read our classics and history.”5 However, Li remained convinced that China’s inadequacies were local problems that would require only local or technical solutions. Not enough interpreters? More language schools. Like so many of his contemporaries, Li was unable to reach beyond the deep-seated conviction that western learning was needed only insofar as it was useful and practical, a conviction that underlay, for example, the establishment of the first batch of foreign language schools and indeed the “self-strengthening” movement, which was a response to a West that had not been properly understood. Nowhere more evident are the limits of China’s understanding of the West than in Zhang Zhidong’s proverbial formula: “Chinese learning for the fundamental structure, and Western learning for practical use.” Was there anything worth learning from the West apart from, for example, its technological skills and its languages that provided access to those skills? In the second half of the nineteenth century, it was believed, even among the most educated, that China was the intellectual origin and center of the world system of knowledge, and that western knowledge was ultimately derived from some sort of Chinese intellectual or cultural ingenuities. In one of their conversations in London, Guo spoke with Yan Fu, the future translator of T. H. Huxley, about a monograph by his colleague Zhang Zimu (張自牧, 1833–86) entitled Yinghai lun (On Foreign Nations), in which Zhang presented a full exposition of “Chinese origins” of western learning. It was a popular book, not least because its argument was typical of a peculiar strand of thought

Guo Songtao in London

that achieved wide currency among the literati after the First Opium War. The West forced itself into China, and at the same time it presented itself as a phenomenon that required an understanding and exposition of its historical development. Within the sphere of scholarly engagement, western learning, so radically different from its Chinese counterpart, had to be explained, analyzed, and examined, in particular with reference to the tradition of Chinese scholarship. Zhang’s classical training enabled him to cite liberally from the classical resources and to argue spuriously that nearly all major branches of modern western knowledge and technological discoveries such as chemistry, optics, mechanics, the principles of steam engine, electricity, and mechanical engineering had all been first broached in such canonical texts as Confucian Analects, Mozi, and Hanfeizi (Guo, in Frodsham 70). More astonishing was his assertion that not only modern sciences but also Christianity originated from China. The name “Moses” was claimed to be the transliteration of the Chinese thinker Mozi (墨子, 470?–391? BCE). And the very name of the Christian God—Tianzhu, heavenly lord in Chinese—was, Zhang argued, of Chinese origin, and, by extension Christianity itself originated from China: “The name Tianzhu originated from China; it was later spread to the Huns in the north and from there to the West. And Jesus Christ then started to appropriate it” (Zhang Zimu 12). Guo found this not only stupid and embarrassing, but perverse. In his diary, Guo recorded in detail the conversation he had with Yan Fu over Zhang Zimu. Yan, Guo wrote, repudiated point by point Zhang’s argument. With regard to Christianity, for example, Yan asked: where to locate the Chinese equivalent of “Roman Catholic”? To show the absurdity of Zhang’s assertion, Guo entered “Roman Catholic” in English, the only English words to be found in the entirety of his London dairy (see Diaries iii 444). Zhang Zimu was not the only one to believe that western civilization had originally sprung from China; a substantial number of scholars converged on this point in the late nineteenth century. Prominent diplomats such as Guo’s successor, Zeng Jize (more commonly known as Marquis Tseng in the West), and Guo’s deputy in the Chinese embassy in London, Liu Xihong, though both in possession of some first-hand knowledge of the West, were nevertheless inclined to agree that western moral, intellectual, and even technological ingenuities were ultimately derived from China. It is more than banal to say that there was within the Chinese government a conservative element that always impeded liberal ideas and reformist visions, because it fails to identify specifically what that conservative element might be and offers no analytical exposition of the historical and social formation of that discursive conservatism as a reactionary and anti-progressive social force. Without a useful distance of time and deeply drawn into the war of ideas in the late nineteenth century, Guo Songtao nevertheless possessed an insight

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into that deep-seated structure of conservatism in China’s political and cultural life, and he identified, with remarkable accuracy, the class of scholar-officials and its social basis, the literati, more than any other social category, to be the leading reactionary intellectual force. Assuming the role of the guardian of the nation, the literati became, for Guo, synonymous with a political culture that defined any attempt to reconcile with foreign states as an act of unpatriotism or treason. Guo commented on the genealogical formation of such a literati tradition in his London diary as follows: Even since the Southern Song [1127—1279], scholar-officials have been divided by their views on China’s situation in relation to foreign states and how China might win, without being concerned with how they themselves should behave. But if one didn’t support China going to war, one would be condemned by the whole nation, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong, whether China is strong or weak, victorious or lost, able to survive or not. For the past seven or eight hundred years, all scholar-officials have been thinking alike and have been inclined to being reckless without knowing why they are like this. This is the consequence of too much discussion and suggestion offered by scholar-officials in the Southern Song. (Diaries iii 375–76)6

The prominent presence of the literati and the scholar-officials as their political representatives in China’s political life ensured their role as opinion leaders in just about every sphere of public life. The tyranny of mainstream opinion formed within and outside the state apparatus would permit no alternative views, informed discussions, or adequate consultations necessary for an understanding of problems at hand and for an identification of the best possible courses of action to take under the circumstances. Not only could scholar-officials and members of the literati influence government policies, they controlled and shaped public opinion and thereby occupied an apparently high moral ground from which to offer advice, proposals, and suggestions related to foreign affairs. Ever since the Southern Song, as Guo noted, such a political culture had been an impregnable fortress of conservatism to halt, resist, and reverse progressive reforms. In Guo’s own time, the practice of this political culture was known as qingyi (清議 pure talk) or qingliu (清流 pure currents), and those associated with it were called the “purists.” The revival of qingyi in the late nineteenth century became the very condition of impossibility for any effort to advance a better understanding of the West; bellicosity became the normative position, deviation from which would be politically suicidal. Ku Hung Ming found the

Guo Songtao in London

practice of qingyi comparable to the Oxford Movement in his The Story of a Chinese Oxford Movement, which opens with this synoptic statement: The Hanlin Academy in Peking was the Oxford of China—the seat of the flower of the intellectual aristocracy of the country. It was therefore in the Hanlin Academy that the movement which I have called the Chinese Oxford movement had its head-quarters. The young Hanlins who joined and supported this Chinese Oxford movement were called the Chin-liu-tang 清流黨,—the party of National Purification. This National Purification movement in China, like the Oxford movement in England, was a Confucian High Church Tory revival. The object of the movement, while opposing the introduction of foreign methods and foreign ideas favored then by [Li Hongzhang] and the Chinese Liberals, was to purify the currents of national life by calling upon the nation to live more strictly according to the Confucian principles. (Ku 5)

This “National Purification” movement was therefore directed against the “liberals” led by Guo Songtao’s friend Li Hongzhang, who was considered by Ku to be “the Lord Palmerston of the Chinese middle class Liberalism” (Ku 16).7 For a long time, Guo Songtao had been a target and victim of a vicious campaign organized by those scholar-officials, those “purists” based in the Hanlin Academy. The banning of his journals is, as mentioned above, just one example of this organized hostility towards him. In fact, his agreement to take up the appointment as the first Chinese ambassador to the West was a kiss of death. Guo was publicly depicted in the press or perceived privately by his colleagues as a man who had lost his Chinese soul to the admiration of the West, especially the western system of learning. His house back in his hometown in Hunan was blockaded and would have been burned down if not for direct intervention from the Court. Even his deputy in the Chinese embassy in London, Liu Xihong, impeached him for his “misdeeds” in Britain, some of which were: that Guo put on a European coat against the wind and cold while visiting an English fortress; that he stood up upon the sight of the King of Brazil; that, following the example of foreigners, he took a program of the concert he attended at Buckingham Palace; that he was keen to learn English, but, as he was too old to learn it, he told his concubine to learn it; and that he brought with him one of his wives to England and observed western diplomatic protocols by bringing her to some of the official functions (see Wang Xingguo 155). In China, nothing seems more condemnable and objectionable than being seen as “servile” or “submissive” to foreign powers, and it was not uncommon that Chinese diplomats would have to personally bear the blame and responsibility, for example, for the signing of unequal

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treaties, even though they only performed the tasks they had been instructed to do. On such occasions, the nation as a whole would need to find a way to divert and alleviate its collective shame and guilt. Liang Qichao (1873– 1929), the leading intellectual voice in the late Qing and early Republican periods, considered the “purification” campaign against Guo symptomatic of an ailing political culture: “Guo Songtao, the most learned man in the domain of Western scholarship at his time, was relentlessly marginalized by ‘the purists’ and died in profound disappointment. Cases like this best illustrate the psychology of the time” (Liang 24).

III Guo Songtao had been a lone traveler on China’s path of discovery of the West, seeking an understanding of it through the powers of his isolated intelligence, until he met, in London, Yan Fu, the future translator of western political and legal work. The concurrency of their residence in England was perhaps a coincidence, but far from accidental is the convergence of their thoughts and views on western learning, which not only constituted the basis of their remarkable friendship but also, and perhaps more importantly, suggests a discursive continuity between the two historical events for which they are remembered: the establishment of the first Chinese embassy in London in 1877 and the publication of the Chinese translation of T. H. Huxley’s Ethics and Evolution in 1898. Perhaps limited by his own educational formation, Guo was unable to articulate a full analytical exposition of the history of western modernity, although at one time he seriously considered the possibility of writing a book on China’s modernization and diplomacy.8 Yan Fu was to fulfill the task to bring to China the world of European ideas through those thinkers he chose to translate. Yan Fu was among the second batch of students the Qing government sent abroad. 9 Compared with the first, it was a smaller group, of thirty students, who, more mature in age and with a more clearly defined purpose in mind, were to be trained in the naval academies in Britain and France. Yan entered the Royal Naval College at Greenwich in September 1877. The Qing court’s decision to send them abroad was yet another manifestation of the limits of China’s understanding of the West among the political and intellectual elite who privileged the installation of modern military architecture over that of western ideas and values. Li Hongzhang, who proposed the establishment of foreign language schools a decade previously, supported the proposal to send naval cadets to England and France for further training. In a letter he wrote to Guo Songtao in London, Li expressed his hope that, if these cadets, after three years of study in Europe, could sail

Guo Songtao in London

home the ironclads that China would have bought from Britain, “they would have accomplished their task” (Li Hongzhang 1321). There is no evidence to show or even to suggest that Yan Fu had gone beyond the scope of that sort of technological pragmatism before his studies in London (see Schwartz 29). However, his experience of Britain and his close relationship with Guo would be a decisive influence on his future career. Like Guo, Yan Fu developed a special interest in British legal and political institutions and would spend an inordinate amount of time attending court hearings in London. He was so inspired and moved by the legal procedures he had observed that he would remain, we are told, in a contemplative mood for several days following each of these visits to the London courts (see Wang Quchang 7). More than twenty years later, Yan Fu recalled, in a comment interpolated in the text of his translation of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, that he and Guo could continue their discussion of the differences between China and Britain in legal practice for “days and nights.” His conclusion was that “the ultimate root” of the wealth and power of the western nations lay in the constitution of a legal system in which “impartial justice is daily extended” (Montesquieu 8). Guo could not agree more.10 It was Guo’s sixtieth birthday on April 9, 1878; he invited a small number of people including Yan Fu to have noodles with him at the Chinese embassy in London. That day’s diary entry was nearly entirely devoted to the recording of Yan’s comments on a wide range of topics: from optics to mechanical engineering, from astronomy to meteorology. Guo described Yan as an eloquent speaker, a charismatic interlocutor, a knowledgeable young man, and someone of much talent and promise (Diaries iii 473). A month later, Guo went to visit Yan Fu at the Royal Naval College. He inspected Yan’s room for a direct knowledge of Chinese students’ life at the College. In his room, Yan Fu showed them devices for measurement and generating electricity and explained to them the principles of the logarithm. He told Guo that western learning was so vast, profound, and sophisticated that he was worried that he might never be able to exhaust it in his lifetime. Included among the topics they spoke about was Newton’s discovery of the force of gravity. Guo noted down in Chinese Newton’s reflective comment on his scientific explorations and discoveries, which he might have learned from Yan: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Newton’s self-reflection might just as well be read as a description of how both Guo and Yan felt about themselves on their journey of discovery of the West. That day’s entry is well over a thousand words, one of the longest in Guo’s London diary. He

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concluded it thus: “I enjoyed and appreciated [Yan’s] words so much that I record them in such detail here” (Diaries iii 515–18). Guo would have liked to see Yan Fu become a learned educator or an informed diplomat, rather than a naval officer; he was willing to go so far as to employ his influence and connections to intervene with Yan’s career development. As stipulated in the curriculum at the Royal Naval College, the last six months were reserved for practice aboard warships. Guo wrote to the British Foreign Office requesting that Yan Fu be exempted from his sea duty and be allowed to stay at the College for further studies. It is probably during this time that Yan Fu learned of or began to read some of the thinkers he was to translate twenty years later. That Yan Fu eventually became, instead of an operator of western military technology, the most important disseminator and advocate of western ideas in the early twentieth century testifies to Guo’s influence on him, the significance of which has yet to be fully understood in the modern intellectual history of China. In a couplet he wrote to commemorate Guo’s death in 1891, Yan expressed heartfelt gratitude to Guo for his understanding, support, and help and compared Guo with Qu Yuan, the greatest of all patriot-poets, whose death in 278 BCE has given China a public holiday: the Dragon Boat Festival (Wang Quchang 13). To locate Guo within the poetic tradition of Qu Yuan was more than a rhetorical gesture of homage; it was an expression of a profound disillusionment derived from their shared sense of failure to institute an enlightened understanding of the West in China. It had been more than ten years since Yan Fu’s return to China, and those ideas he discussed with Guo in London remained as alien and objectionable as before. He had been in various official positions, but had been working no more than a bureaucratic functionary in the Qing hierarchy, falling far short of the youthful ideals he had spoken about in front of Guo. In 1895, four years after Guo’s death, China’s defeat in the Sino-Japanese War stimulated the production of a group of four political essays by him, which served as a prelude to his translation of Ethics and Evolution. In “On the Speed of the Changes in the World Situation,” the first and probably the most famous of the four essays, he recalled once more his conversations with Guo Songtao in London and reiterated their conclusion that the ascendancy of the western nations was the result of their unfailing pursuit of truth, their commitment to social and political justice, rather than their industrial and technological prowess. Paying the final tribute to his mentor and friend in a classical manner, he quoted Guo Songtao in this essay: “once the divine working of Heaven and Earth starts the evolution, it cannot be reversed. Those scholar-officials, out of their narrow-mindedness, attempt to stop that which has already started, but they can never succeed” (Yan Fu 6). This act of citation not only reconfirmed an intellectual friendship that started in London, but also, in anticipation

Guo Songtao in London

of imminent radical social transformations, continued their critique of the scholar-official as an anti-progressive social force. There is, it seems to me, an unmistakable historical and intellectual continuity between Yan’s London years and the decision he made twenty years later to be a professional translator of western political work. In a historical sense, therefore, Yan Fu’s translation project, which began with Ethics and Evolution, may be considered to be a continuation of his conversations with Guo a decade previously and an organized and theoretical articulation, in the voice of those thinkers he chose to translate, of the views and thoughts he shared with Guo in London on the question of how to transform China into a modern state. Despite the fact that they really belonged to two different generations— Guo was thirty-five years Yan’s senior—they had a shared identity as China’s leading intellectuals championing western ideas, values, and institutions.11 Together, they mapped out a path of understanding into the world of western modernity. However, unlike Yan, who was to become an intellectual hero for his translations, which influenced several generations of radical intellectuals, including Mao Zedong, Guo, throughout his public life, had been systematically marginalized, alienated, and ostracized from mainstream intellectual life for his advocacy of the same set of ideas that offered the West as the model of modernity. It is important to emphasize this continuity between Guo and Yan, not just because Yan Fu’s intellectual trajectory brings us back to his formative time in London and directs our attention to the importance of Guo Songtao as a vanguard thinker in the late Qing period but also because the intellectual continuity between their efforts to understand the West delineates a tortuous and difficult process of China’s discovery of the West, a process that was often disrupted, delayed, prolonged, and postponed.

IV On March 27, 1879, after about two years serving as the Emperor’s envoy in London, Guo returned to China. Shortly after his arrival in Shanghai, a message from Zongli yamen in Beijing was sent to Shanghai asking him to travel to Beijing without delay. He wrote in his diary in response to this invitation: “I’m determined not to be drawn into foreign affairs any more” (Diaries iii 843). Indeed, how could he continue to work with those “purists” who had repeatedly brought him humiliation and anguish? How could he forget that he had been publicly condemned and frequently depicted as “a betrayer of both the Dynasty and the Chinese cultural heritage” and as a man who left “the land of sages to serve the foreign devils” (see Hao and Wang xi, 187)? Knowing that “those in the capital” would surely continue to cast aspersions on his reputation and integrity, he decided, wisely, to resign from public office in order to create

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a distance between himself and “foreign affairs” (see Diaries iii 843). Guo traveled back to his hometown and remained there until his death in 1891. To work in the realm of foreign affairs was an impossibility. Zeng Jize, Guo’s successor, was one of a few who seemed to know the perils of being a diplomat in China. At his appointment as “Imperial Commissioner to England and France,” Zeng was called to have an interview with the Empress Dowager Cixi in the Forbidden City. At the interview, Zeng expressed his frustrations. “The difficulty in handling diplomatic affairs,” said Zeng, “lies in the fact that foreigners are unreasonable, while Chinese are ignorant of current events and circumstances. Chinese ministers and people usually hate foreigners, as goes without saying, but we must plan gradually to make ourselves strong before anything can be done” (Teng and Fairbank 105). Popular nationalism was as dangerous as the appeasement policy adopted by the Court. Those at the forefront of foreign affairs often had to bear the blame for any diplomatic failures for which, though, the nation should have been responsible. Ironically, perhaps, Dowager Cixi was understanding and even sympathetic: “If you manage such matters for the nation, there are bound to be times when people will scold you. You, however, should bear the toil and blame.” It is in this context that Zeng Jize brought up the name of the man he was to succeed: Answer: [Guo Songtao] is certainly an upright and straightforward person. This time he also risked damage to his reputation in order to manage affairs for the nation. In the future it is hoped that the special grace of the Empresses and the Emperor will protect him in every respect. Decree: Up above it is thoroughly understood [Guo Songtao] is a good man. Since his mission abroad he has managed many affairs but he has also received plenty of scolding from people. Answer: [Guo Songtao] is vexed by the fact that China cannot become strong immediately and he has frequently argued with people and therefore he has been scolded. After all he is a loyal minister. Fortunately the Empresses Dowager and the Emperor understand him. Even though he has lost his reputation in the fight, still it is worthwhile. Decree: We all know him. The princes and great ministers also understand him. (Teng and Fairbank 106)

Guo Songtao in London

Though Guo was recognized by the Court as a capable diplomat and a man of integrity, such recognition could only be expressed in private. Even within a monarchical system, the most powerful Empress would have to succumb to the pressure from the literati and refrain from a public endorsement of Guo, who, in the eyes of the literati, was corrupted, beyond redemption, by western culture. After Guo’s death, Li Hongzhang submitted a memorial to the Emperor in which Guo’s life achievement was presented in detail, including, in particular, his contribution to the country by undertaking the unprecedented task to be the first resident ambassador in London. But, to Li’s request that Guo’s name be inscribed in the Bureau of National History and his writings be collected in it, the Emperor responded: “Guo Songtao’s writings during the time of his ambassadorship are highly controversial. Your request is not granted.”12 “Ultimately,” Frodsham says, “[Guo] was a failure” not least because he was “unsuccessful in converting the gentry to his views” (Frodsham lxii). True, but how could he be otherwise? How could he successfully convert the literati to his views, as these views would lead to the destruction of the very social and cultural basis that protected their existence?

V Over the past ten years or so, the growth of China’s economic power and its rise to a world power have been the main source of a particular structure of feeling in China—a combination of excitement and depression, hope and disappointment, pride and fear. Underlying this structure of feeling is a whole set of problems, prominent among which is the question of where to locate what could be clearly defined as culturally Chinese, be it Chinese thought, learning, or value. Once again, the intellectual elite is more than ready to take on itself the task to respond to what is seen as a deepening crisis of the indigenous cultural paradigms by proposing ways to promulgate, institutionalize, propagate, and spread beyond China’s borders “Chinese culture.” One should not be distracted by the indeterminacy and fluidity of the term “Chinese culture” or be driven into a pedantic discussion of it and get lost in this context. The point here is to note that what seems to have emerged is a national project to build up China’s “soft power” that would match its spectacular economic success. Although superannuated and therefore rarely evoked explicitly as a principle of practice, Zhang Zhidong’s formula—“Chinese learning for the fundamental structure, and Western learning for practical use”—seems to have been resuscitated and to be able to provide a solution— an easy and convenient one for sure—to the cultural and intellectual crisis brought about by China’s newly acquired modernity or postmodernity, depending on how one sees it.

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As a sign of this national project, there has been a concerted state effort to promote “Chinese culture” both within and outside China. Huge amounts of money, for example, have been set aside to establish as many as five hundred Confucius Institutes around the world “in order to promote a better understanding of the Chinese language and culture among the people of the world” and to “accelerate the development of multiculturalism at the international level.”13 Some of the most important canonical texts such as Confucian Analects, Mencius, and Laozi are ostentatiously taught on the national TV network throughout the country. Some of those who teach on the national TV network become instant-celebrity public teachers and their lectures instant best-sellers.14 While there is nothing inherently wrong about the upsurge and popularity of those classics, what is problematic is the discursive attempt to establish a link between the perception of China’s economic ascendancy and the celebration of a tradition that is written in and embodied by those canonical texts. Admittedly, China’s economic achievement over the past three decades has had no historical precedent, and its present social and political conditions are different from those under which Guo Songtao advocated the need of a thorough knowledge of western modernity, but the collective commitment to what is conceived as Chinese tradition is reminiscent of the ethos of the “purist” ideology that Guo identified as the enemy of modernity. One wonders why various revolutions in the twentieth century, including the Cultural Revolution, have failed to eradicate the literati tradition and why cultural nationalism remains as vital and powerful as it was a century ago. Therefore, Guo’s critical analysis of the literati—a close equivalent of today’s intellectual elite—and his inescapable alienation from mainstream political life because of his advocacy of a comprehensive practice of western learning continue to be instructive today. Amid China’s economic ascendancy, popular cultural chauvinism and nationalism are a condition of possibility for the creation of a China which Guo would surely stand opposed to. Guo was a patriot, but his patriotism was often perceived as evidence of his betrayal of his own country and his servitude to the West to which he represented China. This is the tragic irony for a Chinese diplomat that he perhaps should not have become in the first place. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Guo, perhaps more than anyone else, helped to create a positive image of China abroad that it had never had before. Marking the completion of Guo’s ambassadorship, a Times editorial wrote: [Guo] stood forth as the apostle of progress, honestly reporting and advocating what appeared to him good in the countries he was sent to visit, and this is the more praiseworthy because he

Guo Songtao in London

had only to manipulate facts or damn them with faint praise in order to gratify the prejudices of a bigoted Court and an ignorant party misnamed literati, which persists in feeding the country on Confucian pap instead of the strong meat of the nineteenth century. (Times, November 30, 1878)

Though with evident imperialist and Orientalist undertones, this editorial was perceptive enough to identify rather precisely the literati as the social force that not only made it impossible for Guo to report the “facts” about the West but also forced the nation as a whole to take “Confucian pap.” The editorial reconfirmed the fact of Guo’s success in his mission to Britain insofar as the relations between the two countries were concerned, and it expressed the hope that “[Guo’s] countrymen, if they have not already recognized the fact, cannot fail sooner or later to do so” (Times, November 30, 1878). One cannot be certain, however, if that “fact” and what it can teach us today have been fully grasped. Insofar as “the intellectual aristocracy” continues to find it necessary to “purify the currents of national life by calling upon the nation to live more strictly according to the Confucian principles” (Ku 5), Guo’s mission of discovery of the West, which is inevitably a discovery of the self, must be revived and continued.

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4 Lu Xun, Cultural Internationalism, Leftist Periodicals and Literary Translation in the 1930s Shuang Shen

I Introduction: Translating internationalism Literary translation is a much-discussed subject in Chinese studies, but, for reasons that demand investigation, translations of foreign literature into Chinese tend to get far more attention from Chinese studies scholars than translations of Chinese literature into foreign languages. This happens in spite of abundant evidence of a long history of translation and circulation of Chinese literature in the other direction, beyond linguistic and national borders. For example, according to Donald Gibbs and Yun-chen Li’s A Bibliography of Studies and Translations of Modern Chinese Literature, 1918–1942, anglophone translations of modern Chinese literature were done as early as during the Republican period (1911–49) when the Chinese versions of this literature had just been published, often with the help of Chinese writers themselves. The works of at least thirty Chinese writers and poets of the contemporary period were translated into English within the three decades between 1919 and 1949 (Gibbs and Li). These translations were published in journals such as Asia, Life and Letters Today, People’s Tribune, T’ien Hsia, and China Forum, based in such different places as New York, London, and Shanghai. In addition, close to twenty poetry and short story anthologies as well as individual collections were published in these same cities. Although these figures cannot represent the entire picture of the global circulation of modern Chinese literature since only English translations are counted, they still give us a glimpse of how active translingual and transnational cultural activities were during the Republican era.

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In Writing Diaspora and her other work, Rey Chow criticizes area studies’ nationalistic tendency of privileging China or Mandarin Chinese as the fetishized object of study. The neglect shown towards foreign language translations is a manifestation of this problem; however, there are also some other complex issues involved. For instance, what was the motivation behind the translation of Chinese literature, particularly that of the contemporary period, during the Republican era? Why was translation more frequently conducted from Chinese into certain target languages (English, Russian, Japanese, etc.), and not others? Why were some writers translated more frequently than others? These questions are related to the geopolitical world order of that particular time period and the understanding of culture’s relationship to this geopolitical order from the perspective of translators and writers. Therefore, addressing these questions demands a broader perspective than that which is offered by the traditional approach to translation as “a system of meaning-value.” In their preface to a special issue of Public Culture, Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli criticize the flaws of traditional theories of translation “as an exemplar of theories of meaning,” stating that: [t]hese theories of meaning-value continually orient us toward a theory of the sign, mark, or trace and away from a theory of the social embeddedness of the sign, of the very social practices that these histories wish to describe. In other words, no matter the richness of these social studies, theories of translation continually return to the question of how to translate well from one language to another. . . . (Gaonkar and Povinelli 393–94)

In lieu of this traditional conception of translation, they suggest that translation can perhaps be thought of as “a complex, multifaceted signal phenomenon—signaling the interior content of aesthetic form and message and exterior political and social commitment to the circulation of this form and message as well as entailing the cultural logic of the circulatory matrix itself” (393). They also propose to approach translation as “transfiguration” to emphasize “the functions of indexicality and mimesis” in the process of transmitting a cultural sign from one context to another (395). Taking the cue from Gaonkar and Povinelli, I argue in this chapter that the anglophone translations of modern Chinese literature in the 1930s can be read as a case of circulation and movement of cultural materials across national and linguistic borders. This movement not only challenges the traditional and conceptual divide between “China” and “abroad” as separate geographic regions, but also draws critical attention to the oftentimes unquestioned connection between Chineseness and Chinese literature, for “What counts as the Chinese

Lu Xun, Cultural Internationalism

language?” and “How does literature in circulation inspire nationalist or internationalist consciousness?” are questions that arise in the process of movement. Although both the left and the non-left conducted translation projects of modern Chinese literature in the 1930s, this chapter will only focus on the translation projects related to the political history of internationalism, because, through practices such as collaboration and reprinting, the anglophone internationalist journals present a perfect case for the study of transnational circulation and movement of literary materials for a certain political agenda. The editors of leftist magazines such as China Forum and China Today tried hard to establish close contact with important Chinese literary figures such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun, and succeeded to a certain extent to integrate the Chinese Leftist Writers’ League into internationalist alliances. Although Lu Xun did not know English well enough to compose articles in English, some of his essays were intentionally written for such English-language magazines as China Forum, China Today, or New Masses. They were translated into English by other leftist activists including the well-known Agnes Smedley. The involvement of Chinese writers in left-oriented internationalist journals is more than a question of translation, but an issue of forging transnational alliance by means of literary translation, circulation, and reading. This cultural dimension of transnationalism actually presents a more complex picture of the history of internationalism. Whereas conventional histories of internationalism tend to focus on major political organs such as the Communist International, Communist Parties in various parts of the world, and important political figures such as Stalin, Trotsky, Sun Yat-sen, or Mao Zedong, approaching this history from the point of view of translation and cultural circulation foregrounds a different group of players—writers, translators, editors, and readers. In addition, the focus on the cultural form in circulation, in this case the periodical, and language offers a necessary correction to the negligence towards these issues that contributes to the ideology of internationalism as an all-too-easy notion of global unity based on common faith in the liberation of the oppressed. Internationalism as a political history gave definition to a particular use of Chinese literature at a given historical moment; however, it did not render the anglophone leftist magazines into single-dimensional and homogenous texts. The politics of translation and reading intersected with and sometimes interrupted internationalism as a global discourse, which had a certain unitary logic and center. From the point of view of translation, internationalism seemed more than a discourse of unification; it was also a constant process of negotiation of difference and disjunction. Contrary to perhaps even the editors’ understanding of literature, literature or translation was not a transparent

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vessel carrying political messages; rather, as Brent Edwards argues with regard to the cultural exchange in the African diaspora, “the cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation” (Edwards 8). This statement is applicable to Chinese internationalism as well. Recent scholarship on internationalism and proletarian literature shows a tendency to re-examine the definition of the left and the logic of internationalism from various perspectives. In the field of American literature, for instance, the works of Cary Nelson, Paula Rabinowitz, James Murphy, and Michael Denning continuously call into question the definition of the “left” by incorporating concerns of gender, race, regional difference, and mass culture.1 Approaching the history of the literary left in the United States from a literary-historical perspective, Michael Denning describes the “cultural front” of the left as being shaped by “cultural industries and apparatuses” and “the alliance of radical artists and intellectuals who made up the ‘cultural’ part of the Popular Front” (Denning, xix). The term “cultural front” summarizes the methodology of Denning’s book, one that moves away from an exclusive focus on individual “fellow travelers” and their political commitments to a consideration of cultural mechanism and its relationship with the democratic social movement—the Popular Front. However, these revisionist perspectives on the left have not appeared much in scholarship with regard to China. This chapter aims to fill this gap by showing that the archive of Chinese internationalism might be considered as a transnational and translingual cultural front—a platform of intersection between the local phenomenon of Chinese modernity and the universal goal of a world revolution. From this perspective, this archive is not dead history, but is continuously renarrated and appropriated for contemporary needs. A small anecdote might serve to illustrate the contemporary relevance of some internationalist narratives as a form of transnational culture. Recently there have been some TV series and theatrical productions in the Chinese mainland featuring western internationalists such as Edgar Snow and Norman Bethune. Although many of these productions are propagandistic on the surface, some are rather complex upon closer look and reflect certain contemporary concerns of transnationalism and globalization. For instance, one theatrical adaptation of Edgar Snow’s play Red Star over China casts Da Shan, a Canadian national who has become a popular TV icon in China, in the role of Edgar Snow. When I watched Red Star over China in Shanghai last year, I was surprised to find that the play does not mention any direct or mediated contact between Snow and the American or Chinese Communist Party prior to his first trip to Yan’an in 1936. Structurally, this omission serves to reinforce the mysterious aura of Yan’an and Communism by situating both in a provincial and faraway location, in opposition to the corrupting forces

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of capitalism and imperialism in the big cities. Historically, it isolates the history of internationalist activism from a series of parallel trends including linguistic experimentalism, transnational circulation and movement of people and culture, and the development of cultural industry in urban centers such as Shanghai. This omission is of course historically untrue; however, it is meaningful in the sense that, in conjunction with the casting of Da Shan, we can see how transnationality is being rewritten to suit contemporary needs. This argues that internationalist culture exists only in so far as it is culturally embedded in 1930s or contemporary China and with the support and intervention of a specific medium—the periodical in the 1930s or TV in the contemporary moment. There are two aspects of internationalism as a particular form of transnational culture that will be emphasized in this chapter. First, internationalism both as a transnational alliance and an act of translating and mediating between cultures was made possible by the serial form of the periodical. Available discussions of the periodical that are often situated in History of the Book studies suggest that, compared to the book, the western periodical form has some characteristics that can be associated with openness: the mixing of different genres and authorial voices in a periodical, its lack of clear temporal boundaries by virtue of being a serial publication, and resistance to the traditional taxonomy of literary forms. Due to these characteristics, some critics have argued that the periodical encourages readers to produce their own readings of the text, although the openness of the periodical form has a number of qualifications.2 While there are not many formalist studies of the Chinese periodical, existing scholarship on the Shanghai newspaper Shen Bao confirms the multicultural influence of Shanghai’s print culture. In addition, in some studies that trace the origin of the Chinese periodical to the everyday life encyclopedia of the Ming dynasty, such characteristics as inclusiveness and eclecticism similar to those found in the Victorian periodical have been cited.3 In a larger project, I compare the literary translations published in the leftist periodicals with the literary anthology Living China edited by the American journalist Edgar Snow and published by George G. Harrap in 1936.4 As one of the first anglophone literary anthologies of contemporary Chinese literature of its time, Living China consisted of several stories that had already been published in leftist or non-left anglophone periodicals in China and the United States.5 Even though Snow himself was not directly involved in the production of the magazines, he was close to the international leftist community either through personal friendship or as a reader and contributor to these magazines. However, Snow’s anthology simplifies the textuality of modern Chinese literature by cutting what he considered to be “excessive”

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allusions and citations that indicate a complicated circuitry of cultural and linguistic translation behind this literature. For instance, in Snow’s translation of a short story by Mao Dun, he cut several sections from Mao Dun’s text that allude to popular culture so as to emphasize the story’s progressive and uplifting message. With regard to a short story by Yu Dafu, he deleted a quotation of A. E. Housman’s poem from the translation. This quotation is actually quite significant to the representation of the class and gender disparity of two main characters in this story. These textual decisions in the process of translation betray Snow’s intention of making Chinese literature more original and Chinese by, for example, eliminating any western trace. Compared to Snow’s anthology, the translations published in the periodicals do not exhibit any complicated linguistic play that demonstrate the translators’ awareness of the multicultural origin of Chinese literature either. However, the editors themselves seemed unconcerned about the status of Chineseness with regard to the literary works even though they might have subscribed to Chineseness or nationalism as a political agenda. Thus we can say that the anthology and the periodical have different ways of presenting and structuring foreign knowledge even though there must be variations in both forms. The periodical and the literary anthology also have different functions in transcultural communication: while the periodical can downplay the literariness of Chinese literature but does not pretend to present a complete picture, an anthology can sometimes render isolated and context-free representations of foreign culture precisely due to its pretension to be complete. The second aspect of the culture of internationalism this chapter examines is the use of the linguistic medium—English. In a larger project that studies English-language periodicals in semi-colonial Shanghai, I raise a rhetorical question of whether English can be viewed as a Chinese language. 6 The purpose of raising this question is not to define the true “Chinese language,” but precisely to question it as an ideological construction. I try to show in this project that English-language magazines in semi-colonial Shanghai participated in the formation of the local from the cosmopolitan perspectives of the traveling subject. Even though some periodicals do not contain translations of Chinese literature, they are still translational in terms of using a foreign language, negotiating between the predominantly Chinese-language public sphere and English, and between local interests and global concerns. As Shu-mei Shih, among others, has argued, the formation of a national literature and language during the Republican period did not take place in a context of contentious opposition toward foreign knowledge; at the same time, English was also used not just for reinforcing colonialist subjugation, but sometimes for modern and even anti-colonial purposes.7 However, English was not a value-free medium. In anglophone leftist magazines, there was not much critical reflection on English’s

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elite status or the foreignness of the medium. This created an interesting tension when translation into English and the international actually perpetuates the unevenness between the country and the city, the local and the global, thus countering the political agenda of internationalism. With regard to one publication, Voice of China, for instance, English as a cosmopolitan language puts an interesting spin on the publication’s political agenda to promote democratic participation on the cultural front. Looking at anglophone translations of contemporary literature during the Republican period offers a particularly interesting case since signs of the foreign are already encoded in the original texts. The language used in modern Chinese literature is not a fixed and eternal existence; it emerged from some radical rethinking of the literary Chinese language. A translation of modern Chinese literature into English inevitably has to come to terms with the specific temporality and the non-local characteristics of the modern Chinese language because modern Chinese literature in itself is already a product of cross-cultural translation in terms of content and style. A quick glance at any book of history of modern Chinese literature would be able to tell us that Chinese writers, many of whom were also translators, were influenced not just by English and American literature, but also by Russian, Japanese, French, Scandinavian, and Eastern European literatures. Consequently, the translation of modern literature into English necessarily has to encounter the ghosts of previous acts of translation. It is not a meeting of two cultures and languages both existing in a state of stasis, but an intervention into the constant circulation and mixing of multiple languages and cultures each with its own genealogy in specific local contexts. Strictly speaking, in this global matrix of languages and cultures, neither Chinese nor English can be considered as original or target language. Of course, multicultural influence is not unique to Chinese literature. Imagine what happens when one tries to translate Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” into Chinese, a poem that betrays influence of both the Japanese haiku and Tang dynasty poetry. This shows that translation is very seldom two-way, and the meaning of a particular literary work is more often than not produced in the circularity of languages and the circulation of the work in different audiences.

II Lu Xun in China Forum Although I have argued previously that it is important to examine the context of translation, we cannot get round close textual analysis of specific works, particularly when it pertains to literary translation. In the global matrix

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of anglophone Chinese literature circulated through leftist magazines that this chapter tries to describe, one influential figure, Lu Xun, stands out as arguably the most frequently translated among all modern Chinese writers in the Republican era. But he is also someone whose works offer some useful complexity to the discourse of internationalism. Lu Xun’s works have been favored by intellectuals on the left both in the past and the contemporary period, from Carlos Bulosan to Fredric Jameson. Jameson’s presentation of Lu Xun’s works as an exemplary case of the “national allegory” of third-world literature can be considered a footnote to the continuous over-determination to which Lu Xun has been exposed at all times and in many cultural locations.8 In actuality, however, Lu Xun would perhaps be the first to resist the normative structure of national allegory because he was interested in foreign culture and translation mostly for experimental and innovative purposes, not just to give them recognition or assign them a place in the domestic cultural arena. Lu Xun was both emphatic about the importance of translation for facilitating local cultural formation, particularly the development of leftist culture, and unwilling to pin down the translator to a fixed institutional position either within the literary establishment or in the revolutionary cause.9 From Lu Xun’s point of view, the translator was not a literary authority or a revolutionary hero because both identities would prevent the translator from negotiating with the determinism of the translational mechanism on his own terms. Lu Xun’s views on translation can perhaps be compared to modernist poetics: he expected the translator to be always experimenting with new syntax that was closer to that of the foreign language than of the native language, and the comfort of the reader was not something of his concern. Lu Xun’s individualistic qualities made his involvement with leftist anglophone magazines a complicated and multi-layered case. In the rest of the chapter, I will trace the circulation of his works in the circle of anglophone publications. This will, on the one hand, provide some coherence to the complicated circuit of leftist literature and, on the other, allow me to discuss in a more in-depth manner the culture of internationalism from the perspective of translation. Among the anglophone magazines which published Lu Xun in translation, China Forum (1932–34), edited by Harold Isaacs in Shanghai, China Today (1934–42), edited by an organization called the American Friends of the Chinese People in New York, and Voice of China (1936–?), published in Shanghai, were three major internationalist publications closely connected to the Communist parties in China and the United States. Through practices such as cross-referencing and reprinting, a path of literary circulation is clearly discernable among the three magazines. All three magazines are political publications with an interest in Chinese literature of the contemporary period. Unlike other non-leftist English-language magazines of the same period, such as T’ien Hsia, they did not show much interest in classical Chinese literature.

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China Forum’s editorial office was located in Shanghai’s French Concession. Devoted to “the publication of news ignored, distorted and suppressed” by Chinese and foreign presses, it protested against the Nationalist government’s “white terror” by exposing its persecution of Communist activists and leftist writers in Shanghai. It also published special issues on the achievements of the Soviet Union. As a result of publishing these subversive stories, the magazine was suspended several times by the concession authority and the Nationalist government during its short history of a little over two years. It began as a weekly publication, but due to frequent suspensions and change of printers, it was sometimes published at irregular intervals. Literature by contemporary Chinese writers was an important component of this magazine, especially in its first year, during which time a total of fourteen short stories and two poems were published. Some titles were closely connected with the political focus of the magazine at a particular moment. For instance, the magazine covered the arrest and execution of over twenty Communist Party members in Shanghai in its first issue in 1932 and, in conjunction with this incident, published the stories and poem by four writers Hu Yeping, Ro Shi, Yin Fu, and Feng Keng, who were among those executed. It is obvious that the selection of titles was not based on aesthetic merit, but the political significance of the writers in relation to the tragic incident which quickly brought international attention. Shortly after the arrest of the revolutionary writers, Lu Xun responded by writing a protest article, which was later translated by Agnes Smedley and published in New Masses.10 In its first issue, China Forum published a letter of protest signed by a list of American writers against “the murder of Chinese youths.” China Forum chose to define revolutionary literature by mainly selecting its authors from the list of members of the Leftist Writers’ League, and perhaps also by listening to the advice of close friends such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun. Only three of the writers whose works were published in China Forum, Yu Dafu, Guo Moruo, and Ye Shengtao, did not belong to the League. However, the stories published in the magazine are not unified around a certain theme or style. This lack of uniformity caused some problems for someone closely associated with this magazine—Agnes Smedley. In the preface to a collection of stories from China Forum she edited, Smedley admits that some of the stories do not fit well into the category of “revolutionary literature.” It was the practice of bilingualism, an unusual feature of this magazine, that made it simultaneously linguistically innovative and politically more effective. When China Forum resumed publication in February 1933 after five months’ suspension, a Chinese edition was added to each issue, turning the magazine into a bilingual publication. According to the editor, this change of format resulted in the growth of Chinese readership and expansion

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to several provinces outside Shanghai, such as Hebei and Canton.11 Although the agenda of the magazine remained the same—the exposure of atrocities inflicted by the Nationalist government—the bilingual format represented a further step towards localization and enabled more Chinese writers to become involved and represented in this publication. After it turned into a bilingual publication, the magazine’s appearance was less literary, since there were no more English translations of Chinese literature. One might argue that the magazine was still interested in publishing Chinese literature, but there was a shift of genre from short story and poem to literary and political essay after the magazine adopted the bilingual format. This change implied a different perception toward translation and literature: whereas in the English-only issues Chinese literature was presented as a cultural artifact passively waiting to be translated, in the bilingual issues literature became translational by taking on a more proactive role in political activism, which also demanded translation from the Chinese world to the English-language world. With regard to the publication of Lu Xun’s writings, the difference between the English version of China Forum and its bilingual version is pronounced. In the first year, the magazine published Sze Ming-ting’s mostly faithful and highly readable translations of two short stories by Lu Xun, “Medicine” and “Con Yi Chi,” both written over ten years before. Since there was no proper introduction of the New Culture Movement or the Republican Revolution, it would be difficult for English-language readers to situate Lu Xun’s literary practice within an appropriate historical context. The bilingualized magazine no longer published short stories by Lu Xun, but in several issues, it published a few of his essays that addressed some political topics discussed in those issues. These essays, along with their English translations, demonstrate the difference between Lu Xun’s and Harold Isaacs’s understanding of internationalism as political and cultural practices. For instance, Lu Xun’s article “Sino-Soviet Relations” was published in both Chinese and English versions when the Nationalist government resumed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1933. Compared to the publication of his translated short stories the time lag between the writing of the essay and its publication in English was significantly shortened—only three months. A careful reader, however, would notice that the Chinese and the English versions invite different readings of the essay. The English title of Lu Xun’s essay is “Sino-Soviet Relations,” whereas the Chinese title, literally translated, is “A Tribute to the Connection through Words (Wenzi Zi Jiao) between China and Russia.” The difference between these two titles is significant, for the distinction between cultural exchange and official diplomatic relationship is one of the key arguments in this essay.

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Lu Xun’s essay attempts to define a form of unofficial internationalism through tracing a history of translation of Russian literature and literary theories. For Lu Xun, the “connection through words between China and the Soviet Union” is more important than the diplomatic relation between the two nations. The former has a much longer history than the latter. In addition, literary translation, as long as it involves the Soviet Union, has always been and will remain a subversive act regardless of whether the Nationalist government resumed diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union or not. Alluding to the special issues on Russian literature and the literatures of “oppressed nations” of the literary journal The Short Story Monthly published in the 1920s, Lu Xun emphasizes literary exchange, critical reading, and imaginative identification with the oppressed as the basis for anti-imperialistic transnationalism. He writes in this article: We knew Russian literature could be our teacher and friend, because we could recognize the kind souls of the oppressed, their sufferings and hardship in this literature. We burned with yearning along with Russian literature of the 1840s. We identified with the sadness in the literature of the 1860s. Did we not know that the Russian empire was invading China at that time? But we learned one thing from literature, that is, the world has two kinds of people: the oppressor and the oppressed.12

This passage makes clear that Lu Xun did not consider the political relationship between the two nation states as a determinant factor for internationalism. Nation or nationalism was not viewed as a viable solution to imperialism. Lu Xun believed that in spite of its resumed relationship with the Soviet Union, the Nationalist government would remain an oppressive force and continue to persecute the left. Literary exchange offered the only possibility for an anti-imperialist internationalism that would be subversive. While Lu Xun understood internationalism as literary exchange, Isaacs (and the translators he worked with) understood it as political alliance forged on the basis of the common goal of world revolution among people in oppressed nations. This difference is also shown in the different choice of words in the Chinese and English versions. In several places in the essay where Lu Xun refers to “Chinese readers,” the English translation uses the phrase “Chinese people.” The experimental practice of bilingualism in China Forum allows us to see that internationalism had a palimpsest quality that was not unified around a certain fixed center. Isaacs himself also dissented from the official internationalism of the Communist International, as he records in the preface to his 1985 book Re-Encounters in China: Notes of a Journey in a Time Capsule.13 Compared to the publication of Chinese literature in English in the

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first year of the magazine’s lifespan, the bilingual format contributed more to the formation of the magazine into a dynamic forum of dialogue that could accommodate different views on culture and politics. For readers with no background knowledge of Chinese literary history, the Chinese stories could be taken as unembedded cultural signs and render flat readings of Chinese society. The bilingual editions, by contrast, present a more complicated and immediate picture of the Chinese intellectual circle by allowing writers such as Lu Xun to directly present their views contextualized in a certain moment of Chinese society.

III China Today: Beyond preprinting While the Shanghai-based China Forum reveals how internationalism in circulation is embedded in the leftist Chinese intellectual and public culture of the 1930s, a study of the republication of some Chinese literature in translation in another internationalist magazine, China Today, which was based in New York, further proves that internationalism and the transnational circulation of Chinese cultural materials were intimately connected with each other. The initial editors of China Today were Chi Ch’ao-ting, T. A. Bisson, and Philip J. Jaffe, all of whom were closely affiliated with the American and Chinese Communist Parties. Of these three editors, Chi Ch’ao-ting was the bicultural liaison between China and the United States.14 The editorial board underwent many changes after its initial formation. According to Philip J. Jaffe, close connections were maintained between the New York editorial office and Shanghai during 1933 and 1934, the first two years of the magazine’s publication. “Most of the writing,” Jaffe notes, “was done by me and one or two others. All of it was in the main a rewrite of material received by the Chinese Bureau of the American Communist Party from Shanghai in the form of carbon copies on rice paper.” But “beginning with October 1934, China Today underwent a radical change both physically and politically. . . . Its articles were now no longer rewrites but mainly original pieces written by the editors as well as by invited writers not connected with either the magazine or the organization” (Jaffe, “Introduction”). The reprinting of Yin Fu’s poem “Words of Blood” and two short stories, “Twenty-one Men” by Zhang Tianyi and “Comedy” by Mao Dun, originally published in China Forum, constitutes the most tangible connection between the New York magazine and the one published in Shanghai. Institutional facilitation of this transnational connection by the Leftist Writers’ League in China can be seen in a footnote that accompanies Lu Xun’s essay “Monsters in

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the Chinese Literary World,” published in the February 1935 issue of China Today. We are told that this essay was “written in Shanghai especially for ‘China Today,’” and that the editor was “proud to announce that the League of Left Writers of China have agreed to write one article a month for China Today. This is the first one, written by the outstanding critic in China, Lu [Xun]” (China Today, February 1935, 88). However, this transnational matrix was not just a two-way connection between China and the United States; it was made more complex by traveling writers who reported their visits of other places or performed translations of literary works outside China or the United States. For instance, China Forum had previously published a travel writing piece by Langston Hughes entitled “From Moscow to China” in both English and Chinese. In China Today, the same writer was featured as a translator; we see a poem titled “Until Yesterday: A Chinese Mood” by Regino Pedroso “translated from the Spanish by Langston Hughes” in this magazine. Compared to China Forum, China Today embodies a greater degree of heterogeneity by publishing writings that were written by non-Chinese writers and had not been previously circulated in China, such as two poems on Shanghai by Mike Pell and a rarely seen short story by the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune. Importantly, this magazine also attempts to give representation to Japanese artists and writers. This is significant since Japanese imperialism became an increasingly important concern in the magazine’s publication history. An article written by E. P. Green on Eitaro Ishigaki, a Japanese artist in New York, was published in the May 1936 issue. Ishigaki’s painting discussed in this article, “Uprising,” portrays a confrontation between black plantation workers and white owners against a backdrop of a Caribbean landscape. In the February 1936 issue, an article by Fumio Tanabe on “Proletarian Literature in Japan” was also published; it introduced major representatives of Japanese working-class literature and their venues of publication to the American readership. The magazine also tried to integrate Chinese communities in the United States into anti-imperialistic struggles. For instance, in the June 1937 issue, an article by E. G. Collins entitled “The Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance,” and one in the December 1938 issue entitled “Chinatown Still Goes Forth to War” by Pardee Lowe are representative of this magazine’s concern for community issues. Him Mark Lai has argued that the Chinese Marxist left had tried to work in immigrant communities in New York and San Francisco even before the world anti-fascist struggles had begun, but their work was not successful in all cases.15 However, it should also be noted that this magazine showed interest in the community more as a social and political agent than as a cultural creator. The circulation of Lu Xun’s works in English-language media presents a rather fascinating case of a global Chinese writer. There were at least two

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different Lu Xuns in the English-language circuit—one the short-story writer, the other the writer of argumentative essays (zawen). Whereas Lu Xun’s short stories were accepted by both the left and the non-left and perceived as less political to the extent that a magazine sponsored by the Nationalist government People’s Tribune could also publish them, his essays were published only in leftist magazines and thus had a different connection with politics.16 China Today published two short stories by Lu Xun, “A Hermit at Large” and “Remorse,” both translated by Wang Chi-chen, but these two translations were also reprinted by other publications such as Far Eastern Magazine, The China Journal of Arts and Sciences, and T’ien Hsia. The latter three magazines were not affiliated with the Communist Party and did not exhibit leftist tendencies. Lu Xun’s short stories had an allegorical resonance with regard to Chinese culture and people particularly for foreign readers. For instance, the American journalist Edgar Snow wrote in his 1935 study of Lu Xun that: [T]he “Real Story of Ah Q” has a special value for foreigners. It is perhaps the first attempt made by a Chinese to examine the mentality of his so-called “inscrutable” fellow Chinese. It is Chinese psychology in action, and in Ah Q the reader sees, as through some giant lens thrown across the nation, the mind of rural China. (Snow 42)

If Snow’s remark can be taken as a footnote to why Lu Xun the short story writer was upheld by both the left and the non-left as the national cultural spokesperson, then it seems that his essays (zawen) interrupt this reception by bringing in specificity in terms of temporality, locality, and political position. The different circulation paths of his short stories and essays in English further remind us that literary translation as a translingual and transnational practice did not always follow the pattern of domestic cultural history; its politics were complex, multifaceted, and exceeded those conventional categories such as the left, the middle, or the right that are often used in domestic cultural histories.

IV Voice of China and the circularity of translation A third exemplification and location of this complex cultural politics is the anglophone internationalist publication, Voice of China, a bi-weekly magazine published by The Eastern Publishing House in Shanghai. The funding for this magazine was arranged by Madame Sun Yat-sen, and its editors, Grace and Manny Granich, had been sent from the United States by Earl Browder, secretary-general of the American Communist Party.17 Its first issue came out on March 15, 1936, a few years later than China Forum and China Today.

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Different from the political agendas of the other two periodicals, this magazine promotes a combination of nationalism and democracy and sets its goal in the first issue as attempting to “give expression” to the multiple voices of the Chinese people during the time of national crisis. Consistent with this goal, every issue has a section entitled “Voices of the People,” which contains reprinting of accounts of the war by various individuals and groups originally published in Chinese-language press. Voice of China capitalizes on the iconic status of Lu Xun as the leader of the Chinese cultural left by printing a charcoal portrait of Lu Xun on the cover of its first issue. Its November 15, 1936 issue is a commemorative issue containing several articles written by Chinese and Japanese authors on the occasion of Lu Xun’s death and funeral. Structured around the image and death of Lu Xun, this magazine also reprinted and published some of his writings, and the choice of titles was intentional and revealing of the magazine’s overall political and cultural position. The first piece by Lu Xun published here is “A Little Incident,” a short story that describes the writer’s encounter with a working-class person—a rickshaw-puller. The publication of this short story by Lu Xun, along with two short stories, “Dog” by Ba Jin and “Aboard the S. S. Dairen Maru” by Tien Chun (Xiao Jun), in the first two issues of this magazine (March 15, 1936 and April 1, 1936) effectively convey the editors’ sympathetic position towards the subaltern’s perspective. Ba Jin’s “Dog” is a story told from the perspective of a dog that is confused about his identity and troubled by his inexplicable yearnings for human affection and understanding. Tien Chun’s story describes the experience of a young couple who travels from Japanese-occupied Manchuria toward the Chinese-controlled territories and survives a horrifying interrogation from the Japanese police while aboard the ship. All three pieces share a common characteristic of not identifying their protagonists by name: the dog in Ba Jin’s story “Dog” begins with the claim “I don’t know my own name.” The young man in Tien Chun’s story identifies himself first as “an unemployed beggar” and then as an office clerk, a fake identity he has assumed to get through the interrogation. Compared to Lu Xun’s other stories written at the same time, “A Little Incident” exposes the distrust and hypocrisy of the writer as intellectual subject and does not give a name to the rickshawpuller either. Nameless individuals populate various other sections of the magazine. Letters from readers published in the “Mailbox” section of the magazine are signed by individuals identified as “an interested American,” “a Tientsin Senior Middle School Student,” or “A Chinese girl.” Consistent with new trends in the domestic Chinese cultural arena during the wartime, this magazine published plays that had collective authorship, lyrics written by unknown authors, and poems taken from the walls of remote villages. While

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this quality of namelessness conveys a collective image of Chinese people, it gives more authority to the editor who carries the power to organize and edit the people’s view, thereby speaking on their behalf. Compared to the two other publications, this one puts more emphasis on unity in a national context. However, by addressing translation issues or evoking the context of transnational circulation in two other essays published in this magazine, Lu Xun complicated and to a certain extent subverted the magazine’s discourse of national unity. The other two essays by Lu Xun published in this magazine were “Written in Deep Night” and “I Want to Fool People.” Reading these two articles in the context of this magazine, itself a translational platform, presents a different experience from reading them in other contexts, for it is hard not to consider the language and form of the magazine that frame Lu Xun’s essays. His essays highlight the translational issues in the internationalist discourse that ironically reinforces nationalism. I will only discuss one article here as example. Lu Xun’s “I Want to Fool People” was originally written in Japanese and published in the April issue of Kaizo; it was subsequently published in English in the April 15, 1936 issue of Voice of China, and also translated by the author himself into Chinese and published in a magazine based in Shanghai in June of the same year. When the Japanese version of the article was published, several words referring to the Japanese government were deleted by the censors in Japan, but these omissions were corrected and noted by the author in the article’s English and Chinese versions. Tracking the circulation path of this essay presents a complex picture of the history of leftist internationalism from the perspective of translation. In the transnational circulation of this article, three languages, Chinese, English, and Japanese were all involved; English was not the singular target language, but only one of the three languages involved in this circuit. It is hard to determine whether the Chinese version existed before or after the English version since it was published later than the English version; as a result we do not know on which version the English translator based his/her text. Approaching Lu Xun’s article with an understanding of its history of translation and circulation, I read it as an attempt to address the issue of the technology of truth-telling. The article questions the possibility of truth-telling and communication beyond national boundaries in the context of nationstate-controlled media. It begins by exposing the deceptive propaganda of the Japanese and Chinese presses, both of which try to cheat the public like “fools.” Although the writer refuses to participate in this game of deception, he cannot escape it, since there is no other alternative and trustworthy venue to voice his opinions. This essay further explores the question of truth by testing it out in the context of other cultural forms. The writer wants to see a film in the International Settlement, but in the movies he finds only more stories

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about imperialist deception, depicting either “an Englishman conquering a brutal Indian chief for his country” or “an American who became a millionaire in Africa” (Lu Xun, “I Want to Fool People” 15). On the way home from the theater, he makes a contribution to the flood relief fund, an act of charity premised on common human sympathy that, on second thought, strikes him as tasteless and insignificant—the metaphor used is “chewing soap or something similar” (15). In the end, he reluctantly picks up the pen to expose the only truth available, which is that true sympathy for the other cannot be expressed at the present moment. This article juxtaposes truth as an object of philosophical and ethical pursuit against existing cultural forms such as film and organized practices such as the flood relief fund. While it argues that these cultural mechanisms have been inadequate in terms of the representation of truth, it also suggests that the performance of truth, in words and action, cannot take place outside them. This article demonstrates Lu Xun’s acute selfreflexiveness on how internationalism becomes culturalized in the China of his own time, and the ambivalent implications for the intellectual who becomes both agent and subject in this culturalization. At the end of his article, Lu Xun refuses to offer a facile solution to the difficult question of how to communicate across national divisions in the contemporary moment of impending war. The English version somehow fails to convey the writer’s deeply cynical attitude toward the future: Perhaps it [truth] cannot be said until “Sino-Japanese friendship” has been firmly established. Sooner or later this “friendship” may develop in China to such an extent that any anti-Japanese person will be called a traitor (indeed, some say that the Communists are using anti-Japanese slogans to bring about the destruction of China) and the guillotines of the rising sun shine in every corner of the land. Up to that time, it will still be too early to say what is really in one’s mind. (15)

For the reader of the English version of this essay, it remains ambiguous whether Lu Xun truly believes in the possibility of a future of Sino-Japanese friendship. However, complemented by the Chinese version which was created solely by the writer himself, the reader would understand that “Sino-Japanese friendship” is yet another ideological construction, an excuse for expurgating domestic opponents—the Chinese Communists. The future, described by the image of the “guillotines of the rising sun,” is a totally bleak picture that holds no promise for truth in the positive sense. However, the writer also seems to suggest that exposing the false constructions of ideology and propaganda is perhaps the only truth worth telling, “Perhaps all this is merely my own anxiety. It would be a good thing if, by pen, tongue, or tears. . . . one could see and understand what is truly in the hearts of others” (15). The essay still

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ends by endorsing the value of truth and truth-telling, but it does not present the transnational as a utopian category; rather, the transnational and the translational are strategic cultural sites to contest existing ideologies. The article physically bears evidence of the control of transnational communication through censorship. A word that was erased by the Japanese censors is “the rising sun” in reference to the Japanese flag that flies over the guillotines all over the Chinese land. In the English version this phrase is italicized and accompanied by the explanation that it was once removed from the Japanese version. This mark of erasure is also a moment of différance, implying a delay in the completion of the text’s full meaning and the supplementary relationship of the three languages where it was circulated. The text embodies a certain form of heterogeneity that on the one hand demands the co-dependence of the three languages, and on the other hand marks each one of them as incomplete. The three-way translation unsettles the status of Chinese as the first or original language and English as the only target language. It is hard to characterize this text as either solely “Chinese” or simply “foreign.” Attaining this state of heterogeneity does not require that the languages involved have to be of equivalent power status. If by offering a bleak picture of the future of Sino-Japanese relationship— Lu Xun’s article “I Want to Fool People” suggests a subtle connection between internationalist alliance and loss or mourning—Lu Xun’s own death and the three-way translingual communication among Chinese, English, and Japanese it enabled further prove this connection. The November 1936 issue of Voice of China devoted three pages to the memorial of Lu Xun, who had died one month earlier. The articles written by Japanese authors Uchiyama and Shikaji and by the Chinese writer Mao Dun were published in this section. Uchiyama was a bookstore owner and a close friend of Lu Xun in the 1930s. Shikaji was a scholar of Chinese and the Japanese translator of many Chinese literary works published in the magazine Kaizo. The Chinese versions of these articles by the Japanese writers were simultaneously published in the November issue of a translation magazine titled Yi Wen, founded by Lu Xun and Mao Dun. Formalistically, the republication of these articles in English effectively situates the figure of Lu Xun at the center of translingual communication and displaces Chinese as the only language of Lu Xun’s oeuvre.

V Conclusion This article tries to suggest that whether the anglophone leftist literature examined in this essay should be read as a representation of “China abroad”

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is a question that does not have a singular answer. Whereas the editors and writers involved perhaps intended to supply the work with some Chinese perspectives and voices on class oppression and world revolution, this essay attempts to present a more nuanced look at the complicated cross-cultural practice of translation. Guided by their political goals, the magazine editors did not attempt to represent the entirety of Chinese literature. However, this lack of completeness is not necessarily a flaw. On the contrary, the periodical’s lack of pretension to present a complete picture, consistent with the serial poetics of this cultural form, lends itself to perform a certain form of cross-cultural communication in the transnational context. In addition, the time-sensitive quality of the periodical allows it to convey the notion of contemporaneousness that cuts across spatial boundaries with concreteness and specificity. Where to place these periodicals in national literary history is an interesting question to ponder over. From the moment of their conception, these periodicals already embody a certain form of mixedness and transgression in terms of political stance, author, audience, and distribution venue that disqualify them as independent entries in national literary history. However, what this essay argued is that, as independent texts that provided inter-textual framing for select pieces of Chinese literatures, these periodicals proved to be a tangible platform that bridged home and abroad.

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III China, Hong Kong, and Beyond

5 Nationalism, Internationalism, the Cold War: Crossing Literary-Cultural Boundaries in 1950s Hong Kong Elaine Yee Lin Ho*

I In my introductory chapter to this collection, I discussed the emergence of New Confucianism in 1950s Hong Kong as a phenomenon of Chinese cultural nationalism in exile. Having lost their traditional homeland to what they considered as the alien creed of Communism, the four Confucian scholar-intellectuals reaffirmed their time-honored responsibility to Chinese society and culture through authoring the Manifesto. As a sign of the authors’ transition in between nation and diaspora, the Manifesto represents Confucianism as a Chinese and a world philosophy. It is New Confucianism’s position as an exiled philosophy in 1950s Hong Kong that gives it a specific poignancy. No longer dominant and dominated by xenophobic obtuseness, nor yet newly confident as the presumed philosophy of late-twentieth-century diasporic Chinese capitalism, Confucianism in 1950s Hong Kong achieves a special significance as a mid-century, midway intervention between its earlier and later encounters with nation and diaspora. However, in the polyphony of 1950s Hong Kong, New Confucianist voices articulate only one of a number of literary-cultural discursive spaces. In this chapter, I will first delineate some of the negotiations between nation and diaspora within several of these spaces which will also show how and why they are discrete from each other. Then I will move on to discuss literary-cultural work which attempts to cross a number of these spaces, focusing specifically on the writing in different genres—translations, *

Research for this chapter was funded by the General Research Fund of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.

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poetry, travelogues—by a writer from the period, Wong Man. Like New Confucianism, Wong is unremembered in contemporary histories of 1950s literary culture. And like New Confucianism, he is shaped by similar local, national, and global forces that press on mid-twentieth-century Hong Kong literature and culture. But in him, the transactions of these forces develop a very different culturally hybridized issue. A medical doctor, translator, and poet and travel writer in both English and Chinese; public-school- and Cambridge-educated son of a comprador and member of the Hong Kong colonial establishment; left-wing Chinese nationalist, cultural internationalist: Wong embodies in himself and his work those historical contradictions which defy resolution but whose very concomitance can generate dynamic sociocultural agency. More than a literary figure, Wong enacts the negotiation of an identity in the “field” of literary-cultural production in 1950s Hong Kong. Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptualization of the “field of cultural production” is highly complex and context-specific to nineteenth-century Paris. For its translation into this chapter, a useful place to begin is his contention that: The Field of Cultural Production is the site of struggles in which what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer. (The Field of Cultural Production 42)

What dominates most accounts of the literary-cultural field of 1950s Hong Kong is the contest between right and left wing sinophone writers grouped under the banner of US- or Communist China-sponsored publication venues. More so than the definition of the writer, what is at stake for these separate and opposed groups is the socio-political functions of writing itself. Such functions are delimited largely in Cold War ideological terms with each side claiming the moral higherground, privileged insight into social conditions, and the cultural initiatives that can build a better world for all. For Bourdieu, “the boundary of the field is a stake of struggles,” in particular the boundary “which separates the field of cultural production and the field of power” (43). The literary-cultural field of 1950s Hong Kong could not be solely an aesthetic field because whatever actual or cultural capital which accrued to a particular writer or group would have been enabled by access to publication venues and agents acting as proxies of ideologically opposed nation states. The sources of funding of these oppositional groups could not but mean that this boundary is completely blurred. In terms of the number of writers and readers, Chinese-language writing occupies a majoritarian position. But an anglophone literary sub-culture, under the aegis of colonialism, enjoys a privileged position in the field’s hierarchization disproportionate to the actual size of its membership, output, and activities. Its sponsor is the British colonial establishment

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working through cultural agencies like the British Council and the Sino-British Club, more of which we will see later on. As a medical professional, Wong Man’s social capital carried no necessary prestige in the literary-cultural field; nor did his experience of anglophone literary culture from his early life and education in England open up routes to consecration in the Chinese-dominated field. Because of his family connections, education, and profession, Wong Man’s membership of the colonial literary sub-culture appeared guaranteed. Instead, in his writing, this anglophone disposition and social and professional privilege are pressed into the service of an anti-colonial social critique. In negotiating his way through the 1950s literary-cultural field, he adopted, consciously or unconsciously, artistic and activist practices that challenge and break up the conditioning of habitus. Earlier on, after a period of residence in one of the major London hospitals, Wong’s nationalist reformist beliefs caused him to leave England in 1921 in order to practice medicine in the Chinese mainland during the Republican period, first in Canton and later, after a short return visit to London in 1927, in Shanghai. In China, he allied himself with leftist reformers and social activists. He ran a nursing home in Shanghai with Madame Sun Yatsen (Soong Qingling 宋慶齡) for soldiers wounded fighting the Japanese in 1932. Later, when war spread to the south, he started the Canton International Red Cross Service Corps, and, when the city fell to the Japanese, he took part in evacuating medical personnel and supplies. He was made director of provincial health administration in Guangdong Province during the resistance, returning to Canton to continue in his post after the war, and to start the International Society for Medical Service in South China. Retiring from Republican government service in 1946, he returned to Hong Kong to practice medicine, where he helped set up the first clinic in the colony for members of the left-wing Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions.1 Wong Man’s professional career inside China exhibits a continuous engagement with both nationalist and internationalist institutions and practices. A similar continuity is evident in his literary activities in Hong Kong where his left-wing beliefs fueled an anti-colonial critique which, together with his knowledge of English and anglophone literature, fostered connections with left-wing nationalist and cultural internationalist writers within and outside the colony. A number of reasons—biographical, artistic, and linguistic—may have contributed to the forgetting of Wong in the histories of modern Hong Kong literature: his death in 1963; his writing in the different genres, though worthy, is not artistically felicitous; nor is it exclusively English nor Chinese, and so not easily categorizable as national or monolingual literature. The important question these reasons provoke is what merits literary-historical attention, and why. In addressing this question, this chapter does not wish

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to consecrate Wong’s memory or reinscribe him into a project of “structural nostalgia” (Herzfeld),2 but to argue that the fact he is unremembered speaks volumes about some of the ways of accounting the value of literary-cultural memory in pre- and post-1997 Hong Kong.

II In their seminal work on the literary history of twentieth-century Hong Kong, one of the authors, William Tay, comments on the peculiar difference between 1950s and 1990s Hong Kong: “[In the 1950s], Hong Kong was economically very deprived. A lot of people were out of work, many were struggling to survive from day to day. And yet literary activities flourished. This is exactly the opposite of the situation in the late 1990s” (Tay et al., A Chronology of Modern Hong Kong Literature 13–14).3 Tay’s comment was made in the context of a discussion on US-sponsored literary activities, or what is commonly known as “greenback culture,” which thrived in Hong Kong for around a decade from 1950, the year war broke out between China and the United States in Korea, which signaled the beginning of the Cold War in Asia. Hong Kong was one of the bridgeheads in the American drive to open a cultural front which would complement the military advance. Much of the American money was channeled into setting up magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses which published translations of American “great works” and prowestern articles on current affairs in order to generate an interest in American culture and ways of life and, indirectly, to disseminate the values of freedom and democracy that were identified with western culture.4 Hong Kong’s geopolitical position as the only window on Communistcontrolled China was clearly the main reason for it being on the frontline of the American cultural offensive in Asia. Other contributing factors were the Anglo-American alliance, Hong Kong’s British colonial status which put it nominally within the “west,” and the policy of the colonial government to allow different kinds of publications as long as they did not openly propagandize against British rule. This accommodation was extended to both left- and right-wing Chinese publications before and after World War II, and compared to the Chinese mainland where there was censorship of political opposition by the Kuomintang republican government before 1949, and the Communist state after 1949, colonial Hong Kong ironically offered writers of different political sympathies much greater freedom of expression.5 The actual work of writing and editing for the US-sponsored publishing venues was largely performed by Chinese writers. It would be inaccurate to describe most of these writers summarily as “local,” for, though they resided in Hong Kong, many of them were recent immigrants from the Chinese mainland,

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émigrés and exiles, voluntary and enforced. At the same time, writing for USsponsored publications did not mean they were necessarily pro-American or rightist in the global ideological parlance of the time, or in the Chinese sense of being supporters of the Nationalist party, the Kuomintang (KMT), which had retreated to Taiwan after 1949. For many of them, livelihood reasons weighed in heavily in their decision to write for US-sponsored publications.6 Still, that is not to say that the writers had no political or ideological sympathies. If most of them did not become subalterns and agents of the American cultural advance, that was largely due to the nationalistic counterdynamic which continued to bind them to China. The upheavals of China’s modern history which they all had to endure, and the traditional self-arrogated literati responsibility for the fate of society and culture—these were the experiential and affective bonds which identified them much more with leftwing or PRC-sponsored writers than with the American West. Left or right, the immigrant writers were also “non-local” in the sense that their intellectual, emotional, and creative preoccupation was not Hong Kong but the Chinese mainland, the “homeland,” and the space of inherited cultural tradition. This is most visible when their fiction and poems are compared to the populist writing of those who wrote for the masses of working people in Hong Kong. A significant marker of difference was in the use of the Chinese language—largely Mandarin or modern standard Chinese for the newly immigrant writers, and code-mixed with Hong Kong Cantonese patois in the case of indigenous or localized writers. Stylistic and content differences between “high” or literary writing and “low” or populist writing co-ordinate with the distinction between Mandarin Chinese and code-mixed Chinese. In these intra-linguistic complications, the left-right dyad of literary culture was visibly reconfigured as an opposition between immigrant and local. Most studies of twentieth-century or modern Hong Kong literature deal only with sinophone writing, and anglophone literary-cultural spaces and productions are either not mentioned at all or receive very short shrift. In the 1950s, Tay et al. note in passing the Sino-British Club as the main forum of anglophone writing, and also the meeting point between English and Chinese language writers. Tay comments that Chinese writers from the north, visiting or émigré, did not have any contact with the British in Hong Kong, and the two belonged to entirely separate autonomous circles (Tay et al., Local and Émigré Writing 15–16). Huang further dismisses the Club in the following observation: “[It] didn’t really have many writers, and the Club had little connection with actual cultural development. . . . It carried overtones of upper class embellishment; at most, it had some aspiration towards opening up eastwest exchange” (Tay et al., Local and Émigré Writing 16, emphasis added).

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In their comments, both scholars reveal an investment in historical causality in which actual contact and demonstrable influence offer the most credible explanation of literary-cultural change over a period of time. This developmental logic is clearly evident when Tay describes some of the émigrés who settled in Hong Kong as the “senior generation who ‘gave a leg up’ (提携) to local literary youth” in the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s (Tay et al., Chronology 10). He adds: “writers of a rightist inclination (右傾) have made a special contribution to the development of Hong Kong culture mainly because they nurtured a group of local cultural youth. . . . In judging the contribution and demerit of writers who came south to Hong Kong, there’s room for much more discussion” (Tay et al., Chronology 12). Tay et al.’s statements offer a summary picture of the dominant emphases on continuity, development, and influence in scholarly narratives of Hong Kong literature and culture. Their valuable attention to how the literary-cultural field connects with social and geopolitical changes further serves to reinforce the persuasiveness of this dominant tendency which entails the exclusion of anglophone literary-cultural activities. In this respect, Zhao Xifeng’s Stories of Hong Kong (小說香港) is unusual in that it has an opening chapter entitled “Between East and West” which discusses E. J. Eitel’s Europe in China (1895), W. Carlton Dawe’s Yellow and White (1895), James Clavell’s Taipan (1966) and Noble House (1981), and Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil (1925). The discussion is not organized chronologically and crosses the boundaries of history (Eitel), literary fiction (Maugham), and popular fiction (Dawe and Clavell). The other five chapters are, however, on Chinese-language fiction and literary culture. This peripheralization of the English texts combined with a section title that labels them as “colonial narratives” implicitly justify the neglect of anglophone literary-cultural production because of its ideological complicities with colonialism. However, this justification, if logically extended so as to apply to the entire field, would entail the dismissal of leftist and rightist, Communist and US-sponsored writing. On the surface, there is little to query about Tay et al.’s or Zhao’s premises: except for the singular instance of Edmund Blunden, who was chair professor at the University of Hong Kong from the mid-1950s to early 1960s, Englishlanguage writers of the 1950s had little influence on the generation after them.7 There is also no denying that, post Orientalism and colonial discourse analysis, anglophone writing is or can be implicated in colonial rule and the racial, class, and gender inequalities it sanctions. But the two modalities—development and colonial complicity—also proscribe as they try to illuminate. Neither the scholarly rigor of Tay et al. nor the impulse towards cross-linguistic discussion in Zhao can see its way through to a more nuanced reception of anglophone writing and literary culture.8

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According to Shu-mei Shih, the formation of national literature and literature during the Republican period did not construct as “other” the languages and cultures of foreign imperialist powers. Nor did writers necessarily identify the use of English with colonialist practice or their own affinities with English as a sign of colonial subjugation. As Shih has demonstrated, there were clear instances when English was used for modern and anti-colonial purposes. With equal persuasiveness, Shuang Shen’s archival work in her chapter for this volume shows that the translation into English of some of Lu Xun’s stories and their publication—of which the writer was fully cognizant—forge an important link between his nationalistic critique and the global agenda of cultural internationalism. If, as Tay et al. submit, 1950s Hong Kong literary culture is demonstrably influenced by writers from the mainland, most of whom came to maturity and/or literary prominence during the Republican period, then what happened to the connection between 1950s English-language writing and earlier anti-colonial and socialist reformist agendas, national and international, demands investigation. Through the study of select examples of Wong Man’s poetry, translations, and travel writing, I wish to address three questions emerging from the above articulations of the 1950s literary-cultural field in Hong Kong. First, what are the possibilities of traversing or criss-crossing colonial, leftist, émigré, and local groups; second, how, in the use of English, colonial complicity and anticolonial critique are imbricated; and third, what is the dialogue between a culturalized nationalism and cultural internationalism which is both shaped by and contests Cold War ideological oppositions. To return to William Tay’s allusion to the difference between the 1950s and 1990s that began this section: Tay and his collaborators have proposed a discourse on the 1950s as a specific temporality of the actual and the possible. Within the terms of this discourse, Wong Man is an impossibility. But at the same time, it is doubtful that the 1990s field with its plethora of contesting subjects, media, and practices can be contained within what Tay, in his allusion, calls “literary activities.” As we shall see, Wong Man’s mobile identities, both actual and imagined, exceed the “literary”; like the cultural practices which criss-cross a variety of media and discourses in the 1990s, they are enabled by socio-economic well-being, but are also acts of individual agency. In these respects, it is arguable that a study of Wong Man can offer a better vantage on literary-cultural phenomena and their hybrid forms in more recent and economically buoyant times.

III Wong Man’s first published work, a translation of Poems from China (1950) with parallel English-Chinese texts, appeared in both Hong Kong and

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London. It was, as the title page boldly declares, “Dedicated to International Understanding.” This sentiment reappeared in print ten years later, in a short letter he wrote to the editors of the English-language Hong Kong magazine Eastern Horizon which was headlined “What is National Culture?”9 The letter, as it states, is “a proposal to induce friends to contribute brief summaries of the indigenous culture of individual Afro-Asian nations for the enlightenment of readers of Eastern Horizon.” It goes into some detail about how to systemize this project of “enlightenment”: “a band of stalwarts from every walk of life” would be gathered from each nation “of whom the most important qualification would be age, e.g., each profession to be represented by three persons, one each from the age-groups of 21–30, 31–40 and 41–50, to agree upon what they consider of value in their nation’s culture.” In this attempt at selective but also democratic representation, “The scope and meaning of culture as outlined will necessarily be very wide, an objective appraisal of a nation’s evolution through the ages in every walk of life by modern young minds and a definition of their national culture” (Wong Man, “What Is National Culture?” 2). If the letter’s proposal and language seem rather whimsical, they also offer clear evidence of the ideals or ideological beliefs which motivate Wong.10 The proposal, though addressed to friends worldwide, remains centered on the “nation” as the object and location of cultural analyses and knowledge. The “nation” is the ground on which “international understanding” can develop through comparison and collective action. In the germinal plan for collecting data on Afro-Asian “indigenous” cultures, one can discern Wong’s life-long practice to translate cultural nationalist ideals into popular practice through positivist scientific methods. Here, Wong exhibits the doubled legacy of modernizing China which we have earlier seen in my introductory chapter as split into opposition between Lu Xun and Lim Boon Keng: the left-wing populist agenda of Lu Xun, and the academic scientistic agenda of Lim. It is well known that Lu Xun decided to give up medicine to become a writer because he believed it was the spirit of the Chinese people, rather than their bodies, which needed more urgent remedy. In another interesting twist, Wong’s practice of medicine and poetry attempts to reconcile the oppositions that Lu Xun’s example famously enacts between science and art as nationalistic discourses. Poems from China, as Wong’s first published work, is unabashedly nationalistic. It offers a summary narrative of Chinese national culture from a transparent left-wing ideological standpoint, and includes selections from “Ancient Poems” to “Tzus” (lyrics) to “Modern Poems.” The chronological arrangement, normative for most anthologies of this kind, has a teleological endpoint.11 A last section on “New Songs” begins with the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China, followed by “Army Song of the Eighth Route Army” and various other marching numbers, then followed by

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“Roadmenders Song” and similar rousing celebrations of labor—all from the repertoire of The Chinese Singing, Dancing, and Theatrical Arts Society. The “Introductory Note” historicizes this move from ancient to contemporary, classical to populist art; while the actual poems selected reflect personal tastes, “[t]aken as a whole . . . it [the anthology] illustrates the course of evolution of Chinese verse through tribal, feudal and imperial to the present revolutionary phases” (Wong Man, Poems from China xv). This organic interconnection between aesthetic and socio-political evolution drives the historical logic of the national, one which “the monopoly of the literati, that enslaved caste of professional Confucianists,” is powerless to arrest, for “the people kept on inventing new songs and melodies, for dance, courtship and theatrical shows” (xvi). Poems from China was published in April 1950, in that brief euphoric moment less than a year after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and before the outbreak of the Korean War.12 If Wong Man’s left-wing sentiments sound naïve and his expression plaintive, it shows how much the benefit of hindsight has intervened to dispel the utopian affect of the Chinese Communist triumph in 1949. The moment when “new revolutionary thought” takes hold is also the point when the “national” extends and finds a foothold as “international,” or when “China” turns towards “abroad.” Wong writes, “Not until new revolutionary thought took hold in the period between the two world wars, did modern Chinese poetry of the type approximating to modern English verse appear. As was natural, it flourished first among the leftist advanced thinkers” (xvi, emphasis added). If we recall the New Confucianists’ narrative of encounters between China and the West as a history of misrecognition which they see as their mission to rectify (see Chapter 1), then Wong’s use of “modern English verse” as a reference point is a small act in this rectification—not, however, in the name of Chinese tradition as the Confucianists, but in the name of the “modern.” At the particular level of form, the “revolutionary” national narrative is coordinated with the international so that the modern encounter between the two develops mutual extension into each other as it takes generic hold over poetry. Wong’s expression “approximating to” does not give the slightest hint of resistance to “modern English verse,” or the identification of English usage with British colonialist subjection posited by, for example, Ngg wa Thiong’o, a writer with equally committed and fervently expressed socialist beliefs.13 This, however, should not be taken to mean that Wong condones colonialism; indeed, as we shall see in a moment, the work of decolonizing the mind informs Wong’s own poems. In the acknowledgements to Poems from China, Wong thanks “Mr John Rodker of London . . . for instruction” (xvii). In Rodker (1894–1955), Wong appears to have found an exemplary modern and modernist subject and model. Born in England of Jewish parents, and thus

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both English and an outsider, Rodker became known as “a poet of modern urban life” after his poem “London Night” was published by Ezra Pound in Poetry (Crozier xi). Even though their relationship is not spelled out in Wong’s acknowledgement, there are distinct qualities in Rodker—his insider-outsider ambivalence vis-à-vis the English nation, his urban poetics and interest in both science and poetry—to explain his appeal to Wong. But, it was Rodker’s publishing and editing activities—rather than poetic accomplishment, which seems to have been meager—that exemplify his mobility in the literarycultural field of European modernism. Published by Pound, he became in turn Pound’s publisher and also that of the early T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis— both of whom, ironically, not unknown for their anti-Semitic views. Living as an expatriate in Paris in the 1920s, Rodker was instrumental in bringing out the French translation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He became British Empire representative in the 1930s for the Moscow Press and Publisher Literary Service, which published contemporary Russian fiction and nonfiction in western languages, and later in the 1940s and 1950s, as the founder of Imago Publishing Company, the collaborator of Anna Freud in the monumental project of publishing her father’s work.14 Even in this summary profile, one can discern a highly effective subject-agent in the literary-cultural field of European modernism, one whom Wong expressly regards as exemplary and “instructional.” Rodker’s appearance points to Wong’s non-Chinese, extra-national intellectual alignment. His work of translation hinges this with the brave new world of revolutionized Chinese national literature while internationalizing the latter at the same time. In this material sign of national triumph and internationalist solidarity, European literary modernism and a modern, that is, revolutionized Chinese literature are both celebrated. The ambition of translating modernist poetics into an aesthetics of leftwing opposition in 1950s colonial Hong Kong is much more visible in Wong Man’s own poems—a worthy ambition which, like Rodker, is not always artistically felicitous in issue. This ambition also puts Wong in the company of other left-wing writers, legatees of radical Chinese literary modernism in the Republican period. Wong’s only verse collection, Between Two Worlds (1956), offers clear evidence of his conscious self-positioning vis-à-vis both European and Chinese literary modernisms. All the poems are in parallel modern standard Chinese and English texts. The parallel texts offer the poems in translation but the book is not a volume of translations because it is impossible to tell which is the source and which the target language. In the collection, Wong rehearses a number of possible meanings of “two worlds” and the situation in-between. In the first and titular poem, being in between two worlds is not just a condition of existence. It entails choice, and, for Wong, who speaks in the first person in the poem, the choice is already made:

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“Between the two worlds to-day / My choice is crystal clear: / Our concern how to salve the fated wreck / And welcome them ashore with cheer” (Between Two Worlds 5). What, however, are these “two worlds”? In this opening instance, it is the crossing between two notions of truth and truth-telling—that of science, and that of poetry: “May not a scientific mind / Tell the truth as funnily / Or gently as he can. . . ?” (5). As the volume goes on to reveal, the pursuit and performance of truth are actions which cross a number of opposed worlds besides that of science and art. They are actions which can reveal and resolve contradictions in history, society, and culture; which individuals may choose or eschew, and in so doing, define who they are and their relations with the worlds in which the accidents of birth and circumstance have put them. In-betweenness is an exemplary condition only if the individual develops insight on desire—as in the case of Wong, for whom the “choice is crystal clear”—unlike the many “others” in the volume who do not. In other words, in traveling through in-betweenness, Wong Man’s poems enact the dialectics of opposition as it transpires in specific temporalities and discourses without, however, the guarantee of synthetic resolution. In a number of poems, Wong adopts a variety of dramatis personae to deliver his social criticism. In “The Poor Man’s Doctor” and “The Rich Man’s Doctor,” a characteristic modernist alienation is captured by two different voices from his own profession, and its social and class origins displayed. “Why does he work alone? / Can he not find among so many / Of a great city some like minded colleagues / Who will share this work in company?” the poor man’s doctor asks himself (159). This social alienation finds its counterpart in selfalienation as the rich man’s doctor becomes riddled with guilt about serving “the rich, the powerful, the upper set / Curing them, making them the longer lived, / . . . Stronger to dominate and rule” (163). In another poem, Wong deploys the dinner party as a trope to assemble the colonial cosmopolitan elite under his critical surveillance. The speaker is a member of the party, basking “under chandeliers,” sitting at a table covered with “snow-clean cloth,” laid with “glittering silver,” “chopsticks . . . of purest ivory” and where “glasses were cut-crystal” (153). Over “champagne . . . and dark vintage ‘chateau’ wine,” The lawyer started anecdotes of one he met In New York, millionaire, controller of National mines and connoisseur of women, The suave young man from UNO contributed Further tit-bits, then the puffy Shanghai banker, Not to be outdone, filled in vivid details Of meetings in far Washington, eye to impress The host, proud rich inheritor of opium money. . . . Distinguished company and pleasant talk,

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The world seemed an easy place. . . . . . when of a sudden I saw the lights dimmed to dark blood-red, The cut-glass assumed the stain of opium teeth, The men’s mouths were dripping gore, The women’s sombre cyanosed juice, Wine or rouge had run into their tongues and teeth And they were taking on fantastic shapes – I had raised my glass And was viewing the tableau through my claret. (153–55)

The change in the speaker’s apprehension of his bourgeois cosmopolitan milieu is marked by the shift from realist to gothicized descriptiveness. In the last two lines, the poem turns against the speaker, who seems unable to grasp the meaning of what he has just experienced. The poem shows a colonial psychopathology in performance, one which cries out for diagnosis, and yet, like the two doctors who cannot heal themselves, is captured within the societal atrophy which produces it in the first place. Specifically, it is a colonial cosmopolitanism which is momentarily revealed as vampiric. In “Indulgence,” the politics of class is mapped onto national culture, and the mapping historicized (see Figure 1). Each of the four stanzas places side by side momentous events in China and the recreational pursuits of bourgeois English life. The epic versus the pastoral, or the dynamic of national upheaval versus the rhythm of a nation at leisure—the persona stands poised between these two contrary flows and, like the speakers of other poems, incapable of choice. He is intelligent enough to perceive the historical irony this dual perspective generates, the two very different life-choices it proffers, but, as a spectator of both, he reduces them to the same level in his consciousness. Thus, reading about the floods in China is no different from watching cricket at the Oval; admiring the Chinese revolutionaries is as enjoyable as the performance of an Edwardian actress; the Chinese warlords are like rugby players; and finally, the satisfaction of hearing news of modern progress on the mainland is like the satiety of tea in the comfort of a Hong Kong salon. Bourgeois English lifestyles flow into the anglicized rituals of colonial Hong Kong in an imperialized habitus whose outlook on global historical and social transformation is as complacent as it is trivializing. “Indulgence” gestures toward the work of another modernist precursor, W. H. Auden’s sonnet “Hongkong” (1938), written as Auden and Christopher Isherwood were in transit to the Chinese mainland, in which Auden mocked the colony’s “leading characters” (Auden 235), their stagy affectations and obliviousness to the world-historical drama unfolding right on their doorstep

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Figure 1: Wong Man 黃雯,“Indulgence” in Between Two Worlds .

in the Japanese invasion of China.15 Auden’s sonnet is written from the vantage of a third-person speaker-observer of colonial antics. In his creative turn from Auden, Wong lays bare the interiority of the colonial subject through the repeated use of free indirect style in each stanza at precisely the moment in between China and England—“O put off studies till another day”; “One must get rid of those Manchus of course”; “O those important lessons better wait”; “Good show of course.” The subject in his habitual procrastination takes shape as another symptomatic expression of colonial psychology as trivializing fugue.

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The binary “other” of this disempowered colonial-colonized subject is the traditional power-seeking Chinese intellectual “Who in past ages sided always with / Those in high places, scourging the people. . . . / Too soft to work with hands, betrayers / And traitors of our intellectual trust; / Once a Confucian disciple was rebuked, / “Subjecting not your four fine limbs to work / Nor able to distinguish the five grains, / What sort of master this of yours?” [sic] (“The Intellectuals,” Wong Man, Between Two Worlds 171). The accusatory tone delivers a criticism much more pointed than that of the subject in “Indulgence.” In its finger-pointing, the poem leans on the authority of an earlier challenge to one of Confucius’ disciples, but, at the same time, it resonates with the didactic rhetoric with which Confucianism is traditionally transmitted in the academy. Its appeal to historical antecedent and didacticism gives the poem a quasi-Confucianist cast. At moments like “The Intellectuals,” the in-betweenness of Wong as translator appears reductive, merely that of replicating the didactic rhetoric of the past in the present. There is no sign of the modernist allusiveness, stylistic transitions, or existential anxieties that we have seen elsewhere; these seem to be reserved for representations of more explicitly “western” or “westernized” subject matter. This recalcitrant discursive opposition continues to circulate in the volume despite the radical breakthrough of writing poetry in both Chinese and English. The social and cultural capital Wong accumulated in his anglophone habitus accounts for his insight into the bourgeois subjects and society of 1950s Hong Kong and also the credit of his deliberate distancing from them. The anti-colonial critique co-ordinates with the left-wing beliefs we saw earlier in Poems from China. But for all his socialist commitments, Wong’s anglophone habitus and the social status and advantages it entails for him in colonial Hong Kong put him in a different class from the majority of writers struggling in the economic hardship of the 1950s. This class divide cuts across ideological and English-Chinese oppositions to thrust him outside of both left- and right-wing writer groups. From this vantage, his use of and publication in English inscribe a class rather than a colonial or anti-colonial boundary. Furthermore, the parallel text appears as an attempt to offset the invidious privilege which an exclusive use of English would accent within the local colonial context, even as English encodes the internationalist extension to writers—and readers—of left-wing and modernist sympathies.

IV As Chinese exile and émigré enclave where left and right, sinophone and anglophone, circulate under the aegis of British colonialism, 1950s Hong Kong intervenes to disrupt the continuities between Wong’s socialist nationalist and

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internationalist predilections. But ironically, it is also in 1950s Hong Kong that a space opens up where these continuities can be forged, untroubled by the class and linguistic issues colonialism entails. To add to this irony, the provision of this space is enabled by the exigencies of the Cold War, in the PRC’s counter-challenge to “greenback culture” in Hong Kong. On the local front, there were left-wing publishing outposts and writer groups to compete with those funded by the Americans. Internationally, the Bandung conference of 1955 witnessed China’s attempts to assume leadership of the “non-aligned” nations and cultural internationalists who, disillusioned with Stalinist Russian hegemony, turned instead to the struggle against American cultural imperialism.16 In the years before his death, Wong continued with his writing, but, instead of publishing his own work, he wrote almost exclusively for the English-language journal Eastern Horizon. The first issue of Eastern Horizon appeared in Hong Kong in July 1960, five years after the Bandung conference and as the material expression of its cultural legacy. It had an explicit Asian and internationalist agenda, positioning itself as a forum “for an independent exchange of views and so contribut[ing] to a better appreciation of the fast developing East with its divers cultures and peoples” (Wong Man, “Intimate Travel Notes” I.1: 2). The “East” or “Asia” in the journal’s conception is not geographically determined and, though nationally based, exceeds political and statist borders: “Asia is awake. Africa is on the move,” the inaugural editorial declares; “People in many lands are opening their eyes to these changes. . . . It is important for us as people to find a way to remain as we are, yet to understand others” (“Intimate Travel Notes” I.1: 6). Published in English, the language, rather than an instrument of cultural imperialism, is seen as the medium of some of “the best writing on Asia” by both “Eastern and western writers and scholars” that would appeal to both specialist and ordinary readers. Like Wong Man’s dedication to “international understanding,” the rather naïve promotional rhetoric belies the magazine’s ambition to be the herald of a new world order where aesthetic and social reform are mutually supportive agendas. Eastern Horizon’s inaugural editor is the veteran journalist Liu Pengju, a graduate of the Foreign Languages Faculty of Sichuan University in China, who went to Britain for postgraduate literary studies at Leeds University. After returning to Hong Kong in 1950, Liu worked for the Communist newspapers Ta Kung Pao and New Evening Post (Xinwanbao) before leaving the latter in 1959 to organize the publication of Eastern Horizon. It is more than likely that the magazine had mainland Chinese funding. In its first two years, its stable of contributors includes Rewi Alley, Han Suyin, Mulk Raj Anand, Wong Phui Nam, Ee Tiang Hong—all writers who can claim Asian provenance

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and reputation—other lesser lights, and fellow travelers. Though not overtly propagandist for the Chinese Communist regime—at least not under Liu— within its first year, it was considered subversive enough to be banned by the Malayan government, newly emerged from the so-called “Emergency” or war against Communist insurgents. Eastern Horizon’s literary internationalist agenda offers a radical alternative to the colonial cosmopolitan culture which Wong Man satirizes in his poems. These two forms of local-global encounter are situated at polar axes from each other in the 1950s field. In writing for Eastern Horizon, Wong’s cross-cultural interests appear to be liberated from the colonial-anti-colonial modality and develop a more egalitarian framework of reference. As he said in one of his contributions to the magazine, “Peace-making and promotion of friendship between the two worlds [of east and west] seems best left to individuals who could take equal delight in the indigenous traditions and pleasures of both hemispheres, penetrating deeper than appreciation and more [sic] understanding” (Wong Man, “National Culture” 15). It is as if the location of his writing in the anglophone socialist discourse of the magazine—and, by implication, of himself in the company of other socialist sympathizers— requires no further explanation or justification of his left-wing beliefs and credentials. This is “home” where his familial origins and anglophone disposition would incur no colonialist stigma and so remove the necessity of an anti-colonial response. His poems and translations appear frequently in the magazine right from the beginning, but it is the travel writing series, “Intimate Travel Notes,” and the quasi-memoir series “Bygone Travel Notes” he wrote under the pseudonym “A Modern Marco Polo”—or “MMP”—that comprise his most regular contribution. Both the notion of traveling and the pseudonym resonate clearly with his life-long cultivation of the subjectivities and spaces mobilized by cross-cultural encounters. The invocation of the Venetian traveler to China gives Wong’s own travel writing a revisionist gloss, as a response but also a counterpoint to the earlier canonical text of European travel, long dominant in western perceptions of the exotic Chinese east. In this respect, Wong’s travel writing practices a version of the literary postcolonial, or “writing back,” on his “homeground” of the magazine’s socialist discourse. Ostensibly, “Intimate Travel Notes” records MMP’s European tour with his wife, a return visit after more than three decades, while “Bygone Travel Notes” takes the notion of travel metaphorically to his early childhood and Chinese education in Hong Kong. Both series are not about the formation of a political or ideological self-identity but the nebulous emergence of the subject from inbetween cultures and the self-other, elite-popular binaries it has to negotiate. The “equal” delight of the traveling subject in what is “indigenous” to east or west is premised on universalized assumptions about culture, the national,

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and the individual. In these assumptions, one can detect the transition of the traveler himself from an elitist self of the past to one mobilized by a new appreciation of the value of the popular and quotidian. From this vantage, he is “modern” because unlike Marco Polo whose “east” is the site of palaces, princes, and court-life, MMP looks everywhere for evidence of his belief that “[t]he greatness of a nation is best measured by the happiness of its people, not at play, but at work” (“Intimate Travel Notes” I.9: 43). That this happiness quotient can be raised by egalitarian state policies so that it becomes visibly observable in the everyday world is evident in his descriptions of the leading London hospital where he used to work. There, he found “a thorough rational revolution” had taken place; “patients were now placed at the head in the new oligarchy in a complete reversal of the time-honored scheme of things . . .”; the “erstwhile pomp and solemnity” when senior consultants did their rounds “attended by a full retinue” had disappeared, and the “nurses of different grades” showed a much “improved comradeship” (“Intimate Travel Notes” I.3: 29). Elsewhere “[i]n the Welfare State everyone was holding up his or her head,” he states, but he also notices from ordinary conversations he describes or has with a number of different “others”—a hospital patient, barber, bus-conductress, barmaid—that class self-consciousness and distinctions remain entrenched barely beneath the surface of the new social order. His ambivalence about the achievements of the welfare state is also visible in the contrast between the acclamation, “All roads [going out of London] have been brought to such a uniform pitch of perfection,” and the lament that “The great roads of England . . . are being threatened with extinction as new motorways spring into existence which do nothing but create automatism and boredom.” A gap has opened up in MMP’s hermeneutics of modernity: as the latest stage in a teleology of progress or the irresistible descent from past perfection. In view of this, his journey becomes a quest for an actual, present temporality in between a past and future idyll. “The happiest journey” in the whole trip was not his tour of the English welfare state but on the open road in France, “lovely straight stretches for miles, framed by the most beautiful trees the district could provide, scanty traffic and the most skilful and courteous drivers in the world” (“Intimate Travel Notes” I.6/7: 38). This is a space of ordered but liberated movement, transient but urbane meetings where the pleasures of motion are secured within an unbroken arboreal frame: the greenness of French trees throughout the land was definitely of a different shade and hue from that of other countries . . . the outstanding characteristic resided in a luminosity of the leaves which seemed to reflect, exude and transmit a greater volume of light and sun, illuminating a tunnel of green under which wheeled

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vehicles passed as through a green dream. . . . [The trees] create and provide magic for the traveler the life-long day. (38)

MMP compares this quasi-pastoral idyll with the West Lake in “Hangchow,” but only for “short moments of an early spring dawn” (38). The endpoint of the quest, the space where the idyllic open country and the social habitats of the city extend into each other, and which he calls “Mecca,” is Paris: “Sitting there outside the Café de la Paix under the bright lights of the boulevard . . . one felt fully the freedom and fellowship that were France’s . . . infecting the Paris night with its vibrant quality of excitement and expectancy” (39). Welfare state, open roads in the country, café culture, everyday enjoyment: this seems to be the recipe for a desirable modernity. Surprisingly, for all Wong’s ardently expressed support for the new China, there is no contemporary Chinese location that MMP could invoke as comparison. Instead, MMP conjures the memory of “spring nights in the imperial city of Loyang during the Prosperous T’ang period . . . ” and, significantly, remembers a moment from his own past: “This absolute sense of freedom MMP used to experience in old Canton’s Western Gate suburb where narrow rough-hew stone lanes made for cloth footwear and the sedan-chair, flanked by green brick ancient houses, just made one feel at peace totally with the world . . .” (39–40). Traveling in the modern European west provokes a reverse journey back into the distant and more recent past of China. China, to MMP, is cultural and personal memory, and fragments of this memory are appropriated to represent a cultural imaginary totally alien to the utopian teleology of social reform and the Chinese Communist state that Wong has so explicitly supported all through the 1950s. These fragments of a Chinese cultural imaginary are assembled with the phenomenological fragments plucked at random from the everyday encounters of travel in Europe. The cross-culturality that emerges is neither a seamless transition between “east” and “west” nor a synthesis or totality but a narrative where, like Walter Benjamin’s broken vessel, the joints are clearly visible and challenge the reader to discompose what they bring together. In tracing the traveling subject back into the Wong Man narrative we have seen in this chapter, one can construe at least the following three questions: is this traveling subject, in his apparent mobility across physical and cultural spaces, the embodied realization of that “international understanding” which is an organic extension of the “national” Wong celebrated in his first publication? Again, are physical mobility and the pleasures of travel the displacement of desire in excess of the committed identification to the “national”? And again, is cross-culturality the work of dislocation and dispersal which compels the reconfiguration of “national” with “international”

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in non-linear, non-homogenous time? Wong Man’s life and work appear to hold these three—and possibly other—questions in generative ambivalence that speak to contemporary post-1997 Hong Kong. Traditional and modernist; colonial, anti-colonial, post-colonial; comprador son and socialist; doctor, poet, translator, essayist, travel writer: the shifting ambivalences that make up Wong Man are both unique and explicable in terms of the local, national, regional, and international forces which shape 1950s Hong Kong. In these many respects, he offers a modality for reading more contemporary subject and cultural formations. Studying Wong Man is to discover a form of attention that is more adequate to the complexities and complications of the literarycultural field in contemporary Hong Kong than any ideologically driven, linear or separatist narrative would allow.

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6 Southwards and Outwards: Representing Chineseness in New Locations in Hong Kong Films Wendy Gan

I With the year 1997 approaching, images of outward-bound migrants leaving Hong Kong before the return of the colony to the mainland began to emerge with regularity in both commercial and art-house Hong Kong cinema. 1 Comrades: Almost a Love Story/Tian Mimi, released to critical and commercial success in 1996, is very much in this tradition as its protagonists, by the film’s end, find themselves settled outside Hong Kong in New York. Yet the film, despite the predictability of its ending, does capture an important but muchsidelined migratory movement in its narrative. In the focus on leaving Hong Kong, an earlier move of entering Hong Kong from the mainland has often been elided, especially in more recent films about the Hong Kong diaspora. Comrades recalls this by showing both Liqiao and Xiaojun arriving in Hong Kong as new migrants from the mainland and, in doing so, reminds us that Hong Kong has been both a place of refuge and new hope for mainland refugees, exiles, and migrants and a source of its own exiles and migrants to the rest of the world. In Comrades, it is interestingly the first act of border-crossing that requires the most adjustments, especially for Xiaojun. Though Hong Kong is a British colony, its Chineseness should have guaranteed a degree of familiarity, and yet Xiaojun struggles manfully and comically with Hong Kong’s difference from the mainland, linguistically and culturally. The film thus implies that being in Hong Kong is as good as being in a foreign land and this necessitates a negotiation with the category of Chineseness. The innocent Mandarinspeaking Xiaojun has to learn a whole new way of being Chinese. In this new place, he has to learn how to be a Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong

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Chinese, capitalistic, upwardly mobile, and financially shrewd. As Ien Ang has pointed out, Chineseness, far from being “fixed and pre-given,” is “constantly renegotiated and rearticulated, both inside and outside China” (Ang, “To Be or Not to Be Chinese” 5). The move across a border in particular has the ability to trigger new formations of Chineseness, a process driven by the presence of a new context. As Allen Chun has cogently argued, shifts in place and context are far more crucial to identities than the categories of ethnicity or culture: Rather than viewing the substance of one’s ethnicity or culture as a natural point of departure, more importantly it is necessary to see how context invokes the relevance of culture, as a function of strategic choice, to the processes of identifying. (Chun, “Diasporas of the Mind” 106)

A new location thus necessarily requires a new way of identifying—and identifying with—Chineseness. Though Hong Kong has long been a place attractive to new migrants and also a springboard for emigrants to elsewhere in the world, there are two key periods when the pressure and lure of new locations were particularly pertinent. The first was in the 1950s when the victory of the Communist Party on the mainland in 1949 resulted in the mass exodus of Nationalist loyalists to Hong Kong. This displacement can in some ways be seen as a continuation of a movement of refugees from the mainland to Hong Kong that began in the late 1930s at the outset of the Sino-Japanese war. Yet the situation in the 1950s was markedly different in one crucial aspect. Where the refugees from the turmoil of the Sino-Japanese war and the later Civil War of the 1940s had the potential option of one day returning home on the return of peace, for the political refugees and migrants of the 1950s, returning to the mainland was impossible except in the case of the collapse of the Communist Party.2 A new location was thus imposed on these refugees and, with it, a forced negotiation with Chineseness in a new context. The second key moment for Hong Kong was in the run-up to 1997. With the fear accompanying the return of Hong Kong to the mainland, the lure of new locations was difficult to resist and, in adopting a new home, questions of Chineseness and identity were once again raised. In this chapter, I examine films that represent these two moments when a concern with relocation and thus new locations pressed upon the inhabitants of Hong Kong hence opening up a discussion about Chineseness. In the first section regarding the films of the 1950s and 1960s, I argue that a gradual and sometimes reluctant recognition of the diversity of Chineseness manifested itself in the acknowledgment of the local, specifically of Hong Kong itself. As filmmakers, particularly those on the right wing who had escaped to Hong Kong, realized that the door to the mainland was firmly shut to them,

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they turned their focus onto the specificities of Hong Kong and in doing so prepared the way for thinking of Hong Kong Chinese identity as hybrid. The second section discusses films that imagine a Chinese diaspora moving beyond the confines of Hong Kong especially in reaction to 1997. In these films, a move towards a fictive unity based on a common ethnic identity is made as new locations replace Hong Kong as home. However, this unity is undermined as the films consistently explore the meaning of diaspora with a sharp eye on the cracks that run through the “sameness-in-dispersal” that Ien Ang has characterized as the dominant construction especially in Chinese diasporic imaginations (Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese 13). Indeed, since the late 1950s Hong Kong cinema’s production of diaspora narratives has been particularly nuanced and sophisticated, in large part due to a recognition of Hong Kong’s own diasporic origins and hybrid nature. With Hong Kong geographically on the margins of the mainland and thus unable to claim a Chinese identity that is monolithic, it is no surprise that Hong Kong cinema has consistently questioned the presumed homogeneity of Chineseness via the practice of a pragmatic contingent form of identity-formation. The representations of Chineseness in the films I consider here thus engage in a kind of flexible Chineseness that pre-dates but broadly affirms what Aihwa Ong has identified as “flexible citizenship”—a cosmopolitanism that disrupts the notion of the nation—in her readings of the Chinese diaspora in the transnationalist and capitalist late twentieth century.

II Being Chinese in the south: Recognizing the local in Halfway Down (1957), The Greatest Civil War on Earth (1961), and The Greatest Wedding on Earth (1962) Hong Kong as seen in relation to the mainland has always been doubly marginalized as Poshek Fu has pointed out. Hong Kong as part of peripheral northern China has been subject to the “Central Plains syndrome,” “a centralizing, anti-imperialist state-building discourse underlying twentiethcentury representation of Chinese culture” that privileges the north as the true center of Chineseness at the expense of peripheral cultures (Fu, “Between Nationalism” 199). If Hong Kong’s distance from the cultural and political center of the mainland was not already bad enough, her status as a British colony compounded her already alienated position within Chinese cultural discourse: “Contaminated by British colonialization, it was seen by the mainland cultural elites as a land of ‘slavishness,’ ‘decadence,’ and ‘backwardness,’ obstructing the progress of the national project” (Fu 200).

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Such views not surprisingly affected attitudes towards the local film industry. Though long since a major center of dialect film production and later the bearer after Shanghai of the mantle of “Hollywood of the East,” Hong Kong’s film industry—seen as too frivolous, commercial, and apolitical—has often been sidelined in narratives of Chinese film history. This marginality persisted even within the Hong Kong film industry itself, especially as actors and filmmakers from Shanghai entered the industry with an attitude of contempt for the widely perceived “inferior” Hong Kong and its local film industry. As such, the specificities of Hong Kong were notably absent in films made in Hong Kong even as late as in the 1960s. The traits of “sinicist belligerence” and “sinicist melancholia” that See-kam Tan traces in his essay on Chinese diasporic imaginations in Hong Kong films consistently elided the local in favor of the notion of zuguo jiaxiang, the mainland homeland. So pervasive was this theme of zuguo jiaxiang in Hong Kong films, particularly Mandarin films, that Stephen Teo has expostulated: Hong Kong might as well not have existed. The Shanghai émigrés were making “Shanghai” films—films set in that city or its environs with Hong Kong locations dressed up as its streets and quarters. Characters behaved like typical Shanghai residents, their dialogue laced with Shanghai-isms. (Teo 17)

With a decided orientation towards the motherland, Mandarin-language Hong Kong films ignored the implications of their new place of production and thus Chineseness presented itself in these films as non-local, non–Hong Kong, an identity instead derived from the north and only available in the north.3 For one to be truly Chinese hence meant leaving contaminated Hong Kong to return to the motherland at best (See-kam Tan’s idea of sinicist belligerence), or at the very least effecting a nostalgic melancholia for the lost homeland (Tan’s sinicist melancholia).4 Being Chinese had nothing to do with the local context of Hong Kong. With the closing of the mainland film market after 1949, however, the refusal to allow marginalized Hong Kong into the frame of Chineseness softens, particularly in Mandarin films from the right. As the mainland imported from Hong Kong only leftist films approved by the Communist authorities, the local was to become increasingly central to the imagination of right-wing filmmakers of the Hong Kong film industry and their re-framing of Chineseness.5 The Chineseness of the Hong Kong local was beginning to be recognized, at first reluctantly and then gradually as part of everyday life so much so that by 1961, the year that The Greatest Civil War on Earth/Nan Bei He was released, the refusal to engage with varieties of Chineseness was to become a source of comedy, not patriotic pride.6

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I would like to begin, however, with an unlikely film often identified by critics such as See-kam Tan and Ng Ho as one that has its face turned towards the mainland and away from Hong Kong—Halfway Down/Ban Xialiu Shehui (1955). Adapted from a book by Zhao Zifan about the difficult lives of a group of young mainland intellectuals in the Hong Kong refugee slum of Rennie’s Mill or Tiu Keng Leng, the film is predictable in its longing for the true home, China, and its disdain for the exiles’ temporary refuge, Hong Kong. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, for example, the characters sing nostalgically of their guxiang, of their real home, which unfortunately under the Communists has become a place where the wild wolves roam. A bag of home soil functions within the film as a reminder as well as a synecdoche of the mainland. As long as this group of refugees, this circle of friends halfway-down society, hold onto this bag of soil, they remain a remnant of China though transplanted onto foreign soil. The unity of the exiles in this film is thus not merely about loyalty and community spirit but about maintaining the unity of Nationalist China in exile. As a result, each departure from the group is an affront and insult, a betrayal of China reconstituted as the halfway-down society that gives the film its Chinese name. Only the depraved and the misguided choose to leave. The violent gambler husband of the meek and refined Pang Lingxian forces her to leave Tiu Keng Leng with him and in doing so plunges her into the seedy world of prostitution. A loafer friend of Pan’s husband leaves at the same time with his young son and similarly makes the latter beg as an orphan on the streets for their living. Li Man in her jealousy of her lover, Wang Liang’s concern for the victimized Pan Lingxian, breaks from the halfway-down society in favor of a dubious existence as a rich man’s mistress. Accordingly, Pan Lingxian’s and eventually Li Man’s return to Tiu Keng Leng are celebrated, seen as proof of the intrinsic goodness of this Chinese community and hence this version of China and Chineseness. As Tan notes, “Li’s return to the fold is a return to an idealized ‘China’ at Tiu Keng Leng” (See-kam Tan 16). The film is undoubtedly endowed with a healthy dose of the Central Plains syndrome. Though the film is set in Hong Kong, the heart of the Chinese world for the characters is centered upon the émigré circle of friends at Tiu Keng Leng and their nostalgia for home up north. Speaking Mandarin and not Cantonese, the lingua franca of Hong Kong, the film’s characters linguistically retain their connection to the mainland. Yet, for a film so deliberately blind to the variations in the local context, Hong Kong as a location makes its presence surprisingly felt through location shots on the beach, the streets, and in the slums. However, Hong Kong is a place almost entirely marked with negativity. When Wang Liang and friends leave the convivial atmosphere of Tiu Keng Leng and enter the main heart of Hong Kong, they encounter depravity and decadence that war against their dignity and pride. It is outside the refugee slum that we find

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Pan Lingxian working as a prostitute against her will and where she is almost murdered too by her husband. It is also outside Tiu Keng Leng that Li Man meets a rich businessman and, with her moral fiber dissolving amidst the pleasures of food, wine, and dancing, is tempted into becoming his mistress. Even when the film acknowledges the specifics of local weather by featuring a typhoon, it only serves to highlight the harshness of Hong Kong and, in contrast, the fortitude of the circle of friends uniting and working together to protect one another from the severe weather. The film thus makes an unusual effort to represent, if not to recognize, the realities of Hong Kong but only in an effort to preserve the fiction of Tiu Keng Leng’s superiority as a community, in particular as an authentically Chinese community, identified by core values of moral uprightness and loyalty to traditional ties. Interestingly, Hong Kong is also presented as a Chinese city. When Li Man, who is the literary spokeswoman for the halfway-down society of Tiu Keng Leng, becomes a literary sensation, it is to Chinese literary salons and gatherings that she goes to be feted. The businessman she eventually becomes mistress to is Chinese himself. Thus, implicitly, the film acknowledges that there are different kinds of Chineseness though the local version of Chineseness is not one to be engaged with because it has become impure, in the sense of being morally corrupt, because of contamination by western ways of living (pace the Chinese flamenco dancer at the night club), and thus inauthentic. As Tan argues, Hong Kong is allowed to be represented and acknowledged in the film but is ultimately rejected “not simply because it is a capitalist society under colonial rule, but also because its capitalist/colonial culture is perceived to be harmful in particular to moral-ethical precepts of Chineseness” (See-kam Tan 16). In the end, the film endorses only one version of Chineseness, that present among the refugees in Tiu Keng Leng and marked by that bag of soil from the mainland. All other forms of Chineseness are marginalized, denied any claim to ethical or cultural value. Halfway Down’s acknowledgment of other kinds of Chineseness, though framed negatively, was an interesting step forward in the film industry’s negotiations with its new geopolitical contexts. With The Greatest Civil War on Earth and The Greatest Wedding on Earth/Nan Bei Yi Jia Qin (hereafter, The Greatest Civil War and The Greatest Wedding respectively), we have films that take this step of acknowledgement further by rewriting disdainful recognition of versions of Chineseness to co-operative, intra-Chinese engagement. Contempt for other forms of Chineseness is no longer portrayed as a patriotic act but as a kind of insular folly worth poking fun at. Both films deal with intra-Chinese prejudices with a light comic touch but are nonetheless revealing in their awareness of at least two kinds of Chineseness in conflict within Hong Kong and fascinating in the solutions

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they propose in ameliorating intra-Chinese tensions. In an industry that was divided linguistically into Cantonese and Mandarin, the films were unique in bringing both languages together within the same film and in doing so they challenge “the uniformity and commonality” of Chinese identity, indicating the “lively state of cultural heterogeneity characteristic of urban Hong Kong” (K. Ng 1). The films feature a northern, Mandarin-speaking family and a Hong Kong, Cantonese-speaking family with their respective heads of family antagonistic towards each other. Such a conflict allows the films to delineate the differences between northern and southern versions of Chineseness. In The Greatest Civil War, both families run a tailoring business side-by-side on the same street. On the surface there is little to distinguish the northerner Mr. Li and the local Mr. Zhang. Both are rather rotund men dressed in western suits who appear to be similar. Their shops are on the same street, they rent rooms in the same apartment, and they are both widowers with one grownup daughter and a younger child. Though the film consistently builds visual parallels between the two, differences are still quick to emerge. Mr. Zhang is presented as shrewd and pragmatic, though provincial and small-minded, particularly in his prejudice towards northerners; Mr. Li is seen as modern and visionary in his embracing of the latest technologies and marketing techniques but with a tendency towards risk-taking and extravagance. The Greatest Wedding, a film that reunited the cast of The Greatest Civil War for a retread of the subject, takes even more pains to mark the differences between northerner and southerner. Dressed consistently in western suits, the northerner Mr. Li is designated as modern and progressive. His northern Chinese restaurant is chic and trendy (as is his home) and he utilizes innovative promotional gimmicks to attract customers. His preference for a church wedding for his daughter also highlights his modernity. In contrast, the local Hong Kong protagonist Mr. Shen, always dressed in Chinese garb, is portrayed as traditional and conservative. Mr. Shen’s business is very much an old-fashioned Cantonese restaurant and his preference for a traditional Chinese wedding for his son reveals his entrenchment in old ways. In the two different patriarchs, the films parody stereotypical divisions of northern and southern Chinese into modern and traditional, cosmopolitan and provincial. The films illuminate the artifice of these intra-ethnic identity constructs that have been transplanted from the mainland and invite the audience to laugh at the absurd lengths to which the émigré generation is prepared to go to maintain it. In both films, the differences appear at first to be insurmountable. Linguistically and culturally distinct, north and south can seemingly find no common ground. It is the younger generation however who points the way forward. Challenging the prejudices and the divisions of the older generation are the

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young intra-Chinese lovers of the films who display a much greater openness to other forms of Chineseness. In The Greatest Civil War, northerner Cuihua sings the praises of Cantonese cuisine before her Cantonese fiancé, while local lass Zhen similarly speaks well of northern food. In The Greatest Wedding, northerner Manling learns to make Cantonese white radish cake for her Cantonese future father-in-law while her Cantonese lover Qingwen practices his Mandarin to make a better impression on Manling’s father. The younger generation, driven by romantic interest, is quicker to cross cultures, and, in doing so, they foreground a process of hybridization at work in the small acts of everyday life. Indeed, a bilingual character like Cuihua or Manling is an indicator of the changes afoot within Hong Kong. When we first see Cuihua in The Greatest Civil War, her northern background is difficult to ascertain. She speaks Cantonese to a young child on the airplane where she serves as a flight attendant, yet the modernity and glamour of her job suggests strongly that she is a progressive northerner. Later overheard speaking Cantonese on the phone to her boyfriend, Cuihua confounds Mr. Zhang, rendering him unable to place her origins. Similarly in The Greatest Wedding, the bilingual Manling is difficult to categorize. She is able to pass as a Cantonese before her boyfriend’s parents because of her flawless Cantonese and her ability to cook a classic Cantonese dish, white radish cake. Furthermore her job as a popular Cantonese radio broadcaster suggests that northerner Manling has become a key figure in creating local popular culture through her radio program. Indeed, unbeknownst to the heavily prejudiced Mr. Shen, Manling’s radio program in Cantonese is one of his favorites and he rushes home to listen to it each evening. The northerner Manling has become a producer of local, southern culture, and in the process, culturalizes her future father-in-law out of his habitual prejudice against the north. The increasing hybridization of local Chinese culture and identities presented in these films thus reveals the nascent formation of a Hong Kong identity grounded on both northern and southern virtues. The marriages of the younger generation are a key means of bringing both cultures together, and in the comic genre, the symbol of this togetherness achieved. As Cuihua points out to her father, her Cantonese fiancé may lack the northern propensity for vision and ambition but he is diligent and dependable. Besides, whatever northern qualities he lacks Cuihua brings to the marriage. Indeed, the end of The Greatest Civil War demonstrates this partnership well as Cuihua, with great ingenuity and aplomb, solves her father’s and Mr. Zhang’s business problems but not without the practical financial support that her Cantonese fiancé offers. One can argue that nothing actually changes in either north or south: the northern Cuihua is innovative like her father, and her husband is the replica of the dependable but rather limited southern man stereotype. But from

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another vantage point the film shows that north and south are supplements to each other, each denying the other completeness in its self-identification as Chinese and each working to maintain the other as culturally open and fluid. That this Chineseness develops a specific economic, or capitalist, trait to complicate the intra-ethnic mixture also points to its 1960s Hong Kong location. The marriage of north and south spreads from the level of romance to business as the stubbornly prejudiced older generation in The Greatest Civil War bring their businesses together. Encouraged by the younger generation, both Mr. Zhang and Mr. Li become business partners with a mutually beneficial division of labor. Cantonese Mr. Zhang with his pragmatism will look after logistics and costs while flamboyant northerner Mr. Li will take care of public relations and marketing. The film’s end even has Mr. Zhang and Mr. Li both attempting to speak Mandarin and Cantonese respectively—a sign of the rapprochement between the two sides and that the potential future of a modernized, economically prosperous Hong Kong lies in intra-Chinese cooperation and openness to the local culture. The arrival of mainland refugees and migrants in Hong Kong thus initiated the recognition and acceptance of Hong Kong Chineseness as hybrid. Though at first this hybridity was viewed negatively as a product of Hong Kong’s colonial and commercial status resulting in a film like Halfway Down’s acknowledgment but ultimate rejection of local culture, films such as The Greatest Civil War and The Greatest Wedding began to re-construct hybridity as intra-Chinese and as a valuable asset in Hong Kong’s push towards modernity and wealth. The new location of Hong Kong had thus yielded a new way of configuring Chineseness—no longer ideologically monolithic but pragmatically heterogeneous and hybridized, a Chineseness where “aspirations of social and economic affluence override ethnic divisions” (K. Ng 2).

III Outwards and beyond: Constructing Chineseness abroad in Comrades, Full Moon in New York (1990), and An Autumn’s Tale (1987) With a change in location, the filmic representation of Chineseness in Hong Kong cinema alters once again. When Comrades shifts from Hong Kong to New York, the items that designate a northern or a northern Chinese identity are transformed into general markers of cultural Chineseness. Where Xiaojun’s bicycle in Hong Kong was an indication of his northern new-migrant status, his carefree bicycling in the heart of New York simply marks him as Chinese. Liqiao’s and Xiaojun’s love of the songstress Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun) would, in Hong Kong, illustrate their mainland Mandarin-speaking origins but in

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New York, as the news of her death is broadcast throughout the Cantonesedominated New York Chinatown, Teresa Teng now functions merely as an identifier of general Chineseness, not mainland Chineseness. By the end of Comrades, the sharp differences between Liqiao and Xiaojun have definitely narrowed. This is no doubt part of the romantic thrust of the film but as a film released a year before the return of Hong Kong to the mainland, the final bridging of the gap between northern and southern Chinese would have spoken to Hong Kong’s unique geopolitical place in that space and time. Approaching 1997, the film’s strategy was to highlight intra-Chinese differences but also to promote through romantic union, the merger of Hong Kong and mainland forms of Chineseness. Comrades thus reveals how new contexts constantly bear on negotiations of Chineseness, and its displacing of its protagonists from Hong Kong to the West further justifies its final rendering of varieties of Chineseness as less different than similar. Abroad, the differences that distinguish mainland Chinese from Hong Kong Chinese flatten out, at least in the film, resulting in a shared sense of cultural Chineseness that creates a bond. The nation here is no longer the basis for unity as Sheldon Lu has argued, but an assumed notion of cultural Chineseness, in this case very much a popular Chinese culture of the everyday, becomes the new means to unite disparate Chinese people (S. Lu 285). It is in the end a bicycle, food, and Teresa Teng that constantly link and bring Liqiao and Xiaojun together. Thus in locations abroad, intra-Chinese differences that were once crucial become less so as a hostile foreign environment demands closed ranks and an affirmation of sameness. As Rey Chow has pointed out, a defensive practice that “begins as a resistance to the discriminatory practices of the older Western hegemony becomes ethnicist aggression,” resulting in “a new, ‘differentialist racism,’ which finds its justification no longer in the absoluteness of blood but in the insurmountability of cultural difference” (Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness” 7). Chineseness abroad can thus easily give rise to a Chinese cultural essentialism that refuses any articulation of intra-Chinese differences or of any denial of Chineseness. Hong Kong cinema’s portrayal of life abroad, however, often defies a unified Chineseness, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, a result I would like to suggest of Hong Kong’s own history of intra-Chinese migration and differences. Even Comrades’s conservatism is tempered with its extensive scenes of differences between Chinese from the north and the south in Hong Kong. In this section I would like to discuss two films depicting Chinese characters in diaspora that are careful to trace the cracks in the projection of Chinese sameness abroad. Both Full Moon in New York/Ren Zai Niuye (hereafter Full Moon) and An Autumn’s Tale/Qiu Tian De Tong Hua are films that are keenly

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aware of the tenuousness of the fictive kinships that ground the unity of Chineseness in a foreign location. Full Moon follows the lives of three Chinese women in New York who become unexpected friends in a foreign land. Lee Feng Jiau is a lesbian from Hong Kong who works in her father’s Chinese restaurant but also deals in New York property on the side. Taiwanese Wang Hsiung Ping is an actress who has just broken up with her American boyfriend and is struggling to find roles in an anglo-centric New York stage world, while Zhao Hong from the mainland has just arrived in New York after marrying a well-off Chinese American man. The film is sensitive to the ways Chineseness is fractured by differences such as geography, language, sexuality, and gender. Though the three women may be similarly middle-class Chinese in appearance, the film makes clear that there are numerous barriers that nonetheless divide them. Yet despite the differences, the film is also keenly aware of the various permutations by which multiple forms of Chineseness can yet bond. The moment when the three women first meet one another is indicative of this shifting sense of Chineseness that switches back and forth from difference to sameness and back again. When Zhao Hong and Wang Hsiung Ping enter Feng Jiau’s restaurant, intra-Chinese differences are immediately highlighted. Though Zhao Hong and Wang Hsiang Ping communicate in Mandarin, Feng Jiau’s Cantonese draws attention to the linguistically embedded differences between Chinese people. There are also simmering tensions between Wang Hsiung Ping and Feng Jiau for, in an earlier meeting, Feng Jiau had been contemptuous of the former’s relationship with a white American male tenant who had failed to pay Feng Jiau, as landlady, rent. As Wang Hsiung Ping and Feng Jiau spar over the authenticity of the restaurant’s food with the former claiming that the food is Americanized Chinese food prepared by Cantonese people and the latter countering that the food is Chinese food meant for Chinese eaters and prepared by Chinese people, the film sets up a clear divide between Mandarin-speaking and Cantonese-speaking Chinese people. The breach between Wang Hsiung Ping and Feng Jiau, however, is quickly bridged when they both inadvertently laugh at Zhao Hong’s ignorance of English idioms. In an awkward silence that befalls the three of them, Wang Hsiung Ping says in English that an angel must have flown over the table, causing Zhao Hong to drop her menu and look around in earnest for an angel. Zhao Hong’s naïvety brings the more sophisticated Feng Jiau and Wang Hsiung Ping together, a reminder of Hong Kong and Taiwan’s similarities as capitalist and cosmopolitan in contrast to the Chinese mainland. This process of splitting and joining occurs throughout the film. Just as the three women have become friends and are drinking together in a bar, with Feng Jiau even conversing in Mandarin, Feng Jiau’s lesbian difference pops into view and temporarily alienates the

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married Zhao Hong. Sexuality intervenes to challenge ethnicity as the dominant constituent of identity, and momentary unity is undermined by difference. The film accentuates the differences among the varieties of Chineseness. Zhao Hong and her Chinese American husband, Thomas, may be in love and speak a common language, Mandarin, but culturally and values-wise, they are apart. Thomas cannot fathom his wife’s filial desire to bring her mother from China to New York to live with them nor can his wife quite believe the callousness with which her Americanized in-laws treat their family’s ancestral tablets. Though they may all be ethnically Chinese, their values have been shaped in divergent ways by their different geographical locations. In contrast, Wang Hsiung Ping’s recognition of the fractures within Chineseness does not involve geography but gender. On a visit to her father, she meets a mainland woman writer whom her Taiwanese father has been sheltering. In approaching the mainland woman, Wang Hsiung Ping notices bruises on her wrists and realizes that her father, though sympathetic and supportive of the woman’s writing, has also been sexually exploiting her. Wang Hsiung Ping’s shock and anger remind us of the gender inequalities that fissure the apparent unity of Chineseness as symbolized by her father bridging the Taiwan-mainland divide in helping this mainland woman writer. It is gender, rather than ethnicity, which creates a momentary bond of sympathy between Hsiung Ping and the mainland woman writer and which overrides both blood-ties and the inherited political division between Taiwan and the mainland. Despite the differences, through the central friendship of its three female leads, the film nonetheless wishes to emphasize a common Chineseness. Whether the film succeeds in convincing us of this is moot but its desire to persuade its audience of unity is visible in two key scenes. The first happens mid-way through the film when the three women are happily drunk on the streets of New York, and they all sing simultaneously, though each sings a different song from their respective Chinese homelands. It is a moment that reveals the subtle differences between them—they may be singing together, but each sings a different song; Feng Jiau in particular sings a Cantonese song. However as the music soundtrack increases in volume, covering their cacophony of singing, we are left with an image of unity. The soundtrack imposes a harmony that the diegesis does not quite support. The second is the film’s end where we close with a reiteration of the alliance amongst the three women. After their personal realizations of the cultural and value breaches that divide Chinese American husband and mainland wife, Taiwanese father and daughter, the three women gather at night on a snowy rooftop, drinking and smashing their glasses as a sign of female solidarity. Despite the disappointing cracks that run through the seemingly unified

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edifice of Chineseness, the film suggests the women will always have one another. It is a kinship that nonetheless feels flimsy based as it is on the coincidence of their ethnicity, gender, and location—they are, after all, aliens in New York—not on a real knowledge of one another’s problems. Full Moon thus closes with a desire to maintain an illusion of intra-Chinese unity and kinship even as it reveals in equal measure the differences that frustrate such a desire. An Autumn’s Tale similarly builds a fictive kinship between its lead characters only for class to rear its head and reveal the fictitiousness of diasporic kinship. The film reveals how going abroad can disturb class structures and divisions at home, creating a sense of unity among migrants and travelers. Middle-class, bilingual Jennifer from Hong Kong on arrival in New York finds herself keeping company with the working-class, monolingual Figgy, a distant cousin with whom she would not normally have associated in Hong Kong. Being in a foreign place without too much money alters her position on the ladder of social class and Jennifer is immersed into Figgy’s working-class world, sometimes not quite out of choice. On her first meeting with Figgy and his friends, she witnesses their gang-like behavior as they throw down the gauntlet to a rival Hispanic gang. Her lodgings, arranged for her by Figgy, are in a slovenly tenement—dark, dank, and rundown. In New York to find her boyfriend and to take up acting classes, her limited financial resources force her to eat at Chinatown cafes that are a carbon copy of working-class, male-dominated chachantengs in Hong Kong. She is out of her element here, marginalized by both class and gender, and yet, by the sheer fact that she is abroad with limited options, there she is in an environment that would have been completely alien to her in her native Hong Kong. Jennifer’s gradual overcoming of class prejudice and barriers is best represented through her blossoming friendship with Figgy. Though initially reviled for being stereotypically vulgar and uncouth, Figgy proves to be a kind-hearted and loyal friend and even becomes a potential love interest. With its numerous images of Jennifer and Figgy exploring New York together, the film thus suggests that kinship, based on shared Hong Kong origins, based on common memories of Cantonese food and experiences of iconic Hong Kong locations such as Temple Street, can be established even across the class divide. Yet class divides nonetheless remain in a subtle fashion. Jennifer may live in the same slum-like tenement as Figgy but her apartment is soon transformed into something rather more chic and bohemian. With an introduction to a well-off Hong Kong woman with a daughter, Jennifer first gains a part-time job as babysitter in the middle-class suburbs of New York, an area that Figgy seldom has access to. She later becomes a waitress but at

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a high-end Chinese restaurant, a far cry from Figgy’s job as a waiter in a runof-the-mill Chinese restaurant. With her English-speaking abilities, we see her moving beyond the Chinese working-class migrant world and engaging with her Caucasian classmates. This is unlike working-class Figgy who, held back by his limited English, exists in a purely Cantonese-speaking universe despite being in New York. The differences between Jennifer and Figgy thus begin to reassert themselves and when Jennifer’s middle-class ex-boyfriend reappears, wishing for a second chance with her, class divisions and tensions that had once been subsumed emerge once again. Jennifer has to choose between working-class Figgy and her middle-class ex-boyfriend and in choosing the latter, she leaves the working-class community she had been part of for most of the duration of the film. A once-happy community has been sundered by class. Class thus re-emerges strongly in the film to reveal the fragile nature of the initial kinship between Jennifer and Figgy and his working-class community. There may have been a similar ethnic background, the same point of origin, even romantic chemistry between the two but ultimately these factors are not enough to hold them together in a foreign location. Being abroad does not completely wipe out the divisions and distinctions that fissure Chineseness, and in this case Hong Kong Chineseness. Indeed An Autumn’s Tale suggests the advantages of being abroad is not a holding onto ethnic sameness and projection of harmony but the opportunities for cross-cultural exchange, hybridization, and social climbing. The film ends not with an invocation of Jennifer and Figgy’s common point of origin but with the highlighting of the “lateral axes of diaspora” and, in particular, the opportunities that assimilation provides in becoming middle-class (Clifford, qtd in Ang, “On Not Speaking Chinese” 45). Figgy uses Jennifer’s rejection of him as a spur to engage with America and assimilate, for with assimilation comes an elevation in social status. Figgy improves his English and achieves his dream of owning a restaurant, and, with his Americanization, he also ascends the ladder of social class. When we see him politely sending off Caucasian guests at his new restaurant, Figgy is elegantly dressed in a suit and far removed from his uncouth, working-class self previously shown in the film. As the film celebrates Figgy’s successful transformation, it also raises the potential of rekindling the romance between Figgy and Jennifer. Now on a similar class footing, there is little to stand in their way. Their shared heritage as Hong Kong Chinese in New York is taken for granted, for, though Figgy has assimilated, his assimilation has only been to a certain degree—after all, his restaurant is still a Chinese one. In An Autumn’s Tale, the “lateral axes of diaspora” are simply a means to a middleclass end, and, if the film ends with an image of Chinese homogeneity, it is merely a middle-class one.

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IV Conclusion Both Full Moon and An Autumn’s Tale are films that deal with the complexities of the Chinese diaspora. Even as they attempt to paper over the cracks that run through Chineseness, they are nonetheless keenly aware of the plurality of Chinese identities that can divide Chinese from Chinese even amid the alienation of a foreign location. This consciousness of difference has been hard won with earlier filmmakers in the Hong Kong film industry being slow to recognize hybridity at the heart of Chineseness. As Full Moon and An Autumn’s Tale demonstrate, it was a lesson well-learned among Hong Kong directors working in the 1980s and 1990s. From the comedic union of differences in the single location of 1960s Hong Kong, Hong Kong films have moved on to question ethnic unity and commonality in the many locations of the Chinese diaspora. Indeed, Hong Kong cinema’s contribution to narratives of the Chinese diaspora may well be its down-to-earth acknowledgement of multiple forms of Chineseness, even as locations and contexts shift. Even if Hong Kong has re-sinicized itself as Allen Chun has suggested in the years leading to 1997, its many years on the edge of China and its exposure to the rest of the world has consistently prevented it from propagating monolithic conceptions of Chineseness. Practical Hong Kong, at least via the evidence of its cinematic practices, has inspired a pragmatic and flexible Chineseness able to transform intra-Chinese differences into an advantage while also being deeply aware of the divisions of gender and class that run through any vision of fictive ethnic unity.

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IV Chinese Cartographies in the World

7 Translating and Transforming the American Dream: Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Gish Jen’s Typical American Weimin Tang

I In addressing the recurring issue of identity formation, Stuart Hall speaks of the “four great decentrings in intellectual life and in Western thought that have helped to destabilize the question of identity” (Hall, “Ethnicity” 10). The first three of these “decentrings” are associated, respectively, with Marx’s location of the subject in relation to “a continuous dialectic or dialogic relationship” between the past and future, Freud’s location of the subject in relation to the unconscious, and Saussure’s location of the subject in relation to the differential function of language (11). Hall’s fourth decentring of identity concerns the critique of truth as an offshoot of “Western discourses of rationality” (12). Hall refers to the latter as “the great decentring of identity that is a consequence of the relativization of the Western world—of the discovery of other worlds, other people, other cultures, and other languages” (12). It is through the existence of the Other that the totalizing fantasies of western rationality is reduced to “another regime of truth” or “another particular form of knowledge” (12), deeply undermining the authority of western claim of a true self. While the cultural encounter with the Other relativizes the absolutism of the “old logic” of the western self, it also unveils the genealogy of power and knowledge internal to the “installation of Western rationality” (12). As evident in the critique of western rationalism from across different disciplines, the western self achieves its ascension to the One through its exclusion, expropriation, and assimilation of the Other. The genealogies of Chinese and other Asian Americans’ migration history and struggle for cultural representation, as made known by many Chinese and other Asian American historians and critics,1 offer such a material site that reveals how the Other—the Chinese and other Asian Americans—has

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historically been placed and replaced within the power-ridden logic of the selfOther binarism, and how this logic has been sustained, albeit in different guises, through changed phases of history. It is in consequence of such a dominant binary logic that Chinese American literary-cultural criticism, a substantial part of the Asian American academy originated in the pan-Asian American cultural nationalism of the early 1970s, has been entrenched in its material history of racialization and, as such, implicitly operates in complicity with the dominant self-Other discourse. Over the past few decades, debates within the arena of Chinese and Asian American literary-cultural studies have been implicitly governed by an underlying paradigm of anti-assimilation versus assimilation, which subscribes to a reductive dichotomous mechanism by repeatedly constructing an Other in the opposite.2 Within such a self-Other dialectic, Chineseness, namely, ethnic Chinese culture vis-à-vis mainstream American culture, constitutes an essentialized fixed entity either in the dominant discourse of both racial alienation and assimilation, or in Chinese and Asian American countercultural resistance to white supremacy and acculturative ideology. Shunning the implicitly dichotomous thinking, this chapter, by focusing on what have been largely denounced as the two assimilationist Bildungsromane, Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) and Gish Jen’s Typical American (1991), brings to the fore an in- and outsider’s profound ambivalence that illuminates a full complexity of the cross-cultural Chinese American subject. Evoking the typical colonial “mimic man” that speaks of, as Homi Bhabha puts it, “a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 86), as well as what Carol Jacobs calls the “monstrosity” of cultural translation (see Jacobs), my rereading of Wong’s and Jen’s texts teases out a divisive voicing underneath the apparent textual representation of full assimilation. This is the subtextual voicing of the cross-cultural Chinese American subject’s simultaneous in- and exclusion, hybridity, as well as an untranslatability that articulates a Chineseness both as a cultural and historical given, and as what Raymond Williams calls the “actively residual,” namely, “as an effective element of the present” as differentiated from the “archaic” that is “wholly recognised as an element of the past” (Williams 121–27). In terms of Williams’s concept of the “actively residual,” Chineseness, whilst indicating a cultural otherness alluding to Chinese Americans’ historical racialization, emerges as an active force within a cross-cultural and translational space, contributing to the at once shifting and merged double consciousness of the bicultural Chinese American subject. It is precisely in the active presence of this Chineseness, both as a historical given and cultural reinvention, that the myth of the American Dream as a trope of assimilation in the narratives of Wong’s and Jen’s mimic (wo)men’s striving for likeness to the original symbol

Translating and Transforming the American Dream

is simultaneously negotiated and contested. As this chapter demonstrates, the “assimilated” Chinese American protagonists’ identification with the American Dream of upward mobility simultaneously gestures towards a subtextual articulation of the racialized Other’s Chinese otherness and immobility. Ultimately transcending the reductive dichotomous polarization, the Dream narratives of Wong and Jen are reread here as enunciating a metonymic displacement and transformation of the national myth in the cross-cultural Chinese American subject’s very translational repetition of the American Dream itself.

II The trope of assimilation: De-mythologizing the Dream of upward mobility When Martin Luther King delivered his magnificent speech “I have a dream” decades ago, he ignited a vision of the “promised land” of America among the civil-rights marchers, especially the underprivileged people of color. Although his crusade on behalf of the disenfranchised racialized minority groups was cut short by his assassination five years later and, for many, true racial equality and justice remain an unfulfilled dream, the lure of the American Dream of freedom and equality lives on. In his recent book The American Dream, Jim Cullen traces the genealogy of the Dream and reveals how it originated in the imagination of the early religious dissenters and the Founding Fathers, and moved later from the domain of print culture into mass media where it becomes enshrined as the “national motto” and the “most immediate component of an American identity” (Cullen 5). It is true that national identity is in reality a complex concept that has always been marked with a sense of uncertainty and is undercut by other means of identification, such as “blood, religion, language, geography, a shared history, or some combination of these” (6). It is also true that it has been increasingly destabilized through global migration and the loosening of national boundaries. Nevertheless, as Cullen suggests, the Dream has functioned as “a kind of lingua franca” that continues to invoke a collective imagination of the United States nation as a promised land of freedom and opportunity, re-imagined and reinforced by the new Dream-followers coming from all around the world (6). While the alluring power of the Dream has created over the centuries the myth of a nation on wheels, proliferated through the imaginings of a formidable body of literature,3 upward mobility, like equality in the Founding Fathers’ “holy scripture,” has predominantly been a white prerogative. Correlating Cullen’s claim of “a decisively racial cast” associated with the Dream of upward

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mobility (Cullen 61), Sau-ling Wong’s studies assert a unidirectional movement in mainstream American discourse on mobility, which implies “an endpoint of immobility,” of “at-homeness, rootedness, or centredness,” namely, achieving social stability (Sau-ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature 122). Accordingly, mainstream literary scholarship on mobility reflects what Wong calls “a group-sanctioned ideological direction” (122), or what Edwin Fussell discerns as “a teleological nationalism cartographically advancing from right to the left, Old World to New, reality to beatitude” (Fussell 14). In contrast, Chinese and other Asian American narratives of mobility are from the very beginning not only marked by a geographically reversed eastward movement or a multidirectionality, but also invested with a general sense of socio-economic stagnation and “a keen collective awareness of immobility as a historical given” (Sau-ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature 123), bringing to mind Chinese and other Asian Americans’ historical exclusion symbolized by all the “alien land laws” that prohibited the “aliens ineligible to citizenship” from buying and owning land. Ruminating on the “Dream Metaphor,” Robert B. Heilman draws a directional axis in describing the drastic redirection of the Dream of mobility after the disappearance of the frontier, at which the “horizontal mobility”— “the lure of the frontier”—gives way to “vertical mobility,” namely, going “higher in the world as it is; ‘success’ . . . [represented by] money, property, things, pleasures” (Heilman 10–11). Heilman’s formulation of the Dream in terms of vertical mobility captures the socio-economic change after the Civil War that led to the official closing of the frontier in 1890. Nevertheless, what the past of horizontal westering—the conquering of “the frontier”—represents, that is, the spiritual and material ascension to freedom and self-realization, remains lodged in the American national imagination. What I would like to draw attention to is that this sense of verticality emerged from the western world’s colonization of “the frontier,” and the American nation’s western expansion merges with as well as consolidates such a material and spiritual ascension that is clearly associated with the American Dream of upward mobility. In truth, Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential “frontier thesis” directly links the development of American democracy, individualism, and physical and spiritual mobility to the frontier. For Turner, the frontier is not only “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” but also the birthplace of a unique American democracy where “immigrants were Americanized . . .” (F. Turner 32–47). With Turner’s “frontier thesis,” the Dream is thus significantly rendered to and theoretically substantiated as a national myth of freedom and Americanization, designating a verticality arisen from a horizontal past. It is precisely with the vertical ascension in the myth-making—its own upward mobility—of the American Dream that the history of external

Translating and Transforming the American Dream

and internal colonial violence gets “lost” and muted. Amidst the mythmaking, the Dream succeeds in acquiring an extra-temporal verticality, a hierarchical pinnacle devoid of a horizontal past of colonial acts. Thus, irrespective of its inherent ambiguity and its exclusive nature, the Dream prevails as an overarching metaphor of unidirectional ascension to freedom and independence and as an essentializing trope of Americanization in the dominant discourse of US acculturating ideologies of the twentieth century. As such, the Dream metaphor has equally figured as a trope of assimilation not only in the counter-hegemonic Chinese and Asian American discourse, but also in the critical censure of the works of Wong and Jen. The metaphorical Dream values of vertical mobility were highlighted to symbolize the American Way of Life in the fundamentally assimilationist policies of the melting pot and cultural pluralism during the decade around 1950, the historical period in which both Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Jen’s Typical American are set. Despite the Red Scare and political stagnation of the postwar McCarthy Era, pro-Chinese sentiments from wartime patriotism lingered on and Chinese and other Asian Americans were singled out as an “Asian model minority” in order to demonstrate to other minority groups, and the divided Cold War world, the Dream values of the American democratic system. It is also in this general political climate that Wong’s autobiography caused such a stir, and she was sent to Asia by the State Department in 1953 on a four-month grant to speak about her experience of American democracy. Her “model minority” stance subsequently came to epitomize the success story of the American Dream. As the overtly homogenizing melting-pot policy gave way to the less dominant paradigm of liberal cultural pluralism in the wake of civil rights movements and major changes of immigration laws in the 1960s, the Dream metaphor came under fire from the post-1960s anti-assimilationist pan–Asian American cultural nationalists for being identical with white Americanism. In terms of what Karen Su calls the reductive paradigm of “bad politics = bad art” (Su 26), Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter was readily targeted as nothing more than an American Dream narrative. However, two decades later when multiculturalism took off in the early 1990s, the early pan–Asian American cultural nationalism’s agenda was paradoxically rejected as being Americancentered, whereas its later stage of a self-conscious move towards “claiming America” was criticized as producing Bildungsromane that reinscribe an American Bildung, namely Americanization. With her novel Typical American appearing in 1991, Jen belatedly joined the ride that took Chinese American writers Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan to the peak of critical attention, only to find herself equally relegated to subscribing to the general assimilationist theme. Targeted in the literary-

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cultural criticism of “developmental narratives” by Chinese and other Asian American critics, such as Elaine Kim, Lisa Lowe, Shirley Lim, and Shelley Wong in the 1990s, Typical American is interpreted as tracing the Bildung of the Chinese immigrant protagonists’ acculturation into US society that is, in Shirley Lim’s words, “represented as desirable, fetishistically possessable, and offering utopionist possibilities” (Lim, “Immigration and Diaspora” 299). In its characters’ progressive identification with larger American society, in particular, the American Dream, as Lim contends, “the natal ‘home’ is constructed as less than already past—it is always already absent” (300). It is this “void of origin”—“the lacuna of the other half of the world”— that, in Lim’s view, problematizes “the novel’s gaze on the ‘foreign’ Chinese,” the Other that is othered by the Americanized Other (301). Such an antidevelopmentalist critique may nonetheless be itself suspicious of reiterating the nativism-versus-assimilationism paradigm that presumes a “foreign” Chineseness as an essentialized fixed entity. The reductive strain in labeling Jen’s work simply as nothing more than an “affiliative” assimilation narrative, thus eliminating the novel’s complexity and its inquisitive potential, invokes Jingqi Ling’s criticism of “the reductive interpretative tendency among Asian American critics” with regard to Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (J. Ling 145). With the grouping together of Wong and Jen as both authors of “developmental narratives”—in spite of a gap of a half century in between— for their ideological embrace of the American Dream in Fifth Chinese Daughter and Typical American respectively, there is a peculiar repetition between the rhetoric of the political and cultural trajectory in the 1970s and 1980s and the critical censure of the Chinese American Bildungsromane in the late 1990s. If the earlier pan–Asian American cultural nationalist movement was in direct rebellion against the exclusive integrationist logic that permeated the first half of the twentieth century, the transnational and diasporic imperatives of the late 1990s, in the wake of waning multiculturalism, precipitated a similar denunciation of what came to be seen as an assimilationist move of “claiming America” and reinscribing Chinese and other Asian Americans’ presence in the making of American history. It is in this remarkable repetition, despite significant historical changes over the span of fifty years, that one sees, once again, how Americanization, symbolized by the Dream metaphor, has served as a trope of assimilation, dominating both mainstream cultural policy-making and Chinese and Asian American countercultural discourses, as well as the critical reception of the works of Wong and Jen. Precisely with respect to the implicitly dichotomous thinking underlying the Dream- and counter-Dream discourses, the following discussion exploits, in particular, the space left open by the Dream metaphor itself as it pervades the texts of Wong and Jen. In the light of theories of cultural translation, it illuminates how, in the mimicking act

Translating and Transforming the American Dream

of the cross-cultural Chinese American protagonists’ translation of the Dream of upward mobility, the symbol of assimilation loses the sense of its “prior, archaic image or identity” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 107). Instead, it discloses an actively residual Chineseness whose otherness and negotiative disruption have been deeply imbricated in the protagonists’ translation and transformation of the American Dream, articulating an inconsistency between, and a non-totalizable fragmentariness of, the symbol and the symbolized.

III Seeing double: The masquerade dream narratives and metonymic displacement Drawing on both Freud’s work on the interpretation of dreams and Jakobson’s concept of the dual structure of metaphor and metonymy in relation to Freud’s dream-work (Freud; Jakobson), Jacques Lacan further incorporates Saussurian principles of the paradigmatic relation of substitution and the syntagmatic relation of sequence into his theorization of the way in which the signification of the unconscious structure is produced.4 In his reconceptualization of the metonymic and metaphorical axes, the former clearly denotes a diachronic function as represented by parole and the latter a synchronic function represented by langue. As Ragland-Sullivan puts it, “Lacan’s concept of metonymy lies on the diachronic slope of unstable meanings, of evocative paroles and the gaps implied by Desire. Metaphor creates synchronic meaning by infusing unconscious life into the neutral phonemes and words of the Symbolic order” (RaglandSullivan 252). It is in terms of the differentiated functions of the metaphoric and metonymic poles, with the former denoting a synchronic stability and the latter a diachronic displacement, gaps, and instability, that theories of cultural translation postulate how translation as a metaphor itself, through the activity of “carrying across” by means of substituting one sign for the other, ends up, in Walter Benjamin’s words, being relocated “at other points of time” or metonymic sequences (Benjamin, “Task of the Translator” from Selected Writings 258). What is implicated here is not only the transplantation and destabilizing transmutation of the metaphor that symbolizes a pinnacle of stability, but also a disclosure of what remains inherently elusive in the original metaphor as a signifier. In this sense, translation as an activity of “carrying across” can never be complete in its striving for resemblance, but insinuates the “monstrosity” of translation mentioned earlier, revealing not only a fragmentariness of the unitary metaphor in the original, but also the entry of what Paul de Man calls “a version of the others” that discloses the “nonadequation of symbol” (de Man 91).

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Such transformative twists and turns performed by translation, which disarticulate the authoritative totality of the original symbol, capture the essence of the cross-cultural Chinese American subject’s translation of the American Dream in Wong’s and Jen’s Dream narratives. As shown in what follows, in between the lines delineating the immigrant and American-born Chinese American protagonists’ striving for identification with the Dream metaphor of vertical ascension, there emerges a double voicing articulating the other half of the mimic (wo)men’s double consciousness, an “actively residual” Chineseness that marks their ambivalent in- and exclusion as the simultaneous in- and outsider whilst constituting their contestative status as the crossculturally interpellant Chinese American subject. In the process of the crosscultural subject’s striving for likeness to the “original,” which nonetheless reveals their bicultural ambivalence and untranslatable hidden immobility, the metaphorical extra-temporal verticality of upward mobility devoid of diachronic linkages is displaced with a metonymic horizontality of disjuncture, instability, and non-totality. In a review, Patricia Storace provides a unique insight into Typical American’s preoccupation with the “notion of pairs, doubles, and the interplay of possibility and limitation as the famous Chinese book of divination, the I Ching, or Book of Changes” (Storace 9). She points out that “[e]ven the typical American of Jen’s title is a Chinese immigrant, a man of two names, two cultures, and two languages” (9). Contrary to Lim’s criticism of Typical American as reducing “the natal ‘home’” to a “lacuna of the other half of the world,” the seeping into the Dream narratives of disjunctive fragments and chunks from along the horizontal axis saturated with past histories, gendered cultural practices, and the socio-racial exclusion of the racialized Other, constitutes the subtextual voice that speaks from the other half of the divided consciousness of the bicultural Chinese American protagonists, forming a sharp contrast to their conscious effort to join the ride of amnesic vertical ascension. Typical American begins with Ralph, still a little boy in his natal hometown Shanghai, being called his Chinese name Yifeng, meaning “intent on the peak,” and having the typical Chinese filial son’s intention to “grow up his father’s son” (Jen, Typical American 3–4). Similarly, born the fifth daughter to Chinese immigrant parents, the name Jade Snow is a literal translation of the typical Chinese traditional name for girls: Yu Xue. While the doubles of the names may count little in themselves, they nonetheless point to the whole subtextual presence of the Chinese American protagonists’ “other half of the world.” In fact, biculturality is consistently a divisive voice to the leitmotif of Jade Snow’s conscious move towards Americanization in Fifth Chinese Daughter, whereas it emerges in Typical American as a silhouette to Ralph’s pastless obsession with the American myth of limitless self-expansion.

Translating and Transforming the American Dream

Although Wong publicly makes her Chinese cultural heritage a “plus,” a badge of “distinction” (J. Wong xi), the actual experience of living in between two conflicting cultures as portrayed in her autobiography is anything but the poised position she either consciously takes or is interpreted as taking. Contrary to Patricia Blinda’s judgment of Wong’s possession of a world consisting of “essentially static,” “separate and totalized unities” (Blinda 60), Jade Snow’s duality is clearly witnessed in the text as setting her on a lonely journey, bewildered, questioning, negotiating, and trying to find a third way to come to terms with the two worlds in conflict. Growing up in a working-class Chinese immigrant family in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Jade Snow’s early sense of self is much determined by her father’s Chinese patriarchal familial order, which devalues females and requires absolute filial obedience. From early on, “life [is] a constant puzzle” that confuses her (Fifth Chinese Daughter 3). Her confusion increases when, inevitably, the gendered traditional values of her Chinese world clash with the American culture of individualistic independence and equality as taught by her American education. While living through many a frustrating lonely moment agonizing over her father’s unfair treatment of her as a female, Jade Snow is also seen in the book staging an open rebellion against her father’s authority. One reads that, although it leaves her “a measure of freedom she had not had before, and an outer show of assurance, she was deeply troubled within” (130). The fragmenting cross-cultural confrontation should not be taken merely as part of Jade Snow’s individuation process towards the mainstream American world that forms a neat contrast to her parents’ Chinese world in order to reinforce, as Shirley Lim’s recuperative feminist reading suggests, a surface division “built on two polarities,” that is, “oppression and freedom, patriarchy and female autonomy, home and outside, past and present” (Lim, “The Tradition” 258). Nor should the bicultural juxtaposition be interpreted as Wong’s deliberate intention to establish, in Blinda’s words, “the fixed reference . . . between her life and the China of a bygone era on the one hand and the expectations she thinks white America has of the Chinese women on the other,” from which Wong’s “rigid sense of identity is thus derived” (Blinda 55). Rather, the pain of living through one’s duality, of experiencing a fractured self, is as genuinely palpable for Jade Snow as for many second-generation Chinese Americans living in-between cultures. Jade Snow’s questioning and rejection of her parental Chinese culture does not mean her utter abandonment of the one and adoption of the other or of her keeping both worlds completely separate. As revealed in the book, her inquiring mind and equally critical attitude towards the white American world, “the philosophy of the foreigners,” lead her to creatively forge a third “middle way” in between two cultures:

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No matter how critical she was of them [her parents], she could not discard all they stood for and accept as a substitute the philosophy of the foreigners. It took very little thought to discover that the foreign philosophy also was subject to criticism, and that for her there had to be a middle way. . . . If she chose neither to reject nor accept in toto, she must sift both and make her decision alone. . . . (Fifth Chinese Daughter 130–32)

The cultural translation with which she engages herself by writing the autobiography may appear, on a surface level, to be an enactment of her cultural ambassador’s goodwill of “creating better understanding of the Chinese culture on the part of Americans” (vii), or an inscription of the mimic woman’s Dream narrative that is, in Blinda’s words, “a Horatio Alger account in Chinese guise” (Blinda 59). Yet, on a covert level, the unidirectional assimilation progression from “Chinese” to “American” is significantly redirected towards a bi- or multi-directional enterprise. It creates in the middle a contact zone where both cultures are constantly set in contestation and negotiation. As such, rather than being fixed as either the one or the other, or as an exotic ideal blending of east and west, Wong’s autobiographical translation of the American Dream fashions into existence a “monstrified” duplicate of the American identity that articulates as much a sense of novelty, difference, and ambivalence as the self-portrait of Jade Snow making pottery in a Chinatown store window: “A woman in the window, her legs astride a potter’s wheel, her hair in braids, her hands perpetually messy with sticky California clay” (Fifth Chinese Daughter 244), and the finished products are traditional Chinese pottery. Jade Snow’s successful integration of both cultures, which demonstrates a hybridized “middle way” that is “her own personally applicable combination,” does not, however, indicate a final resolution. Her return to her parents’ San Francisco Chinatown gestures towards what Lim sees as the rebellious daughter’s paradoxical desire for the authorial father’s recognition and, hence, “the tremendous ambivalence surrounding the struggle [for independence]” (Lim, “The Tradition” 259). This subtextual ambivalence of a cross-culturally gender-charged father-daughter relationship is augmented by the Chinese American protagonist’s implicit exclusion as the racialized Other despite her apparent inclusion. While overt racism encountered by both Jade Snow and her family is abundantly expressed in Wong’s text, it is those paradoxical moments at which Jade Snow experiences herself as an insider of the Mills’ American society that most explicitly voice her insider’s outsidedness. One such moment is when Jade Snow’s essay is chosen by her English professor for reading at an English conference held at Mills College. Her intense feeling of

Translating and Transforming the American Dream

being “a participant” is coupled with a consciousness of herself having been an outsider: Jade Snow heard this announcement, smiled, but could find no words to answer when her classmates congratulated her. How could she tell them that for a year she had been watching and listening with wonder to catch every movement and sound of these Caucasian girls who participated so easily in the college scene, who absorbed and contributed while she remained a mere spectator? Now at last she too could claim to be a participant. (Fifth Chinese Daughter 166)

Elsewhere in the book, Jade Snow’s exteriority is subtly mirrored in the implicit exclusion of the Chinese as “the colonized” in Mills’s “colonial structure” of “democratic living in the truest sense”: Although Jade Snow could not participate in residence-hall living, she was invited to affiliate with a hall. She chose Mills Hall, a large, colonial structure still standing from the first Mills days of ninety years ago. This building housed over a hundred girls, and its kitchen staff was entirely Chinese, some of them descendents of the first Chinese kitchen help who worked for the founders of the college. (157)

Resonating with the divergent subtext of cultural duality, ambivalence, genderedness, and racial in- and exclusion in the mimic woman’s Dream narrative of success which simultaneously articulates her untranslatable difference and inability of being fully assimilated, the dream-turned-nightmare story of the mimic man Ralph’s eventual fall from his rags-to-riches ascension in Jen’s Typical American reveals, from a different pathway, a similar concealed zone of an impasse. As Storace’s remark about Ralph as “a man of two names, two cultures, and two languages” suggests, duality, while it never lends itself to such prominence as in Fifth Chinese Daughter, uncannily fills up the “lacuna” conjured up by critics who refuse to see the presence of “the other half of the world” in a hasty dismissal on account of the novel’s assimilationist trait. Unlike the American-born Jade Snow’s persistent Chinese world imposed on her by her working-class immigrant Chinese parents, whose survival in a hostile land is dependent on the ghettoized Chinese world of San Francisco’s Chinatown, Ralph loses his upper class family and native country upon the Communist seizure of China. Homeless, illegally stranded in America, and on the verge of committing suicide, he is saved by what could be perceived as a miracle when he is found by his sister Theresa. He is re-endowed with a sense of home-coming, especially when, after marrying Theresa’s friend Helen, he

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settles down to a family life with two women and later two daughters, Callie and Mona. His linear progression before his ultimate downfall, from realizing his dream of achieving a doctorate in mechanical engineering to receiving tenure as a professor, is dotted with the comfort and remembrance of “home” restored by the presence of Older Sister Theresa and wife Helen. While “Know-It-All” Theresa brings back the old love-hate relationship of sibling rivalry characteristic of home in Shanghai, Helen represents, as she did for Ralph from the first sight, the familiar past: “And around her [Helen], China” (Jen, Typical American 56). Her slenderness, attentiveness, and her Shanghainese dialect and way of cooking, all “inflamed more than abated his [Ralph’s] homesickness” (57). To a great extent, Ralph’s conscious pursuit of the American Dream is coupled with an unconscious desire for the familiarity and comfort of homeliness and Chineseness, a desire that is written into the subtext through his subordination of the female characters. There is, so to speak, a re-imagined and restored Chinese patriarchal family structure of the past, where Ralph, substituting for his lost father, believes “I am [he is] the father of this [new] family” (140). His masculine authority is particularly shown in the book where he takes pleasure in controlling even the way Helen breathes. Indeed, parallel to his embarkation on the Americanizing upward ride, Ralph remains psychically the traditional Chinese patriarch who demands and commands within the domestic space of home. As portrayed in the book, he actually believes that “At home, the husband would command, the wife obey” (69). He wishes that “he were in China, where if there turned out to be something wrong with the marriage he could always take a concubine. That was a better system, he thought, more sure” (69). In her exposure of the “gendered codes of Americanness” in Jen’s Typical American, Rachel C. Lee poignantly points to the fact how “the national trope of self-making” is in fact “male self-making” (R. Lee 61). In this sense, Ralph’s deep-seated belief in traditional patriarchal Confucian teachings merges well with the male self-making of “legendary America.” Under the dual patriarchal dominance within both Chinese and American cultures, both public and domestic spaces, women’s labor—Helen’s homemaking and Theresa’s chipping in on the mortgage payment for their suburban house— and their subordination naturally form the muted subtext to Ralph’s willful male self-making. In this sense, it is not different from the racially biased code of American national self-making that excludes the contributions made by the racialized Other. Paradoxically, the commencement of Ralph’s obsession with starting “a real success story . . . of a self-made man” (Typical American 193) by establishing his own business in collaboration with the vulgar self-made millionaire Grover is also the point at which his Dream turns into a nightmare. Lee rightly points to the fact that “the homosocial bonding of Ralph and

Translating and Transforming the American Dream

Grover takes on a . . . misogynist cast as the two men commune through the objectification of women” (R. Lee 61). One reads in the novel the scene where Ralph, on the first night out with Grover, witnesses Grover’s sexual itemization of a restaurant waitress as a dessert dish to the two men’s meal (Typical American 104). Ralph’s fascination with Grover eventually leads him to invite, in practice, Grover’s physical invasion of the domestic space of home, paving the way to his long-intended subjugation of Helen’s body. Although all three immigrant characters in the novel, as Jen herself affirms, “find some version of the American Dream . . . [which is] very different for each of them” (Jen, qtd in Satz 138), there is a family dynamic there that always hooks them back to past history and culture. Jen admits that she “thought a lot about how what happens to Ralph is shaped by his experience with Theresa and his father. I [she] was thinking too about how much what becomes of you in America is shaped at least as much by family dynamics as by America” (in Satz 138). Precisely because of this in itself rather ambivalent stance on the part of the author, who in another interview claims that “the Changs are not any less American than anyone else” (Jen, “MELUS Interview” 115), and who starts the novel with “It’s an American story,” one cannot fail to see, reading through the Dream narrative, the “Chinese view” from “basically Chinese people,” as Jen herself acknowledges (Jen, qtd in Satz 138). Not unlike Jade Snow’s unacknowledged ambivalence and anxiety that go along with her acknowledged American-Bildung, the Changs’ pursuit of the American Dream is tethered to an ambivalence that speaks of their simultaneous identification with and difference from the “typical American.” Despite Jen’s portrayal of the Changs’ conscious parodic imitation and ridicule of the “typical American” whilst becoming themselves typically American in many ways, a “Chinese view” emerges as a double throughout the novel, constantly indicating from the background the Changs’ Chineseness as the “actively residual.” While Theresa and Helen, their Americanization notwithstanding, serve as Ralph’s double, the mute reminder of his Chinese past, Chinese expressions and commonsensical notions permeate the text, forming another mute reminder of the Changs’ elusive yet frequently tangible Chineseness and, at times, even their Chinese sense of moral superiority. Theresa’s love affair with the married man Old Chao, both friend of the Changs and head of Ralph’s engineering department, is a shock to Helen and Ralph when it emerges: “An affair!” Ralph told Helen. “Impossible,” she said. “Chinese people don’t do such things. . . . Then Old Chao isn’t Chinese anymore” (Typical American 168). Ironically, the Chineseness by which they define themselves does not withhold Helen from falling prey to Grover. Chineseness, elusive and inconsistent as it seems to be, functions as a code-switching cue to the Changs’ profound ambivalence between, with its negation, the outsider’s insidedness and, with its affirmation, the insider’s

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outsidedness. Nevertheless, when the Changs switch the code to the negative and call themselves the “Chang-kees” rather than “Yankees,” they are— instead of being the true “typical American”—more like Bhabha’s colonial “mimic man,” namely, “a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 86). Here, the mimic man’s “difference” also indicates an involuntariness about which the Changs can do nothing, as shown, for example, by their American devotion to baseball being seriously mocked by the true “typical Americans”: “[T]he one time they went to an actual game, people had called them names and told them to go back to their laundry. . . . Anyway, they preferred to stay home and watch. ‘More comfortable.’ ‘More convenient.’ ‘Can see better,’ they agreed” (Typical American 127–28). As Theresa observes in the novel, their mimic (wo)men’s difference here is a straight outcome of being racially different: “to be nonwhite in this society was indeed to need education, accomplishment—some source of dignity. A white person was by definition somebody. Other people needed, across their hearts, one steel rib” (Typical American 200). Speaking in relation to the “subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite,” Bhabha stresses that such a mimic man is the product of the colonial “desire for a reformed and recognizable Other” in consequence of its disavowal of the colonized Other’s difference. In this sense, the Dream narrative of the racialized cross-cultural Other’s mimicry is similarly the product of the dominant discourse of US acculturative ideology. Like the colonial discourse of mimicry that “is constructed around an ambivalence . . . [and] must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 86), the linear progressive Dream narratives of mimicry are narrated upon a subterranean ground of profound ambivalence, dissonance, and untranslatability. In Wong’s and Jen’s portrayal of the Chinese American protagonists’ striving for likeness to the original, for the synchronic resemblance, mobility and inclusion are inflected with the diachronic fragments and chunks of the mimic (wo)men as the racialized Other or raced subject, such as cultural dualities, gendered and racial exclusion and immobility reminiscent of the historical othering of Chinese and other Asian Americans driven home by historians and critics (see note 1). In this sense, mimicry inadvertently turns the symbol into what Bhabha calls “the sign of a double articulation” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 86), enunciating a simultaneous identification and difference, assimilation and contestation. Like the repetitious “slippage,” “excess,” and “difference” that emerge through the colonial discourse of mimicry, the divergent subtextual voicing of the fragments and chunks that mark the Chinese American protagonists’ Chineseness as the “actively residual” not only articulates a full complexity of the cross-cultural Chinese American subject as the in- and outsider but also,

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by inscribing cultural difference, instability, and transmutation into the myth of the American Dream alongside the textual leitmotif of the racialized Other’s American-Bildung, rearticulates the Dream metaphor as a metonymic presence of partiality devoid of its metaphorical totality.

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8 Diasporic Desires: Narrating Sexuality in the Memoirs of Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Li-Young Lee Kenneth Chan

I “The subject of Asian American sexualities is more complex than any of the names we give it,” writes Russell Leong (1) in his introductory chapter to Asian American Sexualities, a seminal collection that reflected the growing importance of queer and sexuality studies within Asian American studies in the 1990s. This complexity arises from, firstly, the ethnic and cultural “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity,” to use Lisa Lowe’s formulation (L. Lowe 67), of Asian America; secondly, the fluid and multivalent possibilities of sexual desire, identification, and practices; and, thirdly, the cross-hatching of ethnicity and sexuality, where ethnicity informs and/or constrains sexual desire, and sexuality disturbs and/or rewrites ethnic identity. This interpenetration of ethnicity and sexuality is particularly significant when one considers, for instance, the history of the Chinese in the United States, where anti-Chinese immigration laws from 1882 to as late as 1965 have summarily engendered male-dominated populations in Chinatowns across the country.1 A compulsory heterosexuality became both an ideological and material urgency in these communities, as reflected, for example, in Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea.2 The post-1965 shifts in US immigration policy opened the gates to a diasporic influx of Chinese migrants, which further deepened the heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity of what constituted Chinese cultural identity in America. Not only did immigrants arrive from the Chinese mainland, but ethnic Chinese from the Chinese diaspora also joined the migratory flow, many coming from countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. “Diaspora” as a critical trope accrued

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cultural and intellectual significance, as Asian American scholars began to use it to track the shifting complexities of Chineseness and the way global mobility, transnationalism, and globalization inflect its meaning. The complexities and complications that diaspora brings to Chineseness in the context of Chinese American politics have a powerful impact on how sexualities and sexual desires are consequently formed and deployed in the narration of cultural and national identities. As Benigno Sánchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton observe of diaspora’s effect on sexuality and its representation: Sexuality is not only not essence, not timeless, it is also not fixed in place; sexuality is on the move. With this new clarity, we are in a better position to analyze the valences of body-in-place and consider the transformations in sexualities that move between— indeed, may have been produced at—the interstices of specific geopolitical territories. Translocation itself, movement itself, now enter the picture as theoretically significant factors in the discussion of sexuality. (Sánchez-Eppler and Patton 2)

My purpose in this chapter is to deploy Sánchez-Eppler and Patton’s critical focus to attend to the representation and rhetoric of sexuality and sexual desire within the narratives of two Chinese American diasporic autobiographies: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moonfaces: Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist (1996) and Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995). Both Lim’s and Lee’s texts seem deeply conscious of how sexual desire mobilizes diaspora, and how diaspora, in turn, informs sexual desire. But these texts also reveal anxieties of how to narrate sexuality in diaspora, particularly in the crossing of national and cultural boundaries, in both cases dealing with ethnic Chinese diasporic subjects moving out of anti-Chinese originating homelands to the United States of America. Lim uses her Malaysian Peranakan cultural background and her academic intellectual emplacement to analyze her sexual choices, while Lee turns to his Indonesian-Chinese identity and his familial connections to Protestant Christianity to frame his sexual relationship with his Anglo-American wife. Significantly, and probably not coincidentally, both narratives wrestle with looming father figures and the powerful shadows they cast on the sexualities of the protagonists, creating conflicted relationships between parent and child. While both Lim and Lee empathetically identify with their fathers as emblems of ethnic minority persecution, they also resist them as signifiers of Chinese patriarchal oppression that paradoxically work through the “universalizing” narratives of sexuality, which are Freudian psychoanalysis in Lim’s case, and Christian theology in Lee’s. Yet, despite this resistance, both texts still anxiously find themselves embedded in and invoking the very discourses they strive to reject, with Lim’s intimations of the

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incest taboo and Lee’s over-wrought heterosexual assertions of an idealized erotic relationship with his wife. Before moving on to the analysis of these two texts, I wish to qualify my critique of sexual desires in these autobiographies. For how does one begin to question the ideological constructions of these autobiographies without feeling as if one has transgressed the sacred ground of the subject, which western philosophical traditions have so privileged, while apparently diminishing the gravity of personal loss that these authors have suffered because of their national, cultural, and gendered positions? But, more pointedly, for the purposes of this chapter, how does one confront the defining power of desire (in both its general and specifically sexual sense of the word) that energizes and configures the narratives of these texts? While sexuality and queer studies have taught us to demystify this obscure and sublime object we call desire in order that we may inquire into the discourses of power that determine and structure it, desire still slips from our analytical grasp to assert its mesmerizing hold on the reality of our everyday lives. Or, as a colleague of mine once rather simply put it, “Desire is desire.” While I resist the coercive insistence of this statement’s solipsistic self-containment, I rather anxiously and reluctantly attest to the reality of its experiential “truth.” One could argue that the narration of sexual desire in both Lim’s and Lee’s texts demonstrates the culturally contradictory position that the diasporic subject occupies. For what alternatives to these narratives of sexuality can one turn to, particularly considering the formative social and cultural matrices out of which our sexual identities emerge? In other words, the risks and consequences of diasporic displacement are very real, hence producing the kind of conflicted narratives we see in Lim’s and Lee’s memoirs. It is in this context that these two texts should be read as forceful but anxious attempts at grappling with the cultural politics of sexuality in the Chinese diasporic narrative, while facing the traumatic realities of disruption, transformation, and loss.

II Among the White Moonfaces: Hybridity and interracial sexuality The literary and critical work of Malaysian-Chinese American Shirley Geoklin Lim has firmly established her as a prominent and important figure in postcolonial, diasporic, and Asian American literary studies. By making her mark first as a prolific poet and fiction writer whose imaginary vistas have transported readers from colonial and postcolonial Malaysia and Singapore to the immigrant world of Asian America,3 Lim has garnered numerous awards including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (1980)—having the distinction

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of being the first Asian and first woman to win the award—and the American Book Award (1990). As an Asian American scholar, she has not only situated herself in the middle of the critical dialogue on various Asian American issues but has also championed specifically the writings of Asian American women.4 Lim’s memoir Among the White Moonfaces tells a rags-to-riches story of one woman’s rise from her humble Malacca beginnings to that of a prominent intellectual and scholar at a prestigious university in the United States.5 In a sense, this is the classic Horatio Alger’s narrative retold through the problematics of diaspora, race, hybridity, and intellectual and institutional hierarchies, though Lim is very careful to interweave her life story with a critique of the grand narrative of the American Dream. As an Asian American immigrant tale, the memoir recounts the difficulties and pains of displacement, culture shock, alienation, and rejection that a diasporic person suffers. But, more than that, it also depicts a journey of cultural, intellectual, and sexual awakenings and discoveries, a journey where the demarcations of self and community are alternately defined and blurred, and where national and cultural identities are constantly contested and negotiated, not only in postcolonial Malaysia but also in the United States—a struggle that continues even after Lim, having endured years of cultural identity crisis, has finally and with much difficulty chosen to surrender her Malaysian citizenship in order to become a US citizen. This journey is also Lim’s paradoxical search for “home,” despite her knowing that “unhomeliness,” to follow Homi Bhabha’s formulation, will always be her ontological state of consciousness as a diasporic person and a cultural hybrid. On the other hand, this deterritorialized state is not unproductive in Lim’s estimation, as it has helped to spur her growth as a poet, an author, and a scholar, an explanation that is reminiscent of how modernist discourses on exile and alienation have accounted for the creative geniuses of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. These various threads of self-discovery and cultural identification eventually twine around the central tropes of postcolonial hybridity and diasporic displacement. In a sense, hybridity and diaspora not only determine Lim’s choice of material in the construction of her memoir, they also provide the propulsive force that in a deterministic fashion drives the linearity of Lim’s narrative, hence producing the sort of conclusion that, in light of the factors involved, would be deemed “inevitable.” It is this “inevitability” and its relation to sexuality that I hope to interrogate in this chapter. In the subtitle of her memoir, Lim calls herself a “Nyonya feminist.”6 The female Nyonya and the male Baba together constitute the Peranakan heterosexual couple. Also known as the Straits-born Chinese, the Peranakans often trace their ancestry to interracial marriages between fifteenth-century Chinese merchants and the Malays of the Malacca Sultanate. 7 As MalayChinese hybrids, the Peranakans occupy that “impure” cultural space of in-

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betweenness which often results in their marginalization within or exclusion from both Malay and Chinese societies. While the Malay majority in Malaya (and later Malaysia) politically and socially marginalized the Chinese minority, the Chinese community, in turn, considered the Peranakans as culturally tainted and tolerated them as cultural inferiors in their midst. Although her Chinese father speaks Hokkien,8 Lim was brought up by her Nyonya mother to speak Malay, the language of the Peranakans, and to live according to Peranakan cultural traditions. Thus, as a Peranakan female child in a Chinese family, Lim’s ethnic/ gender status socially relegates her to the very bottom of the cultural hierarchy. But despite her disadvantaged social placement, Lim still more readily identifies with her mother’s cultural heritage and racial hybridity, as they constitute a significant part of her childhood. However, Lim’s emphasis on the Nyonya aspects of her background at the beginning of her memoir is also politically strategic in that her hybridity offers her the perfect position from which to launch a two-pronged cultural critique. Firstly, it permits Lim to question Chinese centrism and chauvinism: “Chinese-speaking Malayans called me a ‘Kelangkia-kwei’—or a Malay devil—because I could not or would not speak Hokkien”; they were “hostile to peranakans, whom they looked down on as degraded people, people who had lost their identity when they stopped speaking Chinese” (Lim, Among the White Moonfaces 28, 70).9 Secondly, Nyonya hybridity also enables Lim to challenge Malay discrimination against the Chinese in post-independence Malaysia: More and more, the term “Malay” appeared where “British” once stood. The “Malaysian,” that new promise of citizenship composed of the best traditions from among Malays, Chinese, Tamils, Eurasians, Dayaks, and so forth, seemed more and more to be a vacuous political fiction, a public relations performance. . . . One group’s empowerment appeared to lead to another’s oppression. As a thoroughly English-educated mind, emptied of Chinese racialized sentiments, I was a mold into which the idealism of a progressive multiracial identity could be poured. Chinese chauvinism offended me as much as other racisms, for, although of Chinese descent, I was usually treated by Malayan Chinese speakers as foreign, alien, and worse, decadent, an unspeakable because unspeaking, degenerate descendent of pathetic forebears. But Malay chauvinism was no better. (188–89)10

Hence, Lim’s racial hybridity and the historical context of the anti-Chinese discrimination in post-independence Malaysia play a major role in the memoir’s construction of an explanation for what emerges in the narrative as her supposedly unconventional sexual choices.

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On one level, Lim’s memoir functions as a narrative of sexual awakening. Its emphasis on the theme of a racialized sexuality, however, cannot be viewed in isolation, but must be contextualized within the problematics of hybridity in order for one to understand the various thematic connections within the text. As the narrative unrolls chronologically, Lim systematically parades the various reasons that help constitute her sexuality, her choices for non-Chinese sexual and life partners. While there is a deterministic logic at work in the text, Lim never quite loses a sense of agency to this logic but instead works to rupture the cultural and ideological power of these narratives of sexuality, albeit not always with complete success. The prologue opens Lim’s memoir with an ontological lamentation of her excess of belonging: “Too many names, too many identities, too many languages” (20). The fact that she has too many names—not only Shirley, Geok-lin, and Lim, but also Agnes and Jennifer—is symptomatic of the competing and contradictory forces of Chinese culture, British colonialism, American cultural imperialism through Hollywood (Shirley Temple), and Roman Catholicism at work in the molding of Lim’s childhood. To impress the reader further on the impact of British colonial education upon her sexuality, and the gendered divisions which flow through from Chinese to western socio-cultural forms, Lim ruminates specifically on the name “Romeo” and the Malayan appropriation of this Shakespearean appellative: “Romeo” was both an English and a Malayan word. “Hey, Romeo!” the young men said of each other as they slicked Brylcreem into their glossy black hair and preened before mirrors. The performance of the Romeo was their version of Western romantic love. It had nothing to do with tragedy or social divisions, and everything to do with the zany male freedom permitted under Westernization. It included a swagger, winks, laughs, gossip, increased tolerance, as well as disapproval and scandal. . . . Although there was a Romeo around every corner for as long as I could remember, I did not learn of Juliet’s existence until I finally read the play at fourteen. By then, my imagination had hardened over the exclusion. For me, there were no Malayan Juliets, and sexual males were always Westernized. (15–16, emphasis added)

While Lim’s feminist questioning of the social privileging of the heterosexual male is very significant, she also foregrounds the implicit effect this privileging has on defining the sexual primacy the “Westernized” male has on her later libidinal choices—her relationship to various Eurasian11 men, the losing of her virginity to the Indian Rajan, her engagement to the Eurasian Ben, her affair with her British professor James Hughes, her initial fascination and eventual

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dependence on the Berkeley-influenced Iqbal, and, finally, her stabilizing marriage to the Jewish American Charles. Lim’s attempt to interrogate the sources of her desire is a critically courageous move because it risks a deterministic logic that the text wrestles with and thus circumvents. One senses that Lim is working through the conflicts and contradictions of desire in the manner of Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. In scrutinizing the relationship between the woman of color and the white male, Fanon acknowledges that because of his faith “in the possibility of love,” he “endeavor[s] to trace its imperfections, its perversions,” to examine “to what extent authentic love will remain unattainable before one has purged oneself of that feeling of inferiority” (42). Though I am less convinced by Fanon’s formulation of an “authentic love,” and his unequal assessment of the colored woman’s relations with a white man as compared to the colored man’s relations with a white woman, the conflicted wrestling with desire is a crucial concept here. Lim’s revisiting of these relationships in her memoir is thus reflective of how the colonial diasporic subject is “purging” herself of these feelings through the narration and analysis of her desires. In other words, the memoir provides the space for Lim to come to terms with her earlier struggles with her “Westernized” sexual partners as their “inferior” other, before arriving at a kind of “authentic love” with her husband Charles. And, to return to Lim’s explication of the name “Romeo,” her emphasis on the Malayan cultural appropriation and irreverent deployment of the name has, arguably, a subversively rhizomic effect, to use a Deleuzean concept (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 3–25), where a lateral splintering of cultural tradition takes place. The usurpation of British colonial cultural tradition (with “Romeo” as the metonymy for a racialist sexual hierarchy) is achieved through the hybridization of the name’s usage and its subsequent reinsertion into a playful postcolonial patois. Just as the onomastic shifts in Lim’s life signify the cultural violence and fragmentation these social, national, and political forces have wreaked, they also implicate the role Lim’s parents have played in conjunction with these forces to irrevocably mark her as “a renegade” (Lim, Among the White Moonfaces 25). Maternal abandonment and physical violence, as Lim’s narrative suggests, have not only scarred her emotionally but also sexually. For instance, the Electra complex shifts into high gear when Emak’s leaving her family for Singapore clears a space for a particularly vulnerable and insecure Lim to occupy in close connection to her father. “As a child I adored my father’s body,” Lim confesses in a quasi-sexual manner. When the family goes swimming together, she sees her siblings and herself as extensions of her “father’s confident body, . . . links in an unbreakable, undrownable chain, the meaning of my father’s life made manifest to him” (58). When her

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father, in anger, physically punishes her for a vulgar gesture she has rather innocently acquired from her brothers, Lim, for the first time, sees herself defined as a sexual being in the eyes of her father. The fear and taboo of incest would ultimately lead to a further alienation between father and daughter, culminating in her father’s marriage to the family servant’s daughter, Peng, who is only seven years Lim’s senior, thereby thematically perpetuating the horror of incest. What this produces in Lim is resentment towards her inappropriately nubile stepmother and revulsion at her father’s copious sexuality, a consciousness of which is intensified by the sounds that penetrate the thin walls separating her from her father and Peng’s bedroom. Lim writes, after an incident where she loses her puppy and where Peng points out “that Father’s attachment to . . . [his daughter] was unnatural”: The unassuaged grief perhaps had as much to do with Father’s betrayal as with the actual loss of a pup. After Peng’s accusation I never felt the same way about Father. I was afraid of touching him. I could not bear to be near him. His body which I had loved as a child seemed possessed with a power of revulsion instead. He became a fully recognized sexual creature to me, and I abhorred his sexuality. (124–25)

This abhorrence assumes greater significance in the racialized fashion with which Lim would later define her sexuality and her choice of sexual partners. Lim explores her inclination towards non-Chinese males through a psychoanalytic framework: I would never be able to feel sexual with a Chinese male because of the strong incest inhibitions that I had formed in my family. With eight brothers and troubled memories of Father, I could only feel familial about Chinese men: they drew me as strong companions and brothers or repelled me as tyrants or weaklings, but a bar was raised between my body and theirs beyond which I could not imagine. (170–71)

It is not my place to question the integrity and sincerity of Lim’s self-analysis; instead, I prefer to address the impulse of her statement as opposed to critiquing the intricacies of its argument. Lim’s point in linking Chinese men to her familial experiences forms another part of the continuum of reasons that she marshals to interpret the trajectory of her sexual choices and desires. Another possible rationale here is one of cultural strategy: Lim is preempting possible accusations of racial betrayal Chinese chauvinists might hurl at her. In other words, the psychoanalytic framework’s determinism counteracts the cultural politics of choice. In foregrounding the unfortunate familial and social

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circumstances that she has been placed in, Lim deemphasizes personal agency in sexual desire. While sexual desire may be constituted by a multiplicity of cultural, political, and (trans)national forces, its final emergence in the realm of the personal deserves respect in terms of an individual’s right to privacy— the notion that I have the right to desire whom I desire. Lim’s anxiety to fend off cultural critique again leads her, in a later passage, to justify her sexual choices by theorizing that in reaction to the “competition for dominance between Chinese and Malay elites, [she] . . . was attracted contrarily to Eurasians and Indians, a romance of minoritism, as a way out of the fixedness of race identity” (189). Here, sexuality becomes a means for her to disavow both Chinese chauvinism and Malay hegemony. Though she injects political oppositionality in this version of her explanations, the clearer notion of political choice here seemingly conflicts with and undermines the determinism of the psychoanalytic interpretation offered earlier. My critique here is intended to accentuate the complex and conflicted position that the Chinese diasporic subject occupies. Lim’s situation is a fascinating case simply because of the multiplicity of cultural, intellectual, and ideological influences she has to contend with. On the one hand, fending off Chinese and Malay cultural and national chauvinism respectively, she fights off patriarchy, sexism, white racism, and, on the other, oppressive intellectual traditions within American academia. Hence, there is something powerfully redemptive and politically subversive not only in Lim’s anxious grappling with these forces, but also in the text’s unconscious unveiling of its own aporia, contradictory spaces that it cannot but occupy, for it to be what it is, a product of its time and milieu: an expression of the conflicts and contradictions within diasporic identity and sexual and cultural politics.

III The Winged Seed: Sex and the body cultural Sharing similar traumatic experiences of diasporic displacement with Shirley Lim is Indonesian-Chinese American poet Li-Young Lee. Whether these experiences play a role in literary excellence and output remains to be debated; but, what is certain is that, like Lim, Lee’s excellent poetry has also earned him a place among Asian American literary figures of national standing. With now three collections to his credit—Rose (1986), The City in Which I Love You (1990), and Book of My Nights (2001)13—Lee has also published an autobiographical work entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance. Much of his writing emphasizes his relationship with his father (see Hawley 183–96), responses to his Christian upbringing, and a deep sense of connection to his Anglo-American wife Donna.

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These emphases also constitute a well of social and relational concerns from which Lee draws to retrace his steps as a diasporic Chinese in Indonesia and an immigrant to the United States. The central trope that he uses to plot out for his readers his diasporic adventures is the deterritorialized winged seed, the deployment of which textually inscribes his triple marginality: as an ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, as a Chinese diasporic subject, and as a racial minority in America. More importantly, the notion of the “seed” intimates a masculine heterosexuality in Lee’s text, not only as a pun for “sperm” but also as a biological signifier for familial reproduction and cultural continuity within the framework of Chinese patriarchy. The shifting sexual valences of “seed,” hence, permit Lee to confront the burdens of his Chineseness and his Christian upbringing, specifically the conflicts and contradictions that diasporic flight helps provoke and expose. His anxious turn to representations of marital sex as articulations of an idealized love to dissipate the pressures of these ideological burdens only reveals how reliant and bound Lee unwittingly is to the sexist, patriarchal, and culturally chauvinist assumptions of the very discourses from which he is attempting to extricate himself. The winged seed is a powerful botanical metaphor to describe the deterritorialization and global mobility of diasporic peoples in general. In fact, the term “diaspora” is derived etymologically from the Greek verb “to sow” or “to scatter,” a concept borrowed from the dispersion of seeds by plants through various means such as water, wind, or animal and human carriers. Plants that employ wind dispersion, such as the tropical Angsana tree, often have builtin structures or wing extensions that enable their seeds to “fly” across vast distances. Li-Young Lee’s use of this metaphor, not only in the title of his book but also as the main trope around which he weaves his “remembrances,” reveals its effectiveness in emblematizing his own migratory history and the global scope and mobility of the Chinese in diaspora. The deterritorialized state of the winged seed in its production of multiple belongings or lack of belonging helps Lee to figure himself as the reluctant cosmopolitan. The “colorful stickers of steamships and airplanes, and emblems of airlines and train lines and shipping lines” which decorate his father’s “cracked leather accordion case” (L. Lee, The Winged Seed 40) offer not a postmodern pastiche of luxury travel and easy mobility; instead, they are signifiers of violent displacements, material and psychological loss, and an accumulation and casting off of “ephemera” that represent an unbearable lightness of being: We carried our clothes in bundles, our books and shoes were rotten. We were sleeping standing, eating squatting, putting the bowl to our lips. . . . And naturally, we were casting off as we looked ahead. We were jettisoning luggage, names, and bodies. There was Tai,

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my brother. Then there wasn’t. There was Chung, another brother, then there wasn’t. Brothers swallowed up in some murk we called, conveniently, The Past, as though it were a place we could return to, as though we weren’t leaving them behind with the passports we left behind, the jewelry and the books come finally undone. . . . And we were waxing tired, waxing bewildered, for we were departing in order to leave, leaving in order to leave some more, some more tired, some more old. (41–42)

Unlike the flexible citizenship of Chinese transnational capitalists and its celebration of an elitist Chinese cosmopolitanism (Ong “Flexible Citizenship”),14 Lee’s depiction of the paradoxical heaviness in his and his family’s weightless existence not only reveals the mechanisms that enable or force diasporic flight and exile but also unmasks the political violence and cultural nationalisms that marginalize, uproot, and displace groups of people into diasporic existence. The apparent absence of free-play mobility and classprivileged agency distinguishes Lee’s deterritorialized dislocation from that of the Chinese cosmopolitan’s flexible citizenship. The story of Lee’s diasporic flight begins in Jakarta, where he was born in 1957. Three years later his father was “charged with working for the CIA in plans to bomb military installations on the island of Java, and . . . spreading discontent by preaching ideas from the West” (107); he was subsequently imprisoned for a year. Lee details the terrorism enacted upon Ba15 and his family by President Sukarno’s government hence fleshing out the tactics of social alienation, racial incitement, and ideological purging that the family suffered in Indonesia. Overnight, the Lees were transformed into outcasts and, later, political refugees, as Sukarno’s anti-Chinese purging intensified and expanded across the country. In Lee’s chillingly ominous words, “Escape was impossible, the purge had begun, weapons were being handed out to farmers as well as thugs, and all over the island, agents of the president were preaching the evils of Chinese and other foreigners. . . . What was obviously about to happen, chaos and killing, had already begun” (194). But Ba’s imprisonment strangely and fortuitously provided a channel of escape for the family. The Lees’ exile brought them to Macau, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore, before they arrived in Seattle in 1964 and eventually settled in East Liberty, Pennsylvania. Unlike in some postcolonial immigrant texts, Lee refuses to reify the United States as a paradisiacal political safe haven. In fleeing an antiChinese environment in Indonesia to an America that marginalizes racial minorities, Lee’s family was translated from one cultural periphery to another. The family had to cope with a different set of racial and assimilationist politics, one that may have been comparatively “benign” vis-à-vis Sukarno’s Indonesia,

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but no less violent in its mechanism of cultural oppression and alienation. For instance, Ba, as the pastor of a church, cares for his congregation despite the fact that its Anglo-American members label him “their heathen minister” (82). Lee himself struggles with the psychological trauma and self-doubt that come from failing to speak American English with the “correct” accent and pronunciation: “While some sounds were tolerated, some even granting the speaker a certain status in the instances of, say, French or British, other inflections condemned one to immediate alien. . . . More than once I was told I sounded ugly. My mouth was a shame to me, an indecent trench” (76).16 My brief mapping of the national, cultural, ideological, and social forces that have shaped Lee’s diasporic identity is to reconstruct the complex narratives that drive the text’s representations of sexuality. Out of these narratives one can tease out two key ideological threads that have bound Lee’s consciousness in their firm stranglehold: his Chineseness and his Christian upbringing. Both of these factors play pivotal roles in spurring his family’s migration from Indonesia to America, in defining Lee’s relationship with his father, and consequently in coloring his notions of sexuality and desire, as they relate to his wife Donna. Sex and desire become so fraught with cultural anxieties that these anxieties eventually overwhelm and eclipse Lee’s representation of the spousal relation. Donna, to whom the book is dedicated, is ironically and (I want to believe) unwittingly consigned to an otherness of cultural utility. I want to begin my analysis with the winged seed. The notion of the seed offers various political valences which Lee seeks to tap into. The first thing that comes to mind is that “seed” is a paronomasia for “sperm” hence drawing a biological and cultural deterministic link to the imposing figure of Ba, Lee’s father. The inexorable call of “culture” leads Lee to expand the pun on the word “seed” as sperm into a response to his Chineseness: “The age beginning with the Yellow Emperor continues through me, whose history is in my face, my undoubled lid and alien eye, whose future is a question forming between my thighs, . . . bed for seed” (95). Of course, it does not help that Lee is the great grandson (on his maternal side of the family) of Yuan Shih-k’ai (18), China’s first president when it became a republic. Despite the oppressive claims of history and culture, Lee, in fact, views as suspect the notion of “blood” having demands on him just because it “was the oldest thing.” He laments how Ba “felt clogged with it and dammed with the talking about it” (175–76). What is ironic is that one of Lee’s goals in the deployment of the trope is to disentangle himself from the stranglehold of blood and tradition; but, instead, his concept of the winged seed re-inscribes the paternalism that his father represents. Lee credits his father for the metaphor of the seed in the opening dream sequence where Ba returns “dressed in the clothes we’d buried him in, carrying a jar of blood in one hand, his suit pockets lined with black

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seeds” (11). The return of the repressed images of his father first draws Lee into a tearful lament of how worn out Ba’s shoes were and how ashamed he was that his father had to suffer this way. The call of filial piety and blood then turns into the call to remember, in the form of the black seeds that appear in his father’s pocket. Not just a figment of his oneiric imagination, these seeds were actually “carried at all times in his [father’s] right suit-pocket.” When asked the purpose of this practice, Ba responds in his usually cryptic fashion, “Remembrance” (33). What is strikingly remarkable is not so much the fact that Ba uses the seeds as a personal mnemonic device, but rather the way his silence about these seeds, and their connection to memory, continue to haunt Lee. Many times, Lee agonizes over the significance and meaning of the seed, only to feel his father’s presence hovering over and pressing down on him (45–46). His inability to remember what the seeds signify for his father, to extract fresh revelations about his father’s life, and to ignore the seeds’ persistent reminder of his own failures only induces shame, “a strange shame that . . . [he does not] know what happened to those seeds” (34), a burning shame that he cannot know and, hence, retain, as a filial son, the memory of that which his father deems important. The weight of the Father and the shame that it brings not only have familial resonance for Lee, but also represent the intertwining of Chinese and Christian paternalism, which together haunt Lee’s sexuality. In an amazing passage in The Winged Seed, Lee’s stream-of-consciousness mode of associative reflection allows him to weave various seemingly disparate moments of his life through a sexualized thematic threading, connecting a vividly sensual depiction of Lee’s filial devotion to his dying father’s corporeality, to that of his own mortality, his need for sexual intimacy with his wife Donna, and finally his grandfather’s bisexual promiscuity and pedophilic tendencies. Lee’s disorientation from his ambivalent relationship to his father’s body conflictingly produces both disgust (at bodily filth) and sentimental devotion (generated by Chinese filial piety), as is apparent in a description of Lee helping his now aged father take a bath: I’m practically wrestling him, and he’s gripping the sides of the tub, reaching for a nearby towel bar. My fear is he’ll fall apart in my arms like a puzzle and I’ll never get him put together. I fear I’ve dislocated something, he groans so. The bathroom floor is wet and slippery, my clothes are soaked, and I know that the warm bath has stirred his bowels, but he can’t move them without my aid, and I will have to do what I’ve done all the other times. I’ll dry the floor while he sits in the chair, and then I’ll lay a towel I’ve warmed on the heater across the floor, and put him on it, lying on his side. I’ll pull a

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surgical glove over my right hand and enter him from behind to dig out the hard lumps of shit while he groans and pants. (158–59)

This corporeal intimacy between son and father reverberates with a sensuality that taps into an erotic unconscious of bodily oneness, biological genealogy, and cultural continuity—Lee cries out, “My body is Ba’s body, the same.” But his father’s death produces an ontological splitting of the self in Lee, a consciousness of his own selfhood and his own mortality: “But my dying is all my own, though nothing compared with the dying Ba did before our very eyes. Ba’s dying was like a bitter wand snapped off a huge tree of dying [sic]” (159). His sense of an incomplete self produces a desire to redress this loss by attaining a new oneness with his wife. The sensuality of the father-son relation modulates into the spousal sexual relation, where Lee’s sense of loneliness at night impels him to seek out his wife for corporeal and psychic unity: “if I could exist within you, I could exist. If I could penetrate you, I could be penetrated. Who’s here on the night I died? No one. It’s just me alone wondering, Can anyone touch himself as deeply as another might?” (161). This failed point of sexual healing then transports Lee to China in the 1930s where, as a child, his father bears witness to his grandfather’s frequent brothel visits. Lee’s “grandfather had been known to beat, whip, and stab with needles the servants, girls and boys, he found sexually pleasing” (162–63). This seemingly tenuous suturing of sexual or sexualized moments in Lee’s memory underscores his psychic dislocation as a consequence of cultural demands. The Chinese ideology of filial piety has so intimately structured his sense of being that paternal loss ultimately traumatizes the mind into traversing time and space to seek sexual solace and to revisit the sexual horrors of a Chinese familial past in order to diagnose reasons for his dis-ease. Lee’s father contradictorily embodies Chinese cultural ideology and Protestant Christian beliefs, both of which permeate and define sexuality in Lee’s text. The fact that Chinese culturalism and Christian orthodoxy have been turned into unwitting collaborative bedfellows finds its historical basis in the similar marginalized positions they occupy in the context of the oppressive anti-Chinese and anti-Christian climate in Indonesia’s history. In spite of these oppressions, the irony is that Chinese chauvinism and Christian fundamentalist intolerance still persist in the diasporic communities that Lee is a part of—where the experience of oppression does not necessarily translate into a deeper cultural and political sensitivity towards other minority and marginalized positions and identities. Though Lee seems cognizant of this irony and tries to distance himself from his family’s Chinese culturalism and Christian beliefs, he still comes under their discursive and ideological grip, thereby binding him even more tightly to his Chinese father, the pastor.

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The discursive vocabulary and language of the Bible and the church permeate Lee’s work, indicating how Ba’s own religious belief has left an indelible impression on Lee’s consciousness. The metaphor of the seed appears in the Bible, for instance in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13.1–33), while “seed” is used in the King James Version to refer to progeny. The sexual inflection of the term and its connection to the body are further implicated in the marriage allegory of the Church’s relationship to Jesus Christ. The sexualized human body of the Christian, hence, is the earthly representation of the Holy Temple (2 Corinthians 6.16), the Church as the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12.27), and, through contradictory metonymic extension and theological interpretation, the Church as the Bride of Christ (Ephesians 5.23–25). These intricate Christianized interconnections between seed, body, and sexuality provide Lee the terminology to later describe his relationship with his wife: Love, wake up. Don’t sleep. What is the nature of our shared body? What garment could we possibly weave to contain it? Would the garment not be, in fact, the very body, and what we daily make between us? . . . Our shared body is a church, then, and the size of a seed, as any true church must be. So this woman and I are wed at a seed, and I weave a various garment for that seed, a seed garment. (53–54)17

While it may not be his intention, the romance of the language here masks a disturbing risk that Lee takes in using the biblical language to frame his sexuality. In most Christian doctrinal circles, sexual pleasure for its own sake is disavowed, but sexual intercourse for the purposes of procreation is highly encouraged. The notions of seed and seeding trap specifically this idea of procreative continuity in its very logic, reinforcing in a collaborative fashion the larger Chinese cultural narratives of filial piety, familial continuity, and cultural longevity. For instance, Lee places in immediate juxtaposition to his passage on the Yellow Emperor and “bed for seed,” a sexual reference to his wife: “Moving, my hand traverses you infinitely. . . . Therefore, tell me, my love, by what motion of my hands may I gather you, by what action of the soul might I compass, having no hope to encompass, by what gladness of heart earn, your fragrant company?” (95–96). Yet, at the same time, Donna’s ethnicity (which Lee does not make sufficiently explicit in his memoir, especially when he identifies her only as Donna Lee, a last name adopted through marriage18) may challenge Chinese culturalism’s demands through intermarriage and, hence, cultural hybridity in terms of offspring. Lee, in his poem “The Cleaving,” has imbued the idealized figure of the “immigrant” with a multiculturalism that dismantles ethnic and cultural boundaries and creates

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a cosmopolitical oneness that embraces differences in unity.19 One can only wonder if the textual drive towards representing sexual union with his wife is Lee’s means of aspiring towards that oneness, in resistance to the oppressive parochialism and intolerance he sees and experiences. As with the case of Shirley Lim, I wish to contextualize this difficulty of reading as a symptom of diaspora’s cultural conflicts. Yet, I cannot help but wonder that, in a work like Lee’s that is dedicated to his wife and is addressed in the first person directly to her, the reader still does not arrive at a substantial picture of who Donna is and what their relationship consists of beyond the sexual. The overpowering narratives of Chinese cultural chauvinism, Ba’s imposing presence in Lee’s life, and the ubiquitous Christian and biblical imagery press up against the sexual elements of Lee’s remembrances, and thus offer a prescriptive framework that Lee too conveniently employs. While Lee may not intend this, Donna is textually marginalized as a gendered, sexualized Other of utility, Woman as “seed” vessel or container. By questioning Lee’s unwitting objectification of his wife here, I am not suggesting that Lee’s treatment of women in his narrative is tout court sexist in the crudest sense of the word. One need only revisit his descriptions of his mother and the other female figures in his life to realize he does understand the suffering and oppression many of them undergo. Yet, Lee’s text echoes of or hints at a problematic heterosexist-masculinist valence that I find hard to dismiss hermeneutically, despite my realizing his attempts at disrupting the coercive forces that define his life. Once more, the production of this contradictory and conflicted position is the unfortunate price that both Lim and Lee as diasporic subjects pay when they choose to lay bare these difficult aspects of their lives for public scrutiny. The representations of sexual desire and sexuality in both Shirley Lim’s Among the White Moonfaces and Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed are model (though humanly flawed) attempts at fighting against what Michel Foucault calls “the slightest traces of fascism in the body” (Foucault xiii). Foucault may be writing in praise of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, but he could just as easily be saluting Lim and Lee in their anti-Oedipal strivings against the oppressive cultural, political, religious, and social narrations of human sexuality. One can and should learn from these autobiographies, imperfections and all.

9 The Sino-Japanese Conflict of Asian American Literature Colleen Lye

In his introduction to the 2002 Penguin edition of The Flower Drum Song, David Henry Hwang proposes that, as the “first Chinese American novel to be released by an established publishing house,” its original publication in 1957 might well be viewed as “the birth of a new literary genre” (Hwang xvi, xvii). Hwang’s call for a reassessment of C. Y. Lee’s significance converses with current academic efforts to locate the earliest beginnings of Asian American literature. No fewer than fifty-eight prose books are known to have been published by authors of Chinese ancestry in the United States prior to the appearance of Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961).1 Why then has it been so difficult to agree that any of them qualifies as an authentic work of Asian American literature? What, moreover, might this difficulty have to do with the specificity of Chinese American literary form? Post-1970s debates among Asian American movement writers and critics about the Orientalist complicity of certain Asian American writers have regularly tended to center on Chinese American authors, whether in the pre-movement example of Jade Snow Wong, or the post-movement examples of Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, and Hwang himself. Other ethnic Asian American authors have certainly been accused of accommodationism, but the political failure of Chinese American literature is more likely to be perceived as involving an exoticist presentation of ancestral culture. Is there a particular intimacy between Chinese American writing and Orientalism that makes the former prone to the latter? While there may be a psychological truth to the ressentimentist element in the charges of Orientalism directed at commercially successful Asian American works, I am interested in exploring not why a work’s popularity might incur these reactions but the extent to which Chinese American writing is indistinguishable from

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American Orientalism (and perhaps therefore more likely to achieve popular reception). The challenge of backdating the emergence of the Chinese American novel, as Hwang is attempting above, spotlights the issue. Until recently, The Flower Drum Song had been generally ignored, if not aggressively dismissed as part of a “white tradition of Chinese novelty literature, would-be Chinese writing about America for the entertainment of Americans” (Chin et al. xv). Though it has been for some time now that Winnifred Eaton has enjoyed the reputation of being the earliest known Asian American novelist, the ethnic masquerade that founds her writing problematizes any straightforward celebration of Miss Numé of Japan (1899) as the first Chinese American novel. The received authenticity of Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea, by contrast, springs from the unvarnished portrait it appears to provide of a historical New York Chinatown, a world shown to be full of obscenity, prostitution, and gambling. Attention to these texts beyond their immediate surfaces, however, has revealed the potential critical yield of degraded genres, while the comic closure of Chu’s emplotment has also struck some critics as quite conservative. 2 Moreover, by offering American readers a glimpse of a hidden and unknown world, Chu’s literary endeavor is arguably no less free of the ethnographic valence of any naturalism, here compounded by the cultural exoticism of its particular working class subject. To be clear, my intent is not to rehearse the critique of ethnic authenticity, an argument that is by now de rigueur to our current consensus on the performative nature of Asian American identity.3 My interest lies in how the demand for ethnic authenticity has involved the demand for realism, and that, in formal terms, Asian American literature has been defined against Orientalist mystification not unlike the ways in which American realism once defined itself against a tradition of American romance. But if this is the case, what is the reality that Asian American literature is supposed to represent? What is the Asian American reality that is the referent of Asian American realism? The problem for Asian American literary criticism is, of course, that there is none. The realist texts that were first canonized by Asian American Studies— by John Okada, Carlos Bulosan, and Chu—actually refer to realities that are ethnically specific and non-interchangeable: America Is in the Heart points to the colonial conditions of Filipino labor migrancy to the United States in the pre-war era, No-No Boy the trauma of Japanese American internment, and Eat a Bowl of Tea the gender and sexual consequences of the anti-reproductive policies of Chinese Exclusion law. Constructing an analogy between these substantively diverse histories is what allows us to group these texts together as conveying an Asian American “racial experience”—an experience defined by an anti-Asianism whose fungibility is a salient characteristic of the agencies

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of racialization but which always threatens a homogenization of our accounts of the culture of the racialized. Asian American history is a composite of ethnically particular histories whose contents point to divergence as much as similarity, and whose unequal capacities for generalization as “Asian American” underscore the unevenness of Asian American pan-ethnicity. This unevenness increasingly poses a problem to the continued development of Asian American Studies, but its observation has so far largely been for the sake of critiquing the essentialism of identity or drawing attention to geographically marginalized Asian American groups. The unevenness of Asian American pan-ethnicity has been insufficiently historicized as an ideological dimension of Asian American racial formation. As long as Asian American scholars continue to participate in the institutional forces that reproduce the Asian American as an organizational category of research and teaching, however, it is surely just as important for us to research the historical occasions of the concept as to emphasize its imaginariness. 4 Elsewhere, I have described Asiatic racial form—or the dominant stereotype of America’s Asia as a yellow peril or model minority—to be the product of the neo-colonial relations between the United States and East Asia which constructed China and Japan as proxy rather than antipodal Others of the United States; the material history of the US-Asian relations that founds the racial form helps to explain the discursive predominance of its Chinese and Japanese exemplifications, even as the racial form proved to be occasionally extendable to other ethnicities in the later twentieth century, in particular to the United States’s Cold War proxies (Lye, America’s Asia 5–11). What, though, can be said to ground Asian American identity as opposed to Asiatic racial form? In general, racial formation theory has been more persuasive in explaining the legal constitution of racialized populations than in theorizing the historical process by which certain subjects have laid claim to the racial identity or experienced themselves as belonging to it.5 The result is that the historical construction of the Asian American subject has remained largely a presupposition of Asian American cultural studies, the justification of whose object of analysis leans heavily—in the face of internal heterogeneity—on the borrowed wisdom of a “strategic essentialism.”6 What does it mean to lay claim to an Asian American identity, as opposed to a Chinese American identity, a Japanese American identity, a Filipino American identity, etc.? If we are not to commit the synecdochic fallacy of generalizing racial identity from ethnic identity, can we distinguish between an Asian American narrative and a Chinese-, or Japanese-, or Filipino-, etc., American one? Following from my argument in America’s Asia, I propose that we think of Asian American identity as a contradictory unity, demonstrable through the conceptualization of identity as a rhetorical form. As suggested

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earlier, in terms of historical content, Asian American literature references a string of associated but different phenomena: colonial migration, wartime internment, the gender imbalance of bachelor society, among others. But insofar as a text responds to and attempts to undo a general structure of Asiatic racialization, perhaps it can be understood as laying claim to the form of an Asian American identity. Most commonly, we understand this response to involve asking readers to grasp the distinction between Asians in Asia and US Asians, a distinction whose elision is a key aspect of American Orientalist discourse. Texts that lend themselves most easily to Asian American exemplification are those that demonstrate the protagonist’s movement away or distance from ancestral Asian culture. But there is another aspect to the claiming of Asian American identity, and that is the observation of the sovereignty of ethnicity and an emphasis on the significance of intra-Asian differences, differences whose elision is also an aspect of American Orientalist discourse. Though it would seem that the claim to ethnic sovereignty disaggregates the racial category, it is this claim that might paradoxically be understood as constituting the distinction of Asian American identity. An early passage from Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s classic 1973 memoir of internment, Farewell to Manzanar, illustrates this very well. Houston is describing her family’s relocation to Terminal Island in the days immediately after the Pearl Harbor bombing: [F]or me, at age seven, the island was a country as foreign as India or Arabia would have been. It was the first time I had lived among other Japanese, or gone to school with them, and I was terrified all the time. …This was partly Papa’s fault. One of his threats to keep us younger kids in line was “I’m going to sell you to the Chinaman.” When I had entered Kindergarten two years earlier, I was the only Oriental in the class. They sat me next to a Caucasian girl who happened to have very slanted eyes. I looked at her and began to scream, certain Papa had sold me out at last. My fear of her ran so deep I could not speak of it, even to Mama, couldn’t explain why I was screaming. For two weeks I had nightmares about this girl, until the teachers finally moved me to the other side of the room. And it was still with me, this fear of Oriental faces, when we moved to Terminal Island. (Houston 8–9)

What is interesting about this passage is that Jeanne does not just narrate her self-realization as a racial subject through the ironic adoption of society’s Orientalizing gaze. The estranging effect of Asiatic racialization is exposed through a double misrecognition—of the “Caucasian girl” as an “Oriental” and as typically Chinese. The girl sitting next to her is neither, and we cannot be

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sure whether the father’s threat that originates Jeanne’s racial phobia is meant to reflect immigrant internalization of mainstream American stereotypes or the relative autonomy of intra-Asian ethnic prejudices from mainstream American ones. But the important point here is that the representation of Asiatic racialization from the standpoint of the racialized involves three terms, not two. I propose that we think of Asian American pan-ethnicity as an intrarelational construct, not just as a heterogeneous (internally diverse) or a necessarily hybrid (counter-hegemonic) one—a construct in which the subject’s reversal of the Orientalizing gaze depends partly upon the figuration of the otherness of other Asian ethnicities.7 This is also why Jeanne later recounts the injury of misrecognition dealt by the avowals of her white peers that they just “love Chinese food” (Houston 128). The Asian Americanness of the narrative involves the construction of a subject constituted by a double distance—between Asian and American cultures, and among Asian ethnic or national cultures. On the one hand, the first kind of distance is clearly shown to exceed the second, since the Japanese immigrant community might as well have been Indian or Arabic from the perspective of the young American Jeanne. On the other hand, the distinction among Asian ethnicities is also important, since Jeanne’s identity is constituted by being not-Chinese, in what seems to be both an instance of internalized American anti-Asianism and one of ethnic self-awareness (reminding us that Jeanne’s parentage is Japanese). To the extent that the presence of Chinese references in the Japanese American text entangles ethnic self-awareness in the tragedy of Asiatic racialization, they mark the specificity of the experience of racialization from the standpoint of the racialized. Paradoxically, it is in this very gesture of ethnic specification or intra-racial differentiation—the reminder that Jeanne is Japanese American and not Chinese—that the text’s generic Asian Americanness can be said to reside. Read as a historical testament, Farewell to Manzanar yields Japanese Americanspecific content (only Japanese Americans were interned during World War II). But as a narrative, it can be understood as performing the rhetorical protocols of Asian American identity construction. To this extent, I would like to suggest that the Asian Americanness of Asian American literature lies in its form, not in its referenced history, which will always remain to some degree heterogeneous. By the same token, this means that not all works by ethnic Asian American authors can be assumed to evince Asian American form, or the form of Asian American identity. We might further speculate that the ones that do are those that have tended to achieve canonical status and been most easily allegorizable as “Asian American literature.” Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) is, of course, the text that is widely credited with having institutionalized “Asian American literature.” I am not sure that we as yet fully understand why. With Kingston, an equivalent episode

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of racial self-recognition occurs in the abuse of a schoolmate who embodies for the narrator the quality of Chinese female silence she despises in herself. This well-known episode, symbolizing a mirror relation between the narrator and her alienated image, is understood to be part of a process in which the Asian American subject must negotiate between a denigrated Chinese “I” with its “seven strokes, intricacies” and the American “I,” “assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese . . . [with] only three strokes, the middle so straight” (166).8 However, Kingston also contextualizes her disquisition on gendered and ethnicized silence by a school setting where “Japanese kids . . . hit me and chased me and stuck gum in my ears” (166). The text erects an ironic distance between the young narrator’s sense of who is locally being persecuted in the schoolyard and who are, on a broader canvas, the nation’s contemporary victims: “The Japanese kids were noisy and tough. They appeared one day in kindergarten, released from concentration camp, which was a tic-tac-toe mark, like barbed wire, on the map” (166). The identity-constituting role accorded Japaneseness is not, however, isolated to the linguistic scene of Maxine’s American subjectification. The scene echoes the origin story of her mother’s immigration “in the winter of 1939, almost six months after the stoning” (96) death of a “village crazy lady” suspected of being a Japanese spy. The SinoJapanese War provides the general occasion for Maxine’s parents’ reunion, but the stoning episode suggests a more proximate impetus for her mother’s flight from China. “My mother, who had turned her back and walked up the mountain (she never treated those about to die), and looked down at the mass of flesh and rocks, the sleeves, the blood flecks. The planes came again that very afternoon. The villagers buried the crazy lady along with the rest of the dead” (96). If Maxine attacks a schoolmate as if she were not like herself also female and silent, Brave Orchid’s dissociation from the crazy lady she at first verbally defends reflects their similarity as transgressive and outspoken women. Maxine’s response to the girl in the school bathroom represents a violent disavowal of what it means to be Chinese (silent), which is to be notJapanese (boisterous); her mother’s response to the stoned woman represents the uncertainty that being Chinese will protect her from being violently mistaken for (an agent of the) Japanese. It is this concern with intra-Asian differences in the midst of their potential confusion that makes The Woman Warrior not just a Chinese American text—a text with manifest Chinese American content—but an Asian American one, that is, a text that enacts the rhetorical protocols of Asian American identity. If, as I have been arguing, Asian American identity can be understood as assuming a certain rhetorical form, this rhetorical form necessarily has a history. The postwar period witnessed an overall expansion of Asian American publishing even before the immigration reform of the 1960s could exert a

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demonstrable demographic impact because World War II had made intraAsian ethnic distinctions a matter of political consequence. To the domestic transformation of the inassimilable alien into a naturalizable American was linked the development of US global power articulated through strategic alliances with nominally sovereign dependencies. Inaugurating a new phase of US identification with proxy nationalisms in the Pacific Rim, World War II in the Pacific Theater demanded especially that Americans learn the subtle “difference between a Chinese and a Jap.” The well-known Sino-Japanese centrism of “Asian American Literature” may well have a start here, in the World War II constitution of Asian American identity, whose traditional domination by Chinese and Japanese American narrative examples seems to have an ideological force in excess of a numerical basis.9 A quantitative comparison of ethnic publishing trends is nevertheless useful for what it can open of an intra-relational perspective on Asian American literary history. Chinese American and Japanese American literary production patterns reflect an interesting correlation. Chinese American prose book publishing (including fiction and nonfiction) more than doubled in the 1940s, while Japanese American publishing in the same period fell to almost half its 1930s level. The Cold War era of the 1950s subsequently saw a relative decline in Chinese American prose book publishing, but a relative increase in Japanese American books. An overall comparison of Chinese American and Japanese American prose book publishing trends shows that, through the 1930s, they were isomorphic with each other; from the 1940s through the 1970s they show instead an inverse relation, declining and rising oppositely to each other.10 Assuming prose book publishing to be an important indicator of literary productivity, we might infer from this data that while the social conditions of Asian exclusion homogeneously constrained writing by persons of Chinese or Japanese descent in the United States, the postwar possibility of becoming Asian American involved conditions that were oppositely conducive to the emergence of Chinese and Japanese American writing. The inverse character of Chinese and Japanese American productivity—beginning in the era of exclusion’s repeal—not only posits possible grounds for the existence of a relationship between Chinese and Japanese American literary histories, but also encourages us to entertain forms of relationship besides that of (structural or thematic) analogy. I will now turn to two wartime writers whose works themselves are indicative of certain divergences between Chinese American and Japanese American narrative constructions of Asian American identity, divergences that nevertheless point to its contradictory unity. Though my intent is to historicize (and therefore to denaturalize) the Sino-Japaneseness of “Asian American literature,” it may also be the case that my proposal for conceptualizing Asian

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American identity in these intra-relational terms works better for Chinese American and Japanese American textual archives than for others. Given the smallness of the essay genre and the generality of the observations I am about to make about Chinese American and Japanese American narratives, my claims are best regarded as speculative. I offer them in the hope that what illumination they shed may serve as an encouragement to other efforts at conceptualizing the intra-relationality of “Asian American literature.” More specifically, in the historical origins of Asian American identity’s form, I believe, are some clues to the persistent Chineseness of Asian American Orientalism. Better known by American audiences in their day than by students of American literature today, Lin Yutang and Toru Matsumoto were Chinaand Japan-born and raised respectively. Though they both received a postgraduate education in the United States and wrote in English, their overall subject matter was more obviously Asian than Asian American. Their general neglect by Asian American literary studies is a reflection of the fact that, despite current critical enthusiasm in favor of the relaxation of national literary borders, there is as yet little practical consensus as to how far in that direction to go. If bona fide US identity of authorship (whether measured by parentage, nativity, citizenship, or immigration) or of textual characters defines the criteria for Asian American belonging, Lin and Matsumoto would, for the most part, fail to qualify.11 Yet the fact that the Americanizability or American compatibility of their Asian subject is an operative concern suggests their relevance to the concerns of Asian American literary study. To consider their writings as examples of “Asian American literature” would be to redraw the textual field in ways that would try to make it more accountable to the manifold kinds of influence the United States has exerted across the Pacific. Among their most important works were Lin’s My Country and My People (1935), a nonfiction primer on Chinese culture that initiated a series of bestsellers by Lin and Matsumoto, and Marion O. Lerrigo’s A Brother Is a Stranger (1946), a widely admired autobiography that Matsumoto wrote with the help of an American family friend. Though they represent different genres of writing, My Country and My People and A Brother Is a Stranger are comparable in that both seek to explain China and Japan to English-language audiences at a time when the international context of the Sino-Japanese war (dating from 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria, to the conclusion of World War II) had stimulated broad US interest in this subject. A reception for Lin’s and Matsumoto’s publications was facilitated by warm introductions penned by Pearl S. Buck, who attested to the truth of the cultural insights to be found between their pages. Issuing from a celebrity whom most Americans in the 1930s and 1940s regarded as a leading advocate for Asia’s humanity,

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Buck’s praise for Lin and Matsumoto helped to establish a continuity between their aims and her own. Her introductions emphasize the added interest of works composed by Chinese and Japanese persons themselves. Buck describes Lin’s My Country and My People as “the truest, the most profound, the most complete, the most important book yet written about China” and “best of all, [as] . . . written by a Chinese” (Buck, “Introduction,” My Country xvi). Similarly, Buck compliments Matsumoto’s book for providing us with the example of a man who “in the midst of a people whom we have been trained and induced to think of as wholly evil, or at best wholly subject and weak, is . . . neither subject nor weak, and certainly good” (Buck, “Introduction,” A Brother vii); moreover, the author is “a real Japanese, born and educated in Japan,” whose “only early Western influence . . . was a Christian mother” (vii). Buck’s manner of presenting Lin and Matsumoto signals the importance assigned to authorial ethnic authenticity in the mid-century US marketing of Asian-authored texts. At the level of political attitude there may be much to separate such “ambassadors of goodwill” from the US-born writers of the 1950s and 1960s and especially from those of the post-1970s era. But, at the level of rhetorical purpose and discursive effect, they might be seen to share a continuous situation of address.12 Read in relation to subsequent, canonical examples of “Asian American literature,” Lin’s and Matsumoto’s writings help to highlight systematic differences between postwar Chinese American and Japanese American narratives. Considered as ancestral examples of canonical “Asian American” literary form, Lin’s and Matsumoto’s writings also help to indicate the historical basis for these differences. A Brother Is a Stranger centers on Matsumoto’s conflict with his tyrannical elder brother from whom he has to flee to the United States in order to preserve his marriage. Since Matsumoto’s American exile also coincides with the duration of World War II, the defense of a companionate model of marriage provides a wartime allegory for the clash between an American culture of freedom and a culture of Japanese authoritarianism. Matsumoto’s American spirit, though fully realized during his stay in America, has its inception in Japan. The English-language instruction received in early schooling supplies one of his “greatest joys” (A Brother Is a Stranger 41) by exposing him to the value of individualism. “While in Japanese hunger was expressed by saying ‘my stomach is empty,’ it was ‘I am hungry’ in English . . . In Japanese the ‘person’ stayed in the background, but in English the person was in the foreground” (82). Matsumoto takes pride in acquiring a level of fluency to the point that even his dreams are “Englishized” (81). The conditions of US-Japanese conflict both occasion this immediate postwar narrative of individual development and constrain the representation of Japanese-American differences to thematization in starkly binary terms.

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My Country and My People reads as less manifestly pro-American. It finds reason to prefer certain Chinese habits to western ones or even to criticize American commercialism from the superior vantage of “traditional Chinese values.” Though identified as “Taoist,” this vantage happens to converge nicely with Buck’s Jeffersonian agrarianism: both authors agree on the pragmatism and moderation of a fundamentally rural Chinese character. “To scholars and well-to-do families in the cities, persistently the call of the good earth comes” (Y. Lin, My Country 36), Lin writes, in an explicit nod to Buck’s depiction of the Chinese yeoman farmer in her best-selling novel of 1931, The Good Earth. Whereas Matsumoto’s text works by exemplifying the Japanese potential for individualism despite a general culture of conformity (he is named for a famous statesman who was, in his time, a political dissident), Lin characterizes China as essentially already “a nation of individualists” (My Country 172). China’s individualistic culture stems from a society in which historically there had been no hereditary ruling class, but this also militates against the kind of social organization and civic-mindedness necessary for nation-building. Lin’s China is traditionally democratic but insufficiently nationalistic, as opposed to Matsumoto’s Japan, which is excessively nationalistic and insufficiently democratic. Contrary US stakes in Chinese and Japanese nationalisms condition Lin’s and Matsumoto’s varying strategies of self-presentation. Matsumoto is eager to prove the assimilative capacity of the Japanese self. Lin’s concern is to demonstrate his possession of Chinese cultural authenticity in the face of widespread modern deracination. The claim to English fluency is central to Matsumoto’s literary authority as a Japanese writer in English. Lin, however, touts his classical Chinese knowledge and his authorial advantage over compatriot intellectuals for whom “the study of the ancient language is, in point of psychological difficulties involved, exactly similar to the learning of a foreign tongue” (220). Whereas Matsumoto’s individual capacity for change illustrates Japan’s potential for democratic reform, inherited tradition forms the basis of the sympathetic identity Lin draws between China and the United States. In other words, Matsumoto’s Japanese subject is potentially Americanizable, but Lin’s Chinese subject is essentially American-compatible. This difference between Lin and Matsumoto reflects a general divergence in subsequent Chinese American and Japanese American approaches to the positing of “Asian American” identity. Before expanding on this general divergence, let me restate that what permits us to think of Lin’s and Matsumoto’s works as “Asian American” is a focus on rhetorical purpose and discursive effect rather than the national identity of the text’s characters or the author’s background. Lin and Matsumoto both demonstrate the extent to which the American compatibility or

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Americanizability of their Asian subject engages the terms of Asiatic racial form, a combinatory concept involving “China” and “Japan.” Insofar as the yellow peril figures an alliance of Chinese labor power and Japanese military power threatening US security, Lin and Matsumoto represent Asian Americanization as a rhetorical operation involving three terms. In Lin, China’s inherent lack of nationalistic feeling constitutes Chinese identity as a guarantee against the possible realization of “Asia for the Asiatics,” or Japan’s vision of a greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. “The ‘yellow peril’ can come from Japan but not from China,” a country of people inherently reluctant to die for their state, let alone for any grander ambition (185). Continued Japanese aggression, however, promises to incite Chinese national resistance, which Lin predicts will save “American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in rearmament” and “the world from the true Yellow Peril” (413). Lin’s text exemplifies the extent to which claiming Asian Americanness crucially involves being able to distinguish “a Chinese from a Jap.” Intra-Asian distinctions are also crucial to Matsumoto for whom it is the capacity for solidarity with Chinese resistance that distinguishes the Japanese American from the Japanese militarist subject. In illuminating Chinese/ Japanese differences, A Brother Is a Stranger literally stages the Sino-Japanese conflict in the form of a verbal debate before an American audience: Sometimes I was asked to appear with a Chinese speaker for a debate, and I heartily loathed these occasions when I had to defend a point of view which I disapproved. Finally, before a debate with a Chinese friend of mine, I asked him if we could change sides. To my delight, he agreed to do so. People told us afterward that it was the most unusual debate they had ever heard. The Chinese speaker pointed out that if other nations would help Japan to feel equal and secure, instead of trying to curb her growth and hurting her pride, then the liberal statesmen of Japan would be able to steer the course of the government. In turn, I insisted that the Chinese people were basically friendly to the Japanese, and that if the Japanese people knew the truth, they certainly would not go to war against China. The meeting was a great success, and I was very happy that night. (Y. Lin, A Brother 124)

Here, the relativization of Chinese and Japanese national perspectives grants the intra-Asian autonomy that is a reminder of the ethnic sovereignty integral to the construction of Asian American identity. That this occurs before an American audience emphasizes the triangular nature of this process in which intra-Asian differentiation is granted its meaning by having a US frame. Thus, when Matsumoto’s son Teddy is asked one day by a girl on the street whether he

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is Chinese or Japanese, he responds “I’m an American!” (Matsumoto, A Brother 255). For Matsumoto, the claim to Asian American identity is articulated in terms of a condition of neither/nor (in this case neither Japanese nor Chinese), a double negativity that is a trademark of the Japanese American text. By contrast, the coexistence of claims to ethnic traditionalism and American national interest seems to be a peculiarity of the Chinese American text. In World War II’s shaping of the rhetorical protocols of the claiming of Asian American identity, we can therefore observe a divergence between a neither/ nor structure of Japanese Americanism and a both/and structure of Chinese Americanism. This divergence might be phrased yet more precisely as the difference between the double nationalism of the postwar Chinese American text and the double anti-nationalism of the Japanese American one. In that its “salvaging of an old culture” (Y. Lin, My Country 13) is necessitated by the Chinese war of resistance against Japan, which Lin seeks to persuade his readers is of urgent US geopolitical concern, My Country and My People makes the appreciation of Chinese culture a matter of American political interest. Lin’s example suggests that what it means to speak as a Chinese to an American audience at this time is to perform an alliance between two political worlds. To speak as a Japanese to an American audience in the 1940s, by contrast, is to belong to no political world. Resident in New York at the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing, Matsumoto is taken into custody by the Justice Department under suspicion of being a Japanese spy. Detention occasions the act of writing. “On April 10 I began to write a sort of life story. I felt the necessity of tracing my history in order to explain to my own satisfaction my reasons for my decision not to go back to Japan” (Matsumoto, A Brother 243). In declining the offer of repatriation, Matsumoto “signed away his nationality and exiled [himself] to a country where [he] could not become a naturalized citizen” (247). And yet, it is only as a stateless subject, as “the happiest internee the Army had to look after” (249) that Matsumoto comes to fully identify himself “with the principles for which America was fighting” (243)—principles embodied in the process by which he arrives at his decision in which there “is no friend or companion in camp to uphold and approve [his decision] . . . [and] only [his] own thoughts and reasoning to give [him] reassurance” (243). His groundless detention by US authorities echoes an earlier arrest by the Japanese police state, and the effect of the sinister parallel is to reinforce an anti-statist message of Christian pacifism. At the same time, Matsumoto continually identifies freedom with America—“Much as I hated militarism, I thought an American soldier stood for something different” (223), he writes—and therefore his personal development can be described as a paradoxical process in which he becomes at once stateless and more and more American. Contemporary reviewers tellingly described the book as the life story of a “truly noble American, excluded from US citizenship”

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(H. Taylor 1463), the identity of one who is a “free American—in spirit, if not in fact” (Maki 384). A Brother Is a Stranger illustrates a racial identity based on a double denationalization that Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) would most famously give metaphoric expression in the form of stylistic and philosophical double negation. The narrator of Matsumoto’s autobiography and the protagonist of Okada’s novel arrive in this place from opposite geographical origins and scored with opposite affects, but their convergence here reminds us that the double negativity we might be wont to generalize as typically “Asian American” is perhaps most paradigmatically a Japanese American articulation of that identity. 13 Ling-chi Wang’s influential thesis of dual domination describes in similar double-negative terms the socio-historical situation of a Chinese American population that has had to struggle against the exclusionary and appropriative forces of Chinese and American nationalisms (L. Wang). Nevertheless, it is surely consequential for Chinese American versions of Asian American identity that the forties boom in Chinese American literature coincided with, and could allegorize, an urgent stateto-state alliance between China and the United States.14 Even the Cold War did not so much abrogate this special friendship as transfer it from a now fallen mainland to Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China. To the extent that, despite certain important parallels, Chineseness at the height of McCarthyism never figured as an enemy culture to the same degree as did Japaneseness during World War II, Chinese American literature of the 1950s and after could continue to solicit the American public’s interest in the preservation of Chinese democracy. As is well known, Asian American narratives very often involve plots of intergenerational conflict such that the development of the Asian American subject also performs a resolution of American and Asian cultural differences. Matsumoto’s autobiography narrates an irreparable breach with his elder brother, Yuji, whose near-psychotic need to control him symbolizes the “Big Brother” nature of the 1930s Japanese military state. As a substitute figure for an absent father, Yuji can symbolize the deleterious effects of a paternalistic feudal tradition and the dangers of the usurpation of a father’s real authority. To this extent, the text vacillates between a cultural critique of an essentially authoritarian Japan and a historical critique of its 1930s militarist regime. Both this culture and politics are rejected, however, in the autobiography’s adoption of a Christian discourse of individualism. “My fight is for the universal truth that man can be happy only if he can work out his destiny according to his own free conscience” (Matsumoto, A Brother 317).

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Lin holds a very different attitude toward family: That is how it is with the modern Chinese as he surveys Eastern and Western culture. It is the only way in which the Eastern culture should be surveyed and understood. For he has a Chinese father and a Chinese mother, and every time he talks of China, he thinks of his father and his mother or of the memories of them. It was a life, their lives, so full of courage and patience and suffering and happiness and fortitude, lives untouched by modern influence, but lives no less grand and noble and humble and sincere. Then does he truly understand China. (Y. Lin, My Country 15)

Lin’s emphasis on respecting rather than combating parents comports with a text whose mission is the preservation of a culture laid siege by external forces. This radical contrast between Lin’s and Matsumoto’s symbolization of family is reflected as well in their fictional tactics of characterization. In the same year that saw the reissue of My Country and My People, Lin published a historical novel called Moment in Peking (1939), which unfolds the connected fates of two wealthy families against a tableau of twentiethcentury revolution. In the novel, we are presented with a female protagonist named Mulan who at first seems to be set apart from others through her singular experience of romantic passion: “For the first time she was aware, as she lay in bed, that she was living in a world by herself, that there was even such a world all her own. It was difficult for her to account for such a feeling, but behind or within that new world, she was vaguely aware also of Lifu” (Y. Lin, Moment 254). Yet against readerly expectations of an ideology of romantic individualism, Mulan readily accepts an arranged marriage to another. A striking absence of irony characterizes the (free indirect) narration of this moment: “Mulan was more luckily married than many or most of these. She had never really made love to Lifu, and she went into her marriage with a clear conscience. Sunya loved her, she knew, and there was no question that she would love her husband after she married him” (Y. Lin, Moment 324). Mulan’s surprising conservatism as a character is matched by her father’s unusual progressivism; in fact, it is this paternal figure who, in combining classical erudition and liberal social beliefs, best approximates the novel’s heroic ideal. In Lin’s Chinese world, there is no automatic generational alignment of tradition and progress, no distinct generational protagonist. Like his autobiography, Matsumoto’s novel The Seven Stars (1949) narrates the birth of Japanese individuality during World War II despite, or perhaps because of, the pressure to conform in a period of military nationalistic fervor. Here, however, the narrator is not the Christian dissident but an apolitical journalist who slowly becomes aware of his interpellation by imperialism

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and the propagandistic nature of his vocation; as with the autobiography, the process of individuation in the novel intertwines the formation of independent political opinion with the private embrace of companionate love. Like Lin’s Moment in Peking, Matsumoto’s The Seven Stars is a historical novel, populating its social universe with an unusually large number of major characters who stand for varieties of social symbolic systems. But where Lin distributes narrative attention vertically between generations, Matsumoto distributes it horizontally across a single generation, represented by seven boyhood friends who constitute the “seven stars” of the novel’s title. Lin’s family narrative seeks to displace an assumed opposition between tradition and modernity; Matsumoto’s focus on male friendship adjudicates between contemporary outlooks that are jostling for youthful allegiance. As in Kingston’s rendition of the Mulan legend, Lin’s eponymous character is driven by filial piety and patriotism. By the final page of Moment in Peking, Mulan has subordinated herself not just to the wants of family but to the needs of the nation. Watching thousands of civilians marching against the Japanese, “She lost all sense of space and direction, lost even the sense of her personal identity, and felt that she had become of the great common people. . . . She stepped into her place among them” (Y. Lin, Moment 815). Like Kingston’s woman warrior, Lin’s Mulan has all the advantages of natural talent and a male education. Also as in the case of Kingston’s woman warrior, the character’s unique upending of gender norms ends up serving the interests of a patriarchal family system. This apparent contradiction has been at the center of much feminist debate about Kingston’s novel, but it might be of further contextual benefit to see that her Mulan follows a pattern of Chinese American reconciliatory approaches to intergenerational relations. As a representative trope for the larger thematic of mother-daughter relations, Kingston’s woman warrior is famously both the mother and the daughter, across whose subjectpositions narrative sympathy is distributed, despite the latter’s privileged representation through the autobiographical “I.” To this extent, Louis Chu’s female character, Mei Oi, in Eat a Bowl of Tea, whose extramarital affair can be interpreted as equally motivated by the independence of female desire and by male seduction—an affair whose happy resolution marks both a novelistic recognition of the legitimacy of female pleasure and its recuperation for reproductive purpose—also shares something of the contradictory gender politics of this Mulan figure in Chinese American fiction. A vertical distribution of viewpoint characterizes Eat a Bowl of Tea, a third person narrative which, though it opens by situating Ben Loy as its protagonist, contains many scenes that are focalized through his immigrant father, Wah Gay. Though Chu’s novel is usually read as an illustration of the frustrations of the second-generation subject who must evade the paternal supervision

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that is rendering him literally impotent, it is also the case that the ending reconciles the desires of all. Wah Gay eventually gets the grandson he wants, but more surprising is the fact that Ben Loy should fall in love so immediately (and finally) with the bride chosen for him by his parents. An accommodation of the old—or an attempt at its rounded representation—also preoccupies canonical postwar Chinese American autobiography: Pardee Lowe’s Father and Glorious Descendent (1943) and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) both script the emergence of their Asian American subjects through a process of strenuous intergenerational dialogue. The enlightened, if flawed, father-interlocutors of these Chinese American texts contrast sharply with the abjected parental figures of Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar and Okada’s NoNo Boy. By limiting focalization to its second-generation protagonist, Okada’s narrative discourse formally reinforces a thematic representation of a familial dynamic that is among the most alienated in Asian American literature to be found. Finally, to the extent that Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (1953) recollects an exceptionally present set of Issei parents, it is because they are already exceptionally assimilated to a “Nisei perspective.” For Mr. and Mrs. Itoi, home is where their children are. No doubt, a comparative ethnic framework alone cannot be expected to make visible all the internal variations of “Asian American literature,” which will require integrating multiple ways of historicizing narrative form to provide a sufficiently complex picture.15 A greater tendency toward the reconciliatory treatment of intergenerational conflict—or what I have called the both/and logic of Chinese American constructions of Asian American identity—may, however, help illuminate why Chinese American texts by both male and female authors often possess an ethnographic or exoticist quality that Japanese American texts do not. To reiterate, it is not because there have been more Chinese American publications that the problem of Asian American Orientalism seems to lodge in its examples. The Chineseness of Asian American Orientalism is more likely a function of the historical form of postwar Chinese American narrative, the modality by which it articulates Asian American identity. Insofar as the disclosure of a parallel exotic universe provides a basis for claiming American identification in Chinese American narrative, we can never be sure whether the text is representing an authentic Asia or whether it is representing “America’s Asia.” This may explain why though Chu’s and Okada’s novels might be said to be equally “historical”—as period portraits of 1940s New York Chinatown and 1940s Seattle Japantown respectively—Chu’s narrative gaze veers toward ethnographic description (whether the “village customs” are being practiced in Canton or in New York) and Okada’s does not. For the same reason, though stylistically Houston’s Farewell to Manzanar is the more straightforward autobiography

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and might therefore be expected to carry the heavier representational burden of documentary, it is not, however, ethnographic in its effect. Meanwhile, Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, despite the general consensus that it is more fictional than factual, has never been free of the potential for Orientalist reproach. As in the case of their narrative predecessors, this is because Kingston’s narrator moves between two worlds (even if they are imaginary), while Houston’s narrator can show us neither, only the psycho-social space of the camp, which belongs politically nowhere, and which she has difficulty ever leaving behind.

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10 Travels in the Body: Technologies of Waste in the Chinese Diaspora Deborah L. Madsen

I The theme of toilets in particular, and waste in general, permeates the cultural production of the Chinese diaspora. This chapter analyzes the toilet as an element of material culture that usually remains invisible and yet in Chinese diasporic literature is assigned an important cultural value as a site for cross-cultural encounters.1 It is interesting to note that other diasporic Asian literatures do not share this thematic emphasis, with the exception of South Asian texts that deal with the issue of caste and of the “untouchables” whose caste-prescribed duties include cleaning toilets. Mulk Raj Anand’s 1935 novel Untouchable is a classic of this type.2 The emphasis upon the toilet as an icon of cultural transformation and subjective conflict specifically in Chinese diaspora writings seems to me to be a feature of, more or less, latent Orientalism in westernized discourses of cultural “Chineseness.”3 I will turn to this argument later in the chapter, after first exploring some of the implications of the emphasis on waste in diasporic writing. For it is the fact of travel— whether as a tourist, an immigrant, or a refugee—that makes the disruption of toilet habits possible in these texts. The moment of cultural defamiliarization occurs when the body is placed in a situation of difference where “Chineseness” and all the cultural practices associated with being Chinese are placed into question. Benzi Zhang, responding to Rey Chow’s assertion that, for the migrant, homelessness is the only home state, observes that: earlier conceptualizations of home based on a singular location are no longer adequate to describe the new dimensions and transformations of home, which has been re-versed in diaspora not

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as a “felicitous space” of living, but rather as a process of (be-)coming, . . . a paradoxical feeling of both homesickness and home-crisis, for the movement between multiple locations of cultures suggests a cobelonging dialogue which, by situating diasporas simultaneously inside and outside of a culture, intensifies both the desirability and the impossibility of a given home-place. (B. Zhang 103–4)

This experience of being simultaneously inside and outside the culture is, as Zhang, Chow and others have observed, an artefact of travel; but it arises from travel of a particular kind. It is the traveling performed by a migrant or refugee, a traveler who does not intend to return “home,” and who consequently finds the bonds with home culture are loosened and subject to revision. This also includes, then, the experience of liminal states of transformation, from one “national” identity to another. Of course such “culture shock” attends also the experience of tourism. But where the tourist may experience a vicarious thrill from the encounter with cultural difference, secure in the knowledge that the tour will end and a stable “home” will be available to which to return, for permanent travelers living in diaspora the shock of cultural difference is more profound. How one deals with one’s body—the physical “home” that binds the spirit to “here and now”—is subject to national technologies or rather technologies that are “nationalized”: claimed by culture as part of its national fantasy of itself. Through technologies of waste, national cultures keep hidden that which should not be seen in a “civilized” society: shit, disease, death. Travel, however, disrupts these technologies of invisibility by substituting one for another. In this way, travel makes visible that which we try so hard to keep invisible and, as a result, reveals to the conscious view the very invisibility of the culture from which we come and into which we have been socialized. The diasporic subject offers a unique perspective on this experience: in contrast to the migrant who assimilates into a new national culture and becomes fully a citizen of that group, the Chinese diasporan by definition remains allied to at least two national entities: the Chinese homeland (which might be the Chinese mainland but equally Hong Kong, Singapore, or Malaysia, for example) and the nation of residence. Indeed, these allegiances are further complicated by calls upon the diasporan’s loyalties by what Tu Weiming calls “cultural China”: the transnational networks of Chinese cultural communities that are scattered across the globe. As Benzi Zhang further comments: The complexity and ambivalence associated with redefining and revising home in relation to diaspora discourse present a challenging topic for our discussion, since the very term “diaspora,”

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as we use it today, indicates not only a condition of “out-of-country” displacement, but also the mishmash “out-of-culture,” “out-oflanguage” and “out-of-oneself” experiences. (B. Zhang 105)

This is the discursive complement to Henry Yu’s observation of contemporary Los Angeles that “[i]n this world, migration is a process without end, comings and goings rather than the singular leaving of one place and arriving at another by which we mythically understand the immigrant’s story” (Yu 532). From this pattern of movement that places in question the linearity of our inherited models of migration, Yu recommends: “One of the most important benefits for American studies in placing migration to and from the Americas at the center of our scholarship, it seems to me, is to escape nationalism as our rationale” (532). However, it seems to me that the very concepts of migration and diaspora are the artefacts of nationalistic paradigms of transnational study. The paradox of transnational approaches to American Studies (and indeed other fields of study that are based on the analysis of the nation as the object of inquiry) is that these approaches reinforce our intellectual dependence upon the nation as a stable point of reference. It may be that emphasizing diaspora, in contradistinction to migration, will allow us to focus more completely on Zhang’s “out-of-culture,” “out-of-language,” and “out-of-oneself” experiences. I want to present the experience of bodily abjection as illustrative of this “out-of” condition, where that which should be inside the body is “out-of” it, where the traveler is “out-of” his or her body but also finds him- or herself “out-of” control over the technologies that manage our bodily processes. In Lillian Ng’s first novel, Silver Sister (1994), she presents the story of a migrant woman who, as in Yu’s model, is subject to repeated migrations: from her remote village Lung Sun in Southern China to Canton, from Canton to Hong Kong, from there to Japanese-occupied Singapore, and finally to Sydney, Australia. The pattern of repeat migrations serves not only to allow Ng to survey the history of mid-twentieth-century China through the experience of one woman but also allows her to represent the cultural complexity of diasporic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and Australasia. It is a lengthy narrative and I want to focus only on one relatively short episode where the protagonist, Ah Silver, now a woman in advanced middle-age, migrates to Australia. While on the airplane, she is assisted by a Chinese Malaysian student in an adjacent seat who translates for her and, when she needs to use the toilet, shows her to a queue of passengers waiting outside the cubicle. When her turn comes, Ah Silver is shocked to find herself faced with a western sit-toilet rather than an eastern squat-toilet, with no one to advise or “translate” for her the significance of this object. Ah Silver’s confusion is presented humorously, as she tries to fathom how to use this western technology:

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It was a very compact toilet, self-contained, with a small wash-basin with hot water tap, and mirror. I’m used to the squatting type, so I perched on top of the toilet seat, and had great difficulty controlling the stream of urine. I made a puddle on the floor and couldn’t find anything suitable to mop up. I pointed this out to the hostess who burst into tears on seeing the mess. The passengers outside didn’t look very pleased when I emerged. They were all foreigners. As I was unable to apologise in English, I simply smiled, nodded, and looked remorseful. (L. Ng 254)

It is interesting to note that this episode takes place neither in Asia nor in Australia but in transit, in a liminal space that is between nations. Later, I will comment on what I see as traces of Orientalism to be found in this passage but now I want to comment on the details of the episode itself. It is not Ah Silver who is distressed by her inability to understand how western plumbing works; it is the flight attendant who bursts into tears. Ah Silver just smiles and tries to look sorry. She is a comic figure of the kind who sails through a scene of devastation largely untouched by the chaos she has caused. She has violated the decorum of what can be made visible by creating a puddle of urine on the floor, there for all the passengers to see. What should be either kept inside her body or discreetly flushed away is instead made a public spectacle. The fact that Ah Silver does not appreciate the gravity of what she has done adds to her foreignness, excluding her ever more definitively from the community of passengers who do not need an explanation of how the toilet works. The puddle on the floor represents the kind of “out-of-culture,” “out-of-language,” and “out-of-oneself” experience that I referred to above. Ah Silver is unable to articulate any response to the puddle beyond a silent smile; her “out-of-culture” status is unspoken but clear to the hostile fellow passengers. The flush toilet places Ah Silver in a condition where she loses control over her body and its waste. Indeed, increasing tourism between east and west has resulted in a new symbology of toilet signage throughout Asia, to prevent mistakes like Ah Silver’s, as evidenced by these signs:

Figure 2: “Cross-cultural Toilet Signage.”

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Figure 3: “Cross-cultural Toilet Signage.”

These signs attempt to bridge the culture gap between east and west by repositioning the body so that waste will remain invisible, social decorum will be preserved, and abject reactions, like that of the flight attendant, will be avoided. The subject will remain, then, a subject, unlike Ah Silver who is reduced to an inarticulate object in this episode. We may complicate the threatened loss of meaning in the confrontation with foreign technologies of waste by considering Julia Kristeva’s concept of “abjection”: the violent psychological reaction to the loss of the distinction between subject and object or between self and other. This reaction is attributed to the flight attendant, in Ng’s novel, but the cause is the revelation of that which should remain hidden: the materiality and corporeality of the body. The loss of control over the disposal of personal waste and the confrontation with one’s own materiality as a body are heightened in the situation of travel or of geographical dislocation. Kristeva’s concept of abjection can clarify the role of toilets in Chinese diasporic cultural production on two levels: the cultural level where culture is revealed as separate from the “pre-cultural” and specific cultures are revealed in all their specificity; second, the individual level where abjection names the moment of separation from the mother/motherland, when we begin to recognize a boundary between “me” and other, between “me” and “(m)other.” So, on the first level, Ah Silver’s facility with a squat toilet is revealed as a cultural rather than natural ability in her encounter with an incomprehensibly different form of plumbing. On the second level, this failure of her Chinese socialization to prepare her to use a toilet on an airplane bound for Sydney is symbolic of the rupture between the “cultural China” that she is leaving and the western culture of Australia, where she is headed. The relationship between Ah Silver as “me,” as her own self-identical subject, and Ah Silver as “Other,” that to which she is reduced by the flush toilet, is subject to radical transformation in the liminal space of the international transit zone through which her flight passes. She travels from the Motherland to the Otherland.

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II The toilet as a cross-cultural intersection The relationship between travel, the experience of abjection, and cultural technologies of waste is intensified in the experience of permanent migrants living in the Chinese diaspora. For example, in an interview with Wei Djao, published in Being Chinese: Voices from the Diaspora (2003), Joaquin Li, a Chinese immigrant born in Guangdong who migrated to the United States after living for nine years in Cuba, comments that while he enjoys returning to Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland for short visits, he could not think of returning to live in China permanently. The reason? He could not exchange western plumbing for Chinese toilets. He explains: I have been to the People’s Republic of China twice, visiting a sister in her eighties. I don’t think I would like to live there: cannot get used to the plumbing—no shower, no flush toilet—and too many mosquitoes. Even in the new apartments, on the sixth floor, there were mosquitoes. No elevator. Social problems are on the increase too: heroin addiction, gambling, robberies, and organized crimes. . . . Now that we are accustomed to the way of life here [Miami], it’s difficult to live in China. (Djao 46)

The connection here is not simply between flush toilets and everyday western luxury. Rather, the absence of western-style toilets is associated first with disease (mosquitoes) and then with crime (drug addiction, gambling, robberies, organized crime). The tropes used in this passage move us from the individual body and personal hygiene (showers, flush toilets) to the body politic and issues of public health as well as the corruption of the social body by crime. It is interesting to note that the first item on this list of social corruptions is drug addiction and specifically heroin addiction: the technology of intravenous drug administration (the syringe) is a further example of the violation of bodily inside and outside that provokes the reaction of abjection. The syringe should be separate from the body yet it pierces the skin and enters the vein; the blood that wells up into the wound thus created should remain inside, invisible, yet it is externalized and made visible. Joaquin Li, then, represents Chinese toilets as a symptom of what ails the national body of China; he associates flush toilets with modernity or progress and minimum levels of luxury (“even in the new apartments” there are mosquitoes and no elevators). The implication here is that squat toilets are pre-modern and primitive: another Orientalist gesture to which I will return at the end of this chapter.

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Joaquin Li’s symbolic connection between abjection and both the individual and political bodies reveals something of the cultural work performed by Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. As David Spurr, in his study of nineteenth-century British colonial rhetoric, observes: “The idea of abjection . . . offers an analogy between the symbolic structure of individual consciousness and the systems of representation at work in culture at large. Both structures appear to depend for their internal coherence on a symbolic exclusionary tactic: the horror of the Other, the repudiation of the scapegoat” (Spurr 79). Of course I am not suggesting that Joaquin Li wants to create a sacrificial scapegoat of China but rather that his self-identification as “American” depends upon the repudiation of his Chinese origins, which he achieves through the process of Othering through abjection. Chinese culture, therefore, becomes in his symbolic representation a site of defilement, disease, and social corruption in contrast to Florida which is identified with the “normal” or socialization (“we are accustomed to the way of life here”). Within this symbolic system of difference, America versus China is supported by distinctions between cleanliness and defilement, disease and health, modernity and a pre-modern or primitive condition of being. The boundary between the inside and outside of the body finds a symbolic counterpart in the transgression of national borders represented by diaspora. I am invoking here Kristeva’s understanding of abjection as the profound psychosomatic response to the transgression of the categories of “inside” and “outside” the material body. In The Powers of Horror (1982), Kristeva describes the physical symptoms (gagging, nausea, weeping, dizziness, vomiting) that accompany the sight of something made visible that should properly remain hidden: the bodily interior exposed by an open wound, sewerage, dung, menstrual blood, or even the skin that forms on the surface of cooling milk breaks down the distinction between inside and outside, subject and object, self and Other. The abject symbolizes that which defines “me” by standing for the “not me,” but it is not a defining complement; rather, the abject is totally foreign in a way that threatens the breakdown of meaning: .

The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. (Kristeva 2)

The object brings the subject towards meaning; the abject threatens to destroy meaning completely. The primary case of the abject is the corpse or cadaver,

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the sight and smell of which in a state of decomposition traumatically shows us our own corporeality and mortality. The dead body is not simply a sign of, or pointer to, death: it is death made present. The corpse brings to us all that we attempt to deny through the structures of culture: “In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup and masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death” (3). As Kristeva describes it, abjection violently and traumatically takes us back to the stage of psychosexual development of the neo-natal infant, to the stage before the formation of the opposition between conscious and unconscious experience, before entry into the symbolic structures of language: the stage of bodily immediacy and connection with the maternal body, to the “immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (10). The abject marks the establishment of a fundamental border between the object in terms of which “I” is the subject; this border creates the separation of subject and object, of human from animal, and of culture from that which preceded it, what we may call the “pre-cultural.” This pre-cultural, prelinguistic condition is symbolized in some respects by the maternal: that from which the child must separate and against which the child seeks its own autonomy and authenticity. The abject, then, marks separation from the mother, through the recognition of the boundary between subject and object, “me” and other, between “me” and “(m)other.” What Kristeva chooses to call the “primal repression” she also describes as: “a reluctant struggle against what, having been the mother, will turn into an abject. Repelling, rejecting; repelling itself, rejecting itself. Ab-jecting” (13). It is here that we might recall Joaquin Li’s symbolic rejection of his motherland, China, as defiled, corrupt, and abject. He can define himself as an “American” subject by abjecting the Chinese national body as the “not me” or the “no longer me.”

III “Me” and Other / “Me” and “(M)other” The maternal constitution of abjection, as a dimension of the socialization process, dominates a number of recent Chinese diasporic texts, notably Hsu-ming Teo’s Behind the Moon (2005), which begins with an extensive description of the toilet training of Justin Cheong, the son of Singaporean immigrants to Australia. This novel, like Evelyn Lau’s autobiography Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989), explores generational differences between

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immigrant Chinese parents and their foreign-born children, in part, through the problematics of waste. Lau describes the trauma of being lectured by her mother, as her mother sits on the toilet, requiring that the child witness her urination. “Chineseness” is taught to children through training in personal hygiene as part of the parents’ attempt to ensure that cultural heritage as a set of everyday practices is transmitted to future generations. In this way, toilets and toilet training bring together relations between self and mother, self and motherland, cultural Chineseness and multicultural foreignness. Kristeva notes that food can become defilement only “to the extent that orality signifies a boundary of the self’s clean and proper body.” Food, then, becomes abject “only if it is a border between two distinct entities or territories. A boundary between nature and culture, between the human and the non-human” (Kristeva 75). However, the excrement produced by that food also transgresses the boundary between distinct cultures as we saw in the case of Ah Silver, whose urine puddle evoked a reaction of abjection figured by the flight attendant’s tears. The gap separating eastern and western technologies of waste disposal, a gap closed by the socialization and normalization of specific habits of personal hygiene, exposes the cultural specificity of these habits and makes a space for the reassertion of untrained nature, right there in the high-tech environment of intercontinental air travel. An emphasis upon toilet training is, of course, an emphasis upon the assertion of maternal power over the infantile body. Kristeva describes the practice of this maternal authority through the symbolic mapping of the infant’s material body as a site of orifices that are subject either to neglect or mastery, “the differentiation of proper-clean and improperly dirty, possible and impossible. . . . Maternal authority is the trustee of the self’s clean and proper body” (72). In the opening chapter of Behind the Moon, Teo has the character Justin Cheong recall his earliest memory, which is of going to a public toilet with his mother. The recollection begins with the humiliation of being asked loudly if he needs the toilet and checking whether any fellow shoppers have overheard his mother’s words. The narrator comments, “Already, he was starting to develop the habit of censoring his mother in his head; eavesdropping on their conversation from an imaginary non-Asian point of view and marking out her oddness” (H. Teo 2). Here, Justin’s separation from his mother is not so much gendered as it is racialized. He adopts the perspective of a non–Asian Australian as he projects himself into a subject that is separate from the maternal. Justin’s mother, Annabelle, asserts her authority in the following paragraph when he remembers how she “hauled him off to the ladies’. She locked them both into a cubicle and heaved him up so that he was standing balanced precariously on the rim of the toilet” (2). Like Ah Silver, Annabelle Cheong

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transforms a western flush toilet into an eastern squat toilet, and, in fear of a puddle such as Ah Silver produced, Annabelle orders her son “Aim properly and don’t make a mess for other people to clean up” (2). Justin recalls here his socialization as a Chinese son, a process that is complicated by the absence of Chinese cultural technologies. Annabelle’s understanding of proper cleanliness requires that her son’s flesh should not touch the toilet; she teaches him fear of contamination along with her perception of the appropriate use of the toilet. She discards the first few sheets of toilet paper on the roll (“Who knew what contaminated them?”) and before the final flush she cleans the rim: “She could not endure the shame of strangers thinking she had fouled the toilet. She and her husband lived their lives to one mantra: what would people say?” (2). The fear of abjection, then, goes beyond the fear of visual confrontation with filth, with bodily corruption and defilement, to the sounds of excretion (Annabelle flushes the toilet so no one will hear Justin urinating). This is a further complication of Kristeva’s description of abjection and one that invokes Lacan’s concept of the ideal self that is constructed in the mirror stage of psychosexual development, the “Ideal-I” that we pursue and aspire to become throughout our adult lives. For Annabelle and her husband Tek, this “ideal ego” is reflected in their capacity to see in the gaze of others the “Ideal-I” that is not abject. In other words, they strive to see, reflected in the returned gaze of others, an image of themselves as “proper-clean” and not “improperly dirty,” in Kristeva’s terminology. This is emphasized further when the narrator discloses that Annabelle and Tek evaluate everyone according to the condition of their toilets and toilet habits. Socialization, acculturation, the distance of the civilized body from the state of undisciplined nature, is symbolized by the toilet. This takes on an added resonance in the context of the immigrant experience in a multicultural society. Trained toilet habits expose profound cultural gaps and dislocation, at the same time that the importance of cultural assimilation and acceptance as “belonging” intensifies for the migrant subject. The desire to be perceived as “clean,” to be proper in one’s body, can perhaps be linked with the bodily difference that marks the Asian immigrant as Other in a dominant Anglo-Australian society. Tek is pleased to think that his son is growing up to be “an Australian” (6) when, ironically, the Gallipoli poster adorning Justin’s bedroom signifies not his admiration for ANZACS but his homoerotic desire for the actors who play in the movie. The poster signifies that he is growing up gay, not Australian. The emphasis upon skin color and ethnicity in the novel falls primarily upon the character of Tien, a young Vietnamese refugee whose father was an African American GI. However, the cultural politics of visible difference are played out in an Asian Australian context in the narrative. Justin is taught by his mother to erase all signs of bodily materiality, from the audible signs of urination and

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the potential contamination of toilets, to the smells and bodily fluids of sex. The narrator tells us that Annabelle showers twice a day and immediately after sex to remove all signs of bodily functionality. Kristeva’s theorization of abjection includes a distinction between gendered kinds of defilement: “While they always relate to corporeal orifices as to so many landmarks parcelingconstituting the body’s territory, polluting objects fall, schematically, into two types: excremental and menstrual. Neither tears nor sperm, for instance, although they belong to the borders of the body, have any polluting value” (Kristeva 71). However, Annabelle’s perception of defilement includes all sexual fluids, such as semen, which must be compulsively washed away after sex before she is once again properly clean. All signs of sex are “dirty.” Whenever a sex scene appears on television, she hides it from Justin’s sight by slapping her hands across his eyes, saying: “Don’t watch, Jay-Jay. Dirty things going on.” And, confronted with television news coverage of Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, “She pushed him out of the room and warned him, ‘Don’t look, Jay. Dirty like anything’” (H. Teo 7). If the signs of hetero-normative sex must be scrubbed off the body to restore the body’s proper cleanliness, non-normative sexuality is punished with bodily pain. Justin flagellates himself, banging his head against the wall and punching his arms until the bruises bloom; punishing the body that refuses to be “proper” in a way that will conform to his parent’s image of a “good” Australian boy. He wants to cry, to produce those tears that signify his bodily materiality but, as the narrator observes, he is reduced to “a wasteland of regret” (H. Teo 8) for the dirtiness that his body, including the tears he desires, represents. Justin recalls these memories on the day he has his first homosexual experience: a rendezvous with a strange man in a public toilet. This opening chapter sets out a complex network of psycho-cultural significations: the toilet as a site of abjection, the body as material defilement, the body as a marker of cultural difference and potential exclusion or rejection, and the toilet as a site of deviant sexuality that brings together the failure of the socialization that his mother enacts through the disciplining of his body to specific cultural technologies of waste. These technologies should protect against abjection by keeping invisible the signs of bodily materiality: excrement and sexuality alike. But, as a Chinese Australian son of immigrant parents, Justin is located in the gap that divides the Chinese culture that still prescribes his mother’s actions from the Anglo-Australian culture that presents him with flush toilets and an alternative culture of bodily technologies or disciplines, dividing his AngloAustralian self from the Chinese (m)other. The film Public Toilet (2002), by Hong Kong director Fruit Chan, offers a rather different perspective on this issue of self, (m)other, and travel. The protagonist Dong Dong, nicknamed “the God of Toilets,” seeks his identity

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by visiting public toilets, across the world, like the one in which he was found abandoned as a baby. Where, in a text like Lillian Ng’s Silver Sister, the incomprehension with which her heroine confronts a foreign toilet is symptomatic of cultural disjunction and the unsettling of accustomed ways of living in the world, and where the toilet is a scene of cross-cultural tension for Justin, the Australian-born Chinese son of immigrant parents, the toilet in Fruit Chan’s film is a site for the discovery or construction of identity. This aspect of Dong Dong’s experience is emphasized by the friend who accompanies him, who seeks the cure for his brother’s illness: both characters are seeking something almost magical that will overcome death, overcome abjection.

IV Waste and the social abject Kristeva’s concept of abjection has been used to powerful effect by David Leiwei Li in his analysis of the abject status of Chinese Americans, in Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (1998). Li takes up Kristeva’s understanding of the abject as transgressing the boundary between “inside” and “outside,” and applies this to the political body of the United States within which Chinese Americans are simultaneously positioned as both inside and outside. Drawing upon Benedict Anderson’s concept of the nation as a national imagining, Li argues that, in order to sustain the national fantasy of “America,” a myth of Anglo Saxon purity has operated historically to exclude Asians from the national imaginary despite the physical presence of generations of Asian immigrants. A critical mass of immigrants has always been necessary for the United States to secure its expanding geography as an expanding national space, but, in the face of this increasingly nonhomogenous population demographic, the fantasy of national unity has been increasingly urgent. He cites the exclusion laws of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a phase of “alienation” within American Orientalism, when Asian migrants were forbidden access to United States territory except under special conditions (defined for students, merchants, diplomats, and other non-permanent migrants). The period following the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 Li terms the phase of “abjection” when Asian migrants are permitted access to the United States and to US citizenship but while these Asian communities are “inside” the national body, they are not permitted the status of complete belonging as full citizens; the Asian American is still not to be identified with the national imagining of “the American.”

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To describe the mechanism of exclusion from the national imaginary of an Asian American community that appears to be included within the national space, Li draws upon Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of the operations of class privilege within the context of French democracy. Drawing on the concepts of social competence and cultural capital, Li identifies how abjection works with an understanding of social competence that arises from the subject’s genesis in “the nation”—or the national fantasy of nationhood—so race and rights are identified in a way that the law does not permit. Li concludes: Although the law necessarily ensures the contractual terms of citizenship in abstraction, it can hardly change the cultural condition of Asian American abjection. This is because the law cannot—even if it is willing to try—possibly adjudicate the psychocultural aspects of subject constitution; neither can it undo the historically saturated epistemological structures and structures of feeling, which continue to undermine the claims of Asian American subjectivity. Visibly different from the normative look of the nation and suspiciously alien to its cultural origin, Asian Americans can hardly have the requisite “social” competence that is not theirs to inherit in the first place. (D. Li 11–12)

The claim to social competence and to cultural capital is prescribed in terms of subject positions that are filiated or affiliated with the nation; that are “inside,” “outside,” or ambiguously abjected within the national body politic. What Li does not ask, however, is how Kristeva’s symbolic vocabulary of excrement and bodily defilement relates to the boundary-setting mechanism of the national imaginary. The Asian migrants that Li describes fulfil a practical role within the US economy as sources of labor and of managerial expertise. This utilitarian function is important because the abject is not only that which properly belongs elsewhere, somewhere invisible, it is also that which has no function in the discourse of the visible: waste. Waste should properly be invisible to the clean and fully civilized body, and in this way waste performs a normative moral and social function. As John Frow describes: Waste is the degree zero of value, or it is the opposite of value, or it is whatever stands in excess of value systems grounded in use. For Locke it is the limit of property rights: faced with the abundance of nature, a person may appropriate whatever—but only—what he or she can use before it spoils. Yet waste is at the same time constitutive of the structure of value: on the one hand it is residually a commodity, something from which money may still be made. . . . On the other hand, the category of waste underpins

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any system of social distinction, as the principle of uselessness that establishes a non-utilitarian symbolic order. (Frow 21–22)

That which is abjected is, then, that which has no use but which defines the use-value of its opposites or complements. I say complements because not only is that which has no use essential to the definition of cultural systems of value, so too is that which possesses only the usefulness of the decorative, of the ornament. As Bourdieu observes, prestige lies not in the actual possession of cultural capital but in the claim to cultural capital that is given force by patterns of conspicuous consumption and sumptuary waste (Frow 25). The possession of visible markers of financial capital or economic power, of the capacity to consume is in itself a claim to cultural capital through the deliberate production of waste. A curious intersection of waste, toilets, and conspicuous consumption could be found until recently in a popular tourist attraction in Hong Kong. The 24-carat gold toilet was in a jeweller’s shop, not a plumbing supply shop nor a museum: it was situated not for its use-value nor for its decorative potential. Rather, it was an incentive to attract shoppers into the store with the lure of its outrageous conspicuous consumption.5

Figure 4: “24-carat gold toilet, 3-D Gold Store, 21 Man Lok Street, Hunghom/Kowloon, Hong Kong, China.”

Waste as inutility or conspicuous consumption; waste as expulsion and repulsion: both play their part in the cultural dynamics of the desire for power, which is complicated by cross-cultural tensions. As Jacques Derrida explores in Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (1992), the gift becomes waste in the absence of reciprocity which would bestow some use-value on the gift, by transforming the act of giving into an act of exchange. He asks: “Is giving possible? Is it possible to give without immediately entering into a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned?” (Derrida, Given Time 7). We can see this question at work in the film Public Toilet, after baby Dong Dong’s discovery in the toilet by the woman who becomes his adoptive grandmother.

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She tries unsuccessfully to locate the baby’s mother, to institute an exchange, but she becomes the recipient of a gift (from the mother) that is inseparable from a debt (to the child). And the gift is, of course, of uncertain value. The problematic relation between gift and debt—the meaning of the gift—leads Derrida to a paradox or aporia: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as a gift puts it into a relation of debt. In Maxine Hong Kingston’s narrative China Men (1977), we find reference to a culture of reciprocity in the unexpected context of waste. When the grandfather visits his neighbors and uses their toilet, he carefully weighs his excrement which is to become fertilizer for the neighbors’ fields, in order that they may reciprocate precisely by giving him the correct weight of fertilizing excrement in return. Here, excrement is not waste, nor is it abjected. Excrement here is assigned meaning within a different symbolic economy and, in Kingston’s text, serves not to construct the boundary between subject and object for her character, the Chinese grandfather, but rather, for her western reader, serves to mark a national border between Chinese object and not-Chinese reading subject. Waste as exchange, here, signifies the absence of social hierarchy in the positioning of the two neighboring families. Waste is neither a gift nor a sign of defilement because of the value assigned it in this specific cultural imaginary. In Simone Lazaroo’s novel about an immigrant Singaporean family in Australia, The World Waiting to Be Made (1994), the distinction between the useful and the useless lies at the basis of class hierarchies. The unnamed protagonist and first-person narrator describes her arrival with her family in 1966, “only a couple of years after the Assimilation Section of the Australian Immigration Department had become the Integration Section” (25), by explaining the way in which a customs officer inspects a package of Asian spice powder “as if it might contain sewerage” (25) before dropping it into the waste bin. With a play on the term “customs officer,” Lazaroo suggests the clash of cultures that her protagonist has witnessed. This is underlined by the fact that it is not “Integration” but indeed “Assimilation” that is being enforced by this officer. Asian food is here equated to sewerage. At the very moment when this Singaporean family enters Australia, as newly arrived citizens, they are subject to the exclusion that arises from the cultural disciplining of their bodily habits or customs. The symbolic vocabulary of excrement and abjection is extended, later in the narrative, when the narrator introduces her father’s work as an engineer of sewers. Prefacing this introduction is the story of the mythological Hantu Maligang, who controls access to the country of the dead. For those who desire a better afterlife than moldering in a coffin, there is the chance to make their way to this country of the dead but, in order to enter, they must engage the guide, Maligang. He guards the ditch that isolates the country of the dead:

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This ditch isn’t full of flowing water, but of ooze and slime and excrement. Maligang makes you look hard at this, until you are forced to recognise some of the excrement as your own from your life on earth. If you are brave enough to do this, you won’t fall into it. You cross the fallen tree-trunk bridge to a better afterlife. (Lazaroo 52)

Ironically, it is only in the confrontation with one’s own corporeality that escape from death can be found. The narrator confesses to the hope that it was this story that inspired her father’s choice of occupation as a plumber and digger of sewers. She hopes that he will find both peace and also truth in his digging. The symbolic vocabulary used by Lazaroo is reminiscent of the discussion in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression where Peter Stallybrass and Allon White discuss “the sewers as a symbolic system [revealing] . . . one of the dominant tropes of western metaphysics: truth lies hidden behind a veil. But ‘truth’ is . . . conceived materially, as excrement . . . as simply the revelation of the bodily functions, hidden by ‘the last veil’” (Stallybrass and White 140). And, in relation to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, they comment that “the signs of the sewer could not be confined ‘under the surface’. The sewer—the city’s ‘conscience’—insisted, as Freud had said of the hysterical symptom, in ‘joining in the conversation’” (141). A similar symbolic mapping is found in suburban Perth, the setting of Lazaroo’s novel. The Asian family find themselves living in proximity to the swamp, where the local drains empty, in contrast to AngloAustralian families who live near the lake, protected by distance from the waste that flows from the drains. And the protagonist’s father moves from a career as an engineer of the sewers that form the British colonial legacy in Singapore to the equivalent position in Australia where he, invisibly, toils to keep invisible the waste that is repellent to civilized society. The truth that is to be found in the sewers he supervises is the truth of his own abjected position in a society riven with anti-Asian prejudice but dependent upon that abjected class to define and support the edifice of White Australian legacies and power relations.

V Orientalism from west to east I have noted above some instances where the association of Chinese toilets with the primitive or the pre-modern, with disease and corruption, carries overtones of Orientalism and I have proposed that these associations help to explain the prominence of the toilet motif in Chinese diasporic writing. In Lillian Ng’s Silver Sister, Ah Silver is represented as incapable of understanding how to use a flush toilet with the consequence that she makes a puddle on the

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floor. Her rather childlike inability to use the aircraft toilet is narrated from a point of view that is alienated from the Oriental subject as she is reduced to an inarticulate grinning object of the fellow passengers’ hostility. It is curious that Ng transforms the queue of passengers waiting for the toilet into a community that is unified in its objection to the mess she has made; the weeping flight attendant is the sympathetic character in this scene. Underlining the Orientalist trace in the scene, however, is the implausibility of the literal story: it is hardly believable that a woman who possesses many decades of experience using a squat toilet cannot use a flush toilet in the same way, that she cannot aim the stream of urine and so creates a puddle. However, Ng demands that the reader “suspend disbelief” and accept that this is so. In fact, what she describes in this scene is the complaint more frequently made by western women, accustomed to using flush toilets, who cannot manage to aim the stream of urine with any accuracy at the much smaller “target” represented by a squat toilet. Why then does Ng attribute to her Chinese protagonist the cultural dislocation experienced by western women? In this respect, the narrative recapitulates an Orientalist identification of China with the pre-modern or the primitive that is designed to appeal to the presumed Orientalist attitudes of Ng’s readers. Chinese toilets signify a minimum cultural value against which western structures of value can be compared. Joaquin Li’s implication that the squat toilets he encounters upon his return visits to China from the United States are pre-modern and primitive is another similarly Orientalist gesture. I would like to conclude by placing this Orientalist trace in mainland Chinese rather than “overseas Chinese” or Chinese diasporic terms. Throughout the foregoing discussion I have been referring to the experience of Chinese migrants and travelers who move physically from east to west. I want to conclude with some brief remarks concerning the movement of westerners, mostly tourists, to the east. In his studies of McDonald’s in East Asia, Golden Arches East and other works, James L. Watson points out that one of the primary attractions of American-style food outlets is the cleanliness of the toilets available to patrons: “Some try to tag McDonald’s as a polluter and exploiter, but most Chinese consumers see the company as a force for the improvement of urban life. Clean toilets were a welcome development in cities where, until recently, a visit to a public restroom could be harrowing” (Watson 75). This move to bring “western” standards of hygiene to China may seem, on the face of it, to be a progressive move that is in the interests of everyone concerned. However, the assumption that pervades anthropological, historical, and economic discourses on Chinese modernity, as well as the literature of Chinese diasporan writers, is the broadly Orientalist assumption that the western model of progress, including the installation of western plumbing, is a laudable measure of Chinese progress. Implicit here is the shared belief that

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traditional Chinese forms of hygiene are primitive, unclean, and uncivilized. It is reasonable to turn this assumption around and ask, from an eastern point of view, whether the habit of situating a toilet inside the domestic accommodation is so very hygienic; perhaps the structure of the traditional hutong, where a communal toilet was kept separate from all living quarters, is indeed more and not less hygienic. Many Asian people, like Annabelle Cheong in Hsu-ming Teo’s novel, are horrified by the thought of touching one’s flesh to the unclean surface of the toilet. And, exceeding all questions of civilized standards of cleanliness and even issues of public health is the environmental problem of water shortage. The widespread notion that China should modernize by replacing traditional plumbing with western flush toilets ignores the hard fact that water is a scarce resource in China and, indeed, throughout the world. At a global moment when concern for environmental sustainability and effective use of scarce water resources is intensifying, we should be taking a critical view of discourses that romanticize western technologies of waste and Orientalize the Chinese toilets that could be our way back to the future.

11 The Chinese and the White Man’s Burden in Indochina Marie-Paule Ha*

One of the enduring legacies Frantz Fanon bequeathed to postcolonial studies is his powerfully scathing representation of the colonial world as a “Manichean” space unevenly inhabited by two different species of beings: the colonizer and the colonized, the white and the black, the settler and the native, the rich and the poor, and the oppressor and the oppressed. While this Manichean schema no doubt corresponds to the view many a colonialist had of the colonial world, it may not, however, do full justice to the exceedingly complex multi-ethnic and multicultural composition of many of the former colonies which are home to a wide variety of peoples. Such is particularly the case with Southeast Asian countries whose ethnically diverse population could hardly be accounted for by the simple, if not simplifying, colonizer and colonized divide. Among the various ethnicities settling in Southeast Asia, the Chinese have traditionally been singled out as the group that exerted the most considerable cultural and economic influences in their host countries before, during, and after the colonial era. In the nineteenth century, a sizeable Chinese labor cum trade diasporic community was established in Indochina, where they occupied a dominant position in the local economy until the arrival of the French. Upon the completion of colonial conquest and pacification in the 1880s, the French embarked on the mise en valeur of their new possession by setting up a state-sponsored and state-backed “imperial diaspora.”1 Yet, interestingly enough, instead of marginalizing the Chinese who were their most formidable

*

Part of the research for this article was funded by the General Research Fund of the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.

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competitors, the French allowed and sometimes even invited the latter to serve as their intermediaries in their dealings with the indigenous peoples. Such a triangular arrangement, I have argued elsewhere, was necessitated by what Partha Chatterjee calls the “rule of colonial difference” (18), which requires not only that people be identified according to imagined categories such as race and nation, but also that the constructed differences would serve as grounds for instituting a hierarchy according to which people labeled as “whites” were positioned as superior to those designated as “non-whites.”2 In this chapter, through a comparative study of the cultural practices of the Chinese and the French in Indochina, I will show that the Manichean schema not only fails to account for the complexity of the colonial reality, it has also created a form of the “White Man’s Burden” that differs in an interesting way from the one eulogized by Kipling, the British imperial bard.

I The “indispensable” Chinese Of the three countries that made up French Indochina, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos,3 the former two have had a long contact history with China dating back to the Qin dynasty. For two millennia, the Chinese had made their appearances in the peninsula as invaders, traders, and refugees.4 By the time of French occupation in the second half of the nineteenth century, Indochina counted already a fairly important Chinese population. Prior to the French rule, both the Khmer and the Vietnamese governments had instituted a system of indirect rule to manage foreign populations. Each foreign group was headed by a “chef” whose job was to look after its own members. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the Vietnamese Emperor Gia-Long (1802–20) issued an edict that further organized the Chinese into associations or bangs based on their respective languages such as Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Hainanese, and Teochiu. Each bang was managed by a leader called bang-truong, who was responsible for collecting taxes and maintaining law and order among his members. These bangs were retained by the French who called them congrégations. Upon their arrival, all Chinese immigrants had to join one of the congrégations.5 Given the fact that the Chinese had been the former colonizers of Vietnam for a millennium (111BC to 939 AD), one would have expected that they would not have been well received by the territories’ new colonial masters. Yet interestingly enough, instead of expelling them or reducing their numbers, the French administration in fact welcomed the “Celestials” and showed a keen appreciation of the numerous services they rendered during the period of conquest. When the French expeditionary forces reached the shores of Annam

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in the mid-nineteenth century, they had the greatest difficulties persuading the indigenous people to provide them with the sorely needed supplies. Invariably it was the Chinese who came to their rescue by showing up even in the most remote villages delivering provisions as well as occasional treats such as cigarettes, razors, and liquor to the great delight of the soldiers.6 It was not only in the far-off regions that the Chinese served as suppliers to the French forces; even in large urban centers such as Hanoi, where there existed already a few French businesses, the army, according to the military medical officer Dr. Hocquard, still preferred the services of the Chinese merchants.7 The reason is that Chinese stores offered more and better quality goods at a cheaper price than their French counterparts (Hocquard). In short, the Chinese were considered, as the veteran Indochina hand Paul Boudet put it, the fournisseurs providentiels (“heaven-sent suppliers” 457) of the French occupational forces. The dependence of the colonial administration on the Chinese did not end with the period of conquest and pacification. Even after establishing themselves in the colony, the French continued to resort to the Chinese for a wide range of services: for example, the colonial administration continued the Khmer and Vietnamese governments’ practice of recruiting the Chinese to run alcohol, gambling, salt, and opium farms.8 In the economic sphere, not only did the French let the Chinese maintain their traditional supremacy in the rice trade, French firms also needed their help for the distribution and sale of their goods in towns and villages. The French merchants’ reliance on the Chinese was such that after lobbying for measures to control their Chinese competitors, they had to join the latter to get those very same measures revoked when the Chinese threatened to boycott European commerce.9 Even the all-powerful Banque de l’Indochine had to hire a contingent of handsomely remunerated Chinese compradors so as to “make itself accessible to the Chinese clientele” (Métin 20).10 Within the colonial scheme of things, it is clear that the French could not afford to bypass the Chinese as their middlemen in their transactions with the locals. In 1884, Dr. Hocquard already conceded that the Chinese would be “our indispensable intermediary for the mise en valeur of our conquest” (Hocquard 91). This view was echoed later by Henri Vermeren, a gendarme in Indochina at the turn of the century, who wrote in his memoirs that the Chinese “[are] indispensable to life in the colony” (Vermeren 140).11 Because of the special role the Chinese were allowed, or even asked, to play in Indochina, their relationship to the colonizers hardly fits in with the Manichean white-versus-native scheme. For all practical purposes, the colony was run on a tripartite structure made up of Europeans, Chinese, and natives.12 The Chinese being considered as neither French nor natives were given a special legal status that was translated into separate sets of laws regulating their lives and activities.13 In certain respects, the Chinese did derive a great

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many benefits from their special standing. They shared the indigenous people’s rights to own lands and buildings, a privilege denied to other foreign groups, and could freely engage in most economic activities while enjoying the same protection as subjects of the most favored European nations.14 Yet the Chinese were also made to pay dearly for their “privileges” in the form of excessive taxation. In the protectorates of Tonkin and Annam, they were subjected to registration tax, capitation tax, residence cards fee, and trade licenses, while in Cochinchina, which was a full-fledged colony, they were required to pay direct personal tax, indirect tax, direct allowance tax, taxes on both entering and leaving the country, on top of other general taxes. Similar draconian fiscal measures were imposed on Chinese businesses. Under the pretext that in their different bookkeeping methods Chinese merchants would most likely underreport their profits, the colonial administration assessed their taxes twice as high as those of their French counterparts.15 The money the government collected from the Chinese was so substantial that Métin, the budget controller of the colony, had to admit that the loss of such revenues could not be replaced if the Chinese were to be given the status of natives and pay natives’ tax.16 How could one account for the colonial administration’s dependence on the Chinese in Indochina? Several reasons were given to explain the role of the Chinese as the “indispensable intermediary” between the French and the natives. According to Dubreuil, if the French had to enlist the Chinese as their “valuable auxiliaries” in their colonizing endeavor, it is because of the mauvais vouloir (“ill will”) of the natives who persisted in keeping their distance from their new masters. On the other hand, since the Chinese had been settled in Annam for such a long time and got to know its people well, they were therefore in the best position to serve as “the link between the conqueror and the conquered” (Dubreuil 21). Another frequently cited reason for the French’s recourse to the Chinese is that the latter were more hardworking, able, and sophisticated than the Vietnamese who remained, in the words of Dr. Hocquard, “a big child . . . living one day at a time” (Hocquard 89). In these explanations the French tended to put the blame on the “failings” of the natives to justify their own inadequacies. Yet many of the “problems” they encountered in the colony were actually produced by their self-proclaimed superiority, which was used to legitimize their brutal conquests. It was the need and the obligation to constantly prove to themselves and their subjects their own distinction (in both senses of differentiation and superiority) that ultimately undermined their effectiveness in Indochina. In the remainder of the chapter, I will compare the different ways in which the French and the Chinese negotiated their respective cultural identities in the colony. I will show that it was the fluid attitude of the Chinese towards identity that made them highly adaptable to the local conditions whereas the insistence of the French

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on maintaining their differences became, in the long run, a costly liability to their colonizing venture.

II Material culture and identities In many of the personal and travel narratives authored by the French themselves, we often read about the fierce competition between the French and Chinese merchants. In his memoirs, Paul Doumer, governor general of Indochina from 1897–1902, noted how it was virtually impossible for his compatriots to compete with the Chinese in retail business in Saigon: “All that is sold in the European shops . . . is available at the Chinese’s. There is no more competition for cheap goods and simple work. [The Chinese] have the monopoly of dry cleaning, laundry and mending” (Doumer 69). Why could French businesses not compete with the Chinese? One explanation was given by Captain PetitjeanRoget in a letter he wrote to his mother from Saigon in 1880: I needed a basin and a water jar and I went to a French shop. A nice lady attended to me. A water jar and a plain earthenware basin, how much Madame?—Three piastres, sir . . . This amounted to a little over fifteen francs . . . I lost all illusions about French business. I went to a Chinese merchant who treated me really well, offered me a cigarette, a cup of tea, and after chatting for half-an-hour, I got the two things for four francs. (Petitjean-Roget 12)

From Petitjean-Roget’s account, it is obvious that the French shop owners in Saigon had priced themselves out of business. Their steep prices were occasioned by, we are told, their particular lifestyle which differed substantially from their Chinese counterparts’ as Dr. Hocquard explains: “The Chinese could live on very little and make do with the natives’ diet. He does not need as much profit as the European. The latter has to consume food that comes from afar, which makes it very costly . . . all the profits he could make would be eaten up, and more, by the demands of his material existence” (Hocquard 90). This same explanation was also given by Boudet, who contends that because the European could not survive in the insalubrious regions of the tropics without a certain level of comfort his business would have to bear a great deal more general cost than the Chinese whose very rustic way of life reduced his expenses to a minimum. A common argument used to justify the “need” of French businesses for higher profit margins is that colonial living made greater “demands,” material and otherwise, upon the French than the Chinese. The French believed that

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as members of the colonizing nation they were expected to maintain a certain standard in every aspect of their daily lives whereas the Chinese were not bothered by such concern. Indeed, the absence of any conspicuous display of socio-economic rank markers among the Chinese never ceased to puzzle the French administrators. In their reports, they frequently talked about the difficulties they had in differentiating the owners of Chinese businesses from their employees or even the coolies when visiting their premises. For, according to Boudet, both employer and subordinates all dressed in the same discolored cotton outfits, ate and slept in the same lit de camp.17 A similar observation was made by Dubreuil, who attributed this cultural practice to the solidarity among Chinese co-workers: “in these shops nothing distinguishes the boss from the last of the coolies; at mealtime all of them, stripped to the waist, sit around the same table” (Dubreuil 80). In his memoirs Xigong san shi nian [Three Decades in Saigon], Feng Feng, a practitioner of Chinese medicine who emigrated to Indochina from Hong Kong in 1939, likewise recalls the thriftiness of the local Chinese. He notes that for their daily activities most of them wore a plain white shirt and black trousers. This sartorial simplicity was observed even by wealthy businessmen. He cites the case of Mr. Lau, a highly successful retail merchant and owner of several important properties, who was always seen dressed in the same blue coarse cotton outfit. The reluctance on the part of the Chinese to engage in conspicuous consumption could be explained by a number of related reasons. For one thing, many of the Chinese who emigrated to Indochina at the turn of the century came from the poorest parts of China. Uneducated and unskilled, a large number of them made their living as coolies. After a number of years, some managed to mount their own businesses and became highly successfully. It was precisely their thriftiness that enabled them to build up the capital they would need to start their commercial ventures and also to compete with the French. Secondly, until the Communist take-over in 1949, most of the overseas Chinese, rich or poor, did plan to return to China once they had made their fortune abroad. As a result, rather than spending their money on what they considered as non-essential things, they would save as much as they could so as to send a large part of their earnings to their families back in their home villages. And last but not least, politically the overseas Chinese also realized that, given the longdrawn internecine strife and the foreign invasions that were besetting China, neither the late Qing government nor the young Republic was in any position to defend their interests in their host country, and it would have been unwise to attract attention to themselves through flaunting their wealth and creating resentment in both the indigenous and French populations. In contrast to the frugal and unassuming outlook of the Chinese, the French were greatly concerned about the need to uphold what in the colonial

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parlance is known as “white prestige.” One way to achieve this is the adoption of “proper” attire, whose symbolic significance was elucidated by Clotilde Chivas-Baron, a seasoned coloniale from Indochina, in her advice manual La Femme française aux colonies: La Coloniale must maintain her sense of beauty, grace, and propriety, for it will bring her and others moral comfort. . . . Elegance and taste are among those feminine charms which, under certain circumstances, rise up to the level of duty, clothing being a sign of dignity. More than anyone else, the colonial woman must maintain decorous attire. She is constantly being watched. Those who are watching her are either peoples in the developing stage or those from an old civilization. To both groups, the French woman, as a representative of the newly imposed civilization, must appear wellmannered and dignified. (121, emphasis added)

The plight of the white woman as the object of the natives’ gaze evoked here bears an uncanny parallel to that of the first-person narrator of Black Skin, White Masks who finds himself similarly hounded by the gaze of the little white boy and his loud cries “Look, a Negro!” in the streets of the métropole. If in the white world the black man is, as Fanon puts it, “overdetermined from without,” a slave of his own appearance (Black Skin 116), the same could be said of the whites in the colony as seen in the violent outburst of the protagonist of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover (1986) against her shabbily dressed mother. At one point in this semi-autobiographical novel, the first person narrator, a young white girl who grew up in Indochina in the 1920s, recalls the deep humiliation she felt when her mother showed up in her lycée in “inappropriate” attire: My mother, my love, her incredible ungainliness, with her cotton stockings darned by Dô . . . her dreadful shapeless dresses, mended by Dô, she’s still straight out of her Picardy farm full of female cousins, thinks you ought to wear everything till it’s worn out . . . her shoes are down-at-heel, she walks awkwardly . . . her hair’s drawn back tight into a bun like a Chinese woman’s, we’re ashamed of her, I’m ashamed of her in the street outside the school, when she drives up to the school in her old Citroën B12 everyone looks. . . . (Duras 26–27, emphasis added)

In the eyes of the daughter the scandal of the mother is her neglect of sartorial propriety, which makes her a most undignified representative of the supposedly superior French civilization in the colony.

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Besides dress code, there were also other material markers of essential “Frenchness” that French nationals must observe in the outposts of the empire. One such marker is food. We noted earlier the comment Dr. Hocquard made about the differences in diet between the Chinese and French shop owners. The Chinese merchants, we are told, could live on the low-cost native fare while their French counterparts would need the pricey imported French food. Another equally important sign of distinction is housing. In early twentieth-century manuals on emigration to the colonies, when the issue of accommodation was discussed, readers were often advised to heed what colonial doctors refer to as the “ethnic principle” according to which the European population should live in their designated neighborhood away from the indigenous peoples (Abbatucci 67). The conditions of colonial living that all French were expected to observe were clearly spelled out by Joleaud-Barral in the concluding section of the guidebook he wrote for would-be settlers to Annam and Tonkin: It is necessary to bear in mind that one could not live in privation in Tonkin without endangering one’s life: a good diet, a wholesome dwelling, and clean clothing are indispensable and all this costs money. One should not imagine that life is cheap over there. . . . Except for local produce which we use relatively little, cans, groceries, and wine are more expensive here than in France, and the smallest house which rent for 3 to 400 francs a year in France will cost 100 to 140 francs a month in Hanoi and Haiphong. (Joleaud-Barral 241)

Because of the expectation that French citizens should maintain a certain standard of living in Indochina, the colonial administration had to strongly discourage those with modest means from moving to the colony. The importance of maintaining their own distinctiveness informs not only the French’s everyday life, it also influences how they related to the indigenous people. More than the material requirements they imposed upon themselves and which made them less competitive than the Chinese, it is their physical and psychological segregation from the locals that, arguably, undermined their ability to manage their colony on their own, which in turn explains their dependence on the Chinese as their go-between. Indeed, one of the reasons frequently attributed to the “success” of the Chinese in Indochina was their ability to live “like the natives.” Such is the explanation Dubreuil gave to justify the vital role the Chinese played in French colonization, in particular in the colony’s economic development. He conceded that the major advantage that the Chinese had over the French was that the Chinese “know the natives” from living side by side with them, speaking their languages, and marrying their women, whereas the French were “unable” to do so. This “inability” of the colonizers to communicate with their subjects and understand their

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needs had been recognized quite early on as a serious “liability” by the French themselves. Joseph Chailley, a leading figure of the colonialist lobby in France, who accompanied the first French resident general Paul Bert to Indochina in 1886, wrote about this problem in Paul Bert au Tonkin: “The Tonkinese expected only one thing from us: justice. But it would be very difficult to give everyone his due in a country whose language and customs we know so imperfectly” (Chailley 100). Yet the acknowledgement of the importance of “knowing” their subjects, it seems, was not acted on. Quite the contrary, as they proceeded to lay down the administrative infrastructure in Indochina, the colonial administrators introduced more measures and practices that would further separate the French from the locals. To illustrate these issues, I will compare the very different attitudes the Chinese and the French had of interethnic marriages and the so-called “mixed blood” children.

III Matrimony versus miscegenation One of the common observations made about the Chinese in Indochina is their dominance in the local economy. A frequently cited reason to explain their economic “success” is their willingness to marry local women. Prior to the 1911 Revolution, the Chinese who went to Indochina as traders or coolies very rarely brought their families along. As a result, many took indigenous women as wives. One important advantage these matrimonial alliances brought to the Chinese is that they facilitated their trading with the locals who looked favorably upon them as good family providers.18 Yet, in many instances, the indigenous spouses were in fact concubines as their Chinese husbands might have already had a wife in China; and even if they had not had one at the time of their consorting with their native partners, they would in many cases eventually take a Chinese wife back in their home village. Such is for example the case of Lam Chi, a penniless immigrant from a Teochiu fishing village, who went to Cochinchina in the early 1900s to work as a coolie in the town of Cai Rang. There he married a local woman, Trang Thi Hy. After their marriage, the wife continued her Vietnamese pastry business to supplement Lam’s income and later joined him in the rice business he had started. Years later, Lam, who already had a few children with Hy, returned to his home village in China to take a Chinese wife. All this was done with the full knowledge of both women without him having to renounce either one. According to Tri Lam, Lam’s grandson, who recorded the family’s Indochinese story in The Chronicle of an Overseas Chinese Family, with the help of Hy, Lam slowly built up a highly profitable rice business and later became the wealthiest man in Cai Rang.

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If this type of interethnic matrimonial arrangement was a rather common practice among Chinese immigrants, it appeared much more problematic to the French, in particular after they became more solidly established in the colony by the turn of the century. In 1897, the public prosecutor of Cochinchina and Cambodia sent around a circular to the French judges and magistrates under his jurisdiction to warn them of the danger of living with native women. For these “irregular” co-habitations, the prosecutor contends, would create certain regrettable situations that “would degrade the magistrate and compromise his authority and prestige, and at times worse still—his honor.” In the same circular he demanded that those who kept native concubines break off these relationships immediately. The same admonition was issued a few years later by Doumer, who wrote to all the résidents supérieurs that “experience has shown that the influence of native concubines is almost always detrimental to the reputation of the civil servants who associate themselves with them.”19 One way to solve the problem of miscegenation, it was believed, was to make more French women available in the colony. To this end, Chailley-Bert, who became the secretary-general of the Union coloniale française, the all-powerful colonialist lobby in the métropole, helped to establish the Société française d’émigration des femmes whose main task was to facilitate the emigration of French women to the empire.20

IV Minh-huongs versus métis Besides the social inconvenience of keeping a native partner in a French domestic setting, which might hurt “white prestige,” interethnic unions also generated a second no less thorny “problem” for the French, namely that of the métis, or mixed-blood children. In fact, if there was a “problem” of the métis, it was one that was created by the French themselves, or at least by those French fathers who abandoned their mixed-blood progeny upon their return to France. Many of these children were subsequently taken away from their native mothers, considered as “unfit” parents, and sent to local orphanages.21 Besides being “illegitimate” and orphaned, the métis were further stigmatized as “racially impure” and castigated for inheriting the worse failings of the two races to which they belonged and none of their qualities. They were often accused of being “unreceptive to ideas of family, homeland, honor, work, property, order and foresight” and lacking “moderation, temperance, organization and a sense of proportion” (Sambuc, “Les Métis” 201). Within the context of colonial politics which rested on the rule of racial differences, mixed-blood persons would inevitably be perceived as a threat that would destabilize the Manichean setup of the colony.

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The plight of the métis generated a great many heated disputes within the French community in Indochina, which was deeply divided over the issue as to whether those mixed-blood children who had not been recognized by their French parents should be given French citizenship; the status, if conferred, would entitle them to the many privileges French citizens enjoyed in the colony. In these debates, the party that championed the cause of the métis often contrasted the latter’s dire predicament to the good fortune of Sino-Annamite children, also known as “Minh-huongs.”22 In a report on the condition of Franco-Vietnamese children, “Enquête sur la question des métis II,” the lawyer Henri Sambuc, one of the most ardent defenders of the métis in Indochina, took his compatriots to task for not treating Franco-Vietnamese children in the same way as the Chinese did their Sino-Vietnamese progeny who occupied a highly privileged position in Vietnam. Under the rule of Emperor Minh-Mang (1820–44), the Minh-huongs were given the status of full Vietnamese subjects and as such enjoyed the best of both the Vietnamese and the Chinese worlds. On the one hand, they were exempted from the corvée and the military service that were required of the indigenous people; on the other, they paid only half of the taxes of the Chinese. Moreover, they had the same political entitlements as the Vietnamese with full access to the offices of the kingdom, a favor that was denied to the Chinese. The only condition they were asked to comply with was that they adopt the native garb and have their braid cut.23 In Cambodia, due to the high degree of intermarriage between Chinese and Cambodians, there was also an important group of Sino-Cambodian métis, many of whom made up the local elite class.24 In “Enquête” Sambuc cites the case of the Minh-huongs as a counterexample to the widely held claim that mixed-blood children were born mentally and physically defective. Raised by their own fathers, who provided them with a good education, the Sino-Vietnamese children grew up both healthy and intelligent. They were taught Chinese, Vietnamese, and French and groomed to become their fathers’ future partners in the family businesses. Brought up on equal footing as their “pure Chinese” siblings, the Minhhuongs were very proud of their mixed heritage and were well respected by the Vietnamese. Such a positive experience seems to be the lot of the Minhhuong children in the Lam family. When Lam’s oldest son, Lam Nhieu, had reached school age, his father took him back to China where he could attend a Chinese school. During the same trip, Lam took a Chinese wife in his native village and left his oldest son in her care. By letting his mainland wife raise the son he had by his Vietnamese wife, Lam sought to strengthen the ties between his two families. The same arrangement was made with the first son his mainland wife bore him at a later stage. When the boy was eight years old, Lam took him to Vietnam to be reared by his Vietnamese wife. By thus

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“painstakingly arrang[ing] this interlacing relationship to unify [his] family,” as the grandson puts it, Lam succeeded in building those strong ties (Lam 16). After his death, his oldest son Lam Nhieu continued to care for his “mainland mother” by regularly sending her money to help her survive the hardship of the Communist regime. After finishing his schooling in China, Nhieu returned to Vietnam where he attended the Franco-Chinese School. With the help of his father, he went on to manage the family’s rice business in Saigon where he became known as the “Rice King” of South Vietnam. We saw earlier that one of the reasons the French gave for having to resort to the Chinese as their “intermediaries” is that they themselves did not have sufficient knowledge of indigenous languages and cultures. If such were the case, the métis should be their ideal “go-between” and could easily replace the Chinese. For, after all, not only did the métis belong to the two cultures by birth and have a perfect knowledge of local languages and customs, they also wanted nothing better, according to Sambuc, than to identify themselves with the French and serve the latter’s interests. But such an eventuality did not come to pass partly because the French were too concerned with maintaining “racial purity” as General Gallieni, who had served in both Indochina and Madagascar, explains to Mme Pégard, the secretary-general of the Société française d’émigration des femmes: “I want to prevent by all possible means our soldiers, who will become settlers at the end of their leave, from living legitimately or illegitimately with Malagasy women, I want the island to be populated by a pure French race and not a mixed-blood race.”25

V Constructing the cultural habitus In the colonial context, “racial purity” involves more than the policing of biological blood lines, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for keeping the race unadulterated. What is further needed is the re-creation in the colony of a French milieu that would make possible the reproduction of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the habitus, or a system of dispositions that generate practices and perceptions acquired through a long process of socialization.26 The habitus that the colonial government sought to reproduce in Indochina was that of the French middle class. To achieve this end, a simulacrum of the socio-cultural infrastructure of the mother country had to be put in place in the colony. Over a period of several decades, the colonial administration invested massive sums of tax money to endow Saigon, Hanoi, and other cities with monumental public edifices such as law courts, postal offices, town halls,

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hospitals, schools, train stations, residences for high-level administrators as well as social, cultural, and recreational venues such as theaters, museums, club houses, and parks. Many of these buildings were attempts to replicate metropolitan models, the most famous (or infamous) of which was the Hanoi theater house, derided by Eugène Brieux as “a pretentious caricature” of the Opera house of Paris.27 No effort was spared to re-create the bourgeois sociocultural ambiance of the métropole. Both Saigon and Hanoi had their own calendar of society events featuring the latest Parisian musicals, théâtre de boulevard plays, races, balls, galas, and receptions that were patronized by the local equivalents of tout Paris.28 From the newspapers reports, it is clear that the French colonial community tried very hard to rival the elegance and glamour of Parisian high society albeit with uneven success. 29 But notwithstanding the fact that the desired results might not always be obtained, the financial cost proved to be quite onerous to both the public and private budgets. Indeed, in the accounts of both French residents and travelers, we read that in spite of their high earnings, a number of colonial civil servants would still find themselves in financial insolvency, a price they had to pay to uphold their middle-class “Frenchness.”30 If reproducing the appropriate socio-cultural habitus is a means to maintain one’s cultural identity, the Chinese seemed to have accomplished this objective without however having to bear the heavy cost as the French did. Many Chinese diaspora studies provide detailed descriptions on how the different dialect groups conducted their respective socio-cultural activities in their host countries. In Cambodia and Vietnam, the Teochiu, Hokkien, Hakka, Hainanese, and Cantonese bangs all set up their respective schools, hospitals, and temples for their fellow compatriots. They celebrated Chinese cultural and religious events such as the Lunar New Year, Qing-Ming, Dragon Boat, and Mid-Autumn Festivals, and observed Chinese rituals in wedding ceremonies and funerals.31 Yet, unlike the French who received substantial government funding to build and run the socio-cultural infrastructure, the Chinese had to rely entirely on themselves. In Lam Chi Phat, Tri Lam recounts how his grandfather, an illiterate man, got together with other well-to-do Chinese families in Cai Rang to build the town’s first and only Chinese elementary school in the mid-1920s. It was this same type of private fund-raising initiatives that supported the construction of Chinese hospitals and temples. To finance the running of these establishments and the services they provided, the bangs usually purchased properties which were rented out to generate a steady source of income. Such was, for example, the set-up of the hospital in which Feng worked when he first arrived in Saigon. Funded by the Cantonese bang, the Cantonese hospital provided both free Chinese medical care and hospitalization to the local people.

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Besides establishing the necessary infrastructure to maintain their community life, the Chinese, like the French, also organized a diverse range of socio-cultural activities for socialization and entertainment purposes. Even in the small town where the Lam family first settled, to celebrate the birthday of the Teochiu temple’s deity, every year the local Chinese would hire a Teochiu opera troupe from Saigon to stage performances for the townspeople. Yet, unlike the French who adopted a highly selective policy as to who could attend the plays or concerts that were partly subsidized by the administration, the Teochiu opera which was held in a makeshift stage near the town’s pier was free and open to all and even attracted the non-Teochiu-speaking Vietnamese. In the larger urban centers, different types of entertainment such as Cantonese and Teochiu operas, musicals, and comedies were also available to the community. In his memoirs, Feng, himself an aficionado of Cantonese opera, evokes with a great deal of emotion the many performances he attended in Saigon and recalls that some even featured a number of famous opera stars from Hong Kong such as Xue Juexian (薛覺先), Ma Shizeng (馬師曾), and Fang Yanfen (芳艷芬). While these shows were not free of charge, their prices varied from as little as two cents to nine dollars.32 Because of their affordability, these cultural events were patronized by a wide public that included people of all ages from all walks of life. One of the frequent remarks the French made about Cantonese opera was precisely its socially mixed audience and its boisterous ambiance. In an article on Chinese theater Edmond Gras wrote after attending a Cantonese opera in the royal capital of Hué in 1917, he noted that the entire Chinese population of the city (even babies) came to the show and that during the performance people were smoking, drinking, and belching loudly. Yet in spite of the “rowdy” behavior of what he considered an “uncouth” audience, Gras was quite impressed by the latter’s ability to appreciate the exquisitely sophisticated singing and playing of the actors. Similar observations were made by Auguste François, the French consul, who visited a Chinese opera house in Cholon in 1901. He too remarked that the Chinese public “don’t bother about their attire; they all come in their work clothes. The tinsmith and the blacksmith, taking a break from their hammering, go to listen to the recitation of antique poems . . . or immerse themselves in the marvelous world of the epics” (François 286). Half a century later in the early 1950s, Poncins registered the same experience when attending a Chinese opera in Cholon which was also filled with a similarly motley crowd. During the performance, he took a glance at the Chinese audience around him and saw how “Everyone was beaming with delight. The craftiness of the suitor was fully appreciated, and each of his asides was greeted with thrills of pleasure by every last spectator. Yet the audience was a thoroughly popular one, and not, as in Western theaters, an

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audience of sophisticates” (Poncins 71–72). Not only were the adults totally engrossed in the performance, even the young children also thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle and some of them, Poncins wrote, “more eager to see the show, had slipped into the wings. And they overflowed onto the stage, half naked as they were—and some were even stark naked!” (73). The “incongruity” the three Frenchmen observed between the socioeconomic backgrounds of the Chinese opera-goers and their cultural capital in fact tells us something interesting about how they themselves understand the role of culture. In Distinction, in which Bourdieu analyzes the cultural habitus of the French in the 1960s and 1970s, he argues that “taste,” as displayed in cultural practices such as concert-going, museum visits, and reading is a product of education and social origin. In French society, “taste,” Bourdieu contends, “classifies, and it classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar . . .” (Bourdieu, Distinction 6). If in the métropole, cultural practices are used to define class identity, in the colony where class tends to be conflated with race, they serve to demarcate both class and racial distinctions. Consequently, for the French in Indochina, engaging in cultural practices such as going to the theater involved not only buying the tickets and attending the performance, but also being dressed for the occasion, showing up to the venue in the proper vehicle, sitting still the entire evening in the seats one paid for, and conducting oneself in accordance with certain rules of decorum. In other words, these cultural events not only allowed the French to re-immerse themselves in the motherland’s cultural aura, they also served as a means to re-enact their cultural and racial distinction vis-à-vis themselves and (hopefully) their subjects.

VI Conclusion From the foregoing discussion, it appears that given their different status and roles in the colony, members of the two diasporas adopted distinctive strategies in constructing their respective cultural identities. The Chinese, who benefited from very limited (if any) diplomatic protection from the Chinese government, found it more judicious to opt for a more fluid approach in negotiating their own identity in the host country. Not only were they willing to consort with local women, a number of them would readily engage in “ethnic cross-dressing” and “ethnic living” by taking on “native” ways whenever the need to do so arose. In the Southeast Asian context, “ethnic bending” is in fact not peculiar to the Chinese, but rather a common practice among the different

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non-white ethnic groups residing in the colonies. For the multi-ethnic population in Indochina, ethnic identity, as Muller argues, is not necessarily the one they were born with. Membership in a given ethnic community is often a question of the cultural practice an individual chooses to adopt to suit the demands of the moment. In contrast to the flexibility of the Chinese, the French in their role as the representatives of the conquering nation felt the need to demonstrate both to themselves and their subjects their differences and distinctions through taking up the White Man’s Burden. Yet, the Burden of the White Man, if there is one, may just be the burden of whiteness. For keeping oneself always immaculately white in a tropical colony could prove highly onerous, a reality that was candidly acknowledged by the old Indochina hand Robequain: It is this which gives the Chinese a big advantage over the European merchants. He can live as the natives does . . . he is easily acclimatized in the country which adjoins his own, and does not require the standards of hygienic conditions and comfort indispensable to European; he never experiences that feeling of misunderstanding and basic incompatibility which so often overwhelms the European in dealing with native behavior and reactions. . . . The government has used the Chinese for many tasks which were too distasteful for Europeans, for example, to collect taxes in the markets, feed prisoners and work the salt pits. . . . (Robequain 38)

Indeed the price the French had to pay for assuming the burden of whiteness seemed quite a costly one—such was at least the view of the Frenchman Brieux, who filed the following report card on the imperial performance of Greater France after his 1910 visit to Indochina: Would China need to be concerned with conquest? Indochina already belonged to her. We are masters only in name; the Chinese are the actual ones. . . . We sent soldiers there, they sent merchants. The dream of having a colony where one would amass a fortune to be enjoyed back home, we made that dream, but it is they who fulfill it. (Brieux 154–55)

In comparing the ways the French and the Chinese imagined and constructed their respective identities in Indochina, I have argued how the Manichean white versus native paradigm falls short in more ways than one in accounting for the reality of the colonial world. At the historical level, we have seen that it is such a Manichean vision that got the colonialists trapped in the terribly burdensome white superiority complex which led them to impose

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on themselves numerous stringent constraints. Not only did the concern with maintaining white distinction weaken their competitiveness vis-à-vis the Chinese and make them dependent on the latter, it also put them in the morally deplorable position to have to repudiate their wives and abandon their children. At the meta-historical level, it has been shown that to examine the dynamics of colonial relations only through the colonizer and colonized prism would have excluded a whole range of important players who, like the Chinese, might not fall on either side of the Manichean divide. In Indochina the Chinese constituted but one of several diasporic groups that included, among others, the Chetty from India and the Japanese. The same multi-ethnic complexity also characterizes the indigenous population which comprises a large array of minorities such as the Hmongs, the Rhades, the Bahnars, the Sedangs, and the Stiengs, who did not have the status of French subjects of the Vietnamese or Cambodians.33 Indeed even within the colonizers’ camp itself, its demographic make-up, far from being the “lily white” community it liked to imagine itself to be, was ethnically equally heterogeneous as a significant contingent of its members originated not from the métropole, but from Corsica, La Réunion, Guadalupe, Martinique, and Pondichéry. To complicate the picture further, one should also bear in mind that ethnicity is but one of the many features that structure the dynamics of colonial relationships. Other equally important elements that also inflect identity formation include gender, religion, and class. Given such a diverse range of factors one would have to go beyond the highly restrictive Manichean schema and elaborate alternative models and methods of analysis that would lead us to a better appreciation of such a complex political and cultural mosaic.

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12 Affirming Cosmopolitanism? Chineseness and the Chinese Museum of Queensland Tseen Khoo*

I In a world of globalized capital where cosmopolitanism has become a discernible commodity, the expression of a society’s cultural diversity has taken on significant political and economic dimensions. For a nation such as Australia, with a very particular—some would say notorious—history in terms of its resistance to non-European migration and rigorous bouts of anti-Asian sentiment, asserting these traits has become a crucial part of the country’s cultural export strategy. Indeed, a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade document about “selling” Australia’s culture stresses the goal of promoting “an image of a nation that is democratic, welcoming, vibrant, intelligent and creative, with a rich and diverse culture” (“Promoting Australia’s Culture Abroad”). These notions of a happily stable and diverse Australia are also circulated by the government to its own citizens. Because of ongoing debates surrounding asylum seekers, social cohesion, and “good” citizens, the pressure to define “Australian values” remains strong and controversial. In this context of renewed, often parochial, assertions of Australian identity, examining racialized heritage sites allows the interrogation of the limits of the contemporary appreciation of “cosmopolitanism” and “diversity.” To this end, this chapter focuses on the phenomenon of internal tourism and the ways in which Australian Chinatowns present themselves to internal and external tourists, as well as their local communities. Sociologist Michael

*

I would like to acknowledge the co-operation of members of the original Chinese Museum of Queensland Steering committee in the research for this chapter.

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Keith states that “[a]n understanding of the dynamics of contemporary urbanism is consequently imperative for a consideration of both the potential of the cosmopolitan and its actually existing realizations” (Keith 3). Taking into account Keith’s argument for a focus on the dynamics of the city, I discuss the establishment of the Chinese Museum of Queensland (CMoQ) alongside the geocultural context of Chinatown in Fortitude Valley. After presenting an overview of Australia’s historical (dis)engagement with Chinese migration, this chapter outlines the socio-political setting of Brisbane and Fortitude Valley (the city and suburb, respectively, in which CMoQ is to be created) and the idea of “Chinatowns,” before concentrating on the development of the museum and the motivations of its initial steering committee as a case-study in affirming Chineseness.

II Being Chinese: From White Australia to post-multicultural nation In terms of Chinese diasporic history, Australia is most well known for its Immigration Restriction Act (1901), otherwise known as the “White Australia Policy,” whereby non-European migration was severely curtailed.1 A driving force for this discriminatory policy was, as with other “gold-rush” sites, the unsettling presence of large Chinese groups within majority white settlements. The policy itself never mentioned exclusion of immigrants on the grounds of race, but the effect of the legislation, its “dictation tests,” as well as other conditions that shepherded Chinese out of Australia meant that communities shrank and sometimes dissolved altogether. It was not until the late 1960s that migration control supporting the notion of “White Australia” was abolished and avenues for non-European migration opened up. Further, significant migration of diverse Asian groups has only taken place relatively recently, particularly through the decades where multiculturalism was Australia’s official national policy; the 1980s and 1990s saw “newer” Asian communities from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China emerge in Australian society. Today, Asian Australians comprise about 5% of the total Australian population, with Chinese Australians being one of the oldest cultural communities. Within the dynamic field of Asian Australian studies, Chinese Australian material dominates, and this is clearly the case in Asian Australian heritage studies. The Chinese Australian community is the most wellestablished ethnic community, with some families claiming sixth and seventh generation Chinese Australian status. Post-1945 migration to Australia by those of Chinese descent is dominated by a reliance on business/professional and education schemes.2 The Chinese Australian community itself is highly

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diverse, with large representations from Southeast Asian source countries (e.g. Malaysia and Singapore), Taiwan, and Hong Kong. The ways in which Asian migrants loom large as threats to Australia’s sovereignty and culture are not elements of a colonial past, however, but very much a part of the Australian social environment even today. In a book about gold in Australia, historian Ann Curthoys argues: These Chinese men perch at the edge of our historical consciousness, figures of fun and shame, a marker of our colonial origins and the colonial vestiges in our present culture. They truly were a harbinger, not of an invasion of millions of people as some feared, but of later dilemmas for policy makers and for citizens, dilemmas about immigration policy and citizenship, and of modern Australia’s ambivalence about a place we call Asia. (Curthoys 103–4)

The nation’s “ambivalence” about Asia has meant decades of problematic political and economic grappling with Australia’s “place” in the Asia-Pacific. Asians as threatening external competitors in commerce and regional political influence are juxtaposed uneasily with the presence of Asian Australian communities, whose treatment often reflects current public debates on immigration, multiculturalism, and cultural diversity.3 Bouts of anti-Asian sentiment recur in Australia, from the 1980s Blainey debate about Asian immigration4 to the mid-1990s, which saw the rise of the protectionist, antiAsian political party, One Nation. Particularly during the latter instance, Australian commentators noted a marked trend towards cultural conservatism and a perception of “multiculturalism” as both divisive and passé. The enduring notion of an “Australian” as only ever a white Australian persisted and was, if anything, reinforced by the rhetoric of the incumbent Coalition government (in power from 1996 to November 2007) and One Nation. Cultural critics Suvendrini Perera and Joseph Pugliese wrote that this “re-licensing of racism . . . target[ed] those racialized groups least conducive, corporeally and culturally, to the process of assimilation, and therefore least likely to be re-cycled into Anglo-Australians” (Perera and Pugliese 1). The verbal, and occasionally physical, attacks on Asian communities that were ushered in by One Nation’s racist provocations had multiple outcomes. One of the most significant was that the communities felt under threat and socioculturally disenfranchised by widelyaired comments that called their ability to belong to the nation into question. This spurred certain sectors of the Chinese community to political mobilization and activism, and these effects continue increasingly to make themselves felt in the fields of politics, the creative arts, and academia. Some consider the formation of “Chinese Australian” community groups in the aftermath of One Nation’s success as self-serving

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actions that were not elements of political change, radical or otherwise.5 Australia has a system of “clientelist” relations between ethnic groups and government institutions, and political sociologist Gianni Zappala argues that “the importance of ethnic associations in increasing the political participation of immigrants in their host societies is well known” (Zappala 157). The intergroup relations for Chinese Australian community associations or clubs can be highly competitive and fraught, as more fully outlined below, so Zappala’s statement should not be read as easily optimistic. What has become apparent since the 1980s is the increasing number of community groups that give voice to various Asian Australians and, more recently, the ways in which these groups have formed coalitions to optimize political leverage. While their effectiveness and representational integrity will always be issues of constant debate, the opportunities afforded by their presence in the Australian public sphere have yet to be fully understood.6

III The Setting: Chinatown, Brisbane Brisbane, Queensland’s capital city, has “long [been] belittled by its southern counterparts as something of a ‘big country town,’ both culturally insular and xenophobic,” according to sociologist David Ip (Ip 69). The long reign of autocratic State Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen in the 1970s and 1980s, and the subsequent emergence of Pauline Hanson and the One Nation Party from the western Brisbane suburb of Oxley in the mid-1990s,7 are prime reasons why Brisbane seems to retain its parochial air despite its best efforts. Since the 1980s, Brisbane has been “anxious to rid itself of such negatively perceived images” (Ip 69), and the advent of mega-events, such as Expo 88, was read by many as the city’s “coming of age.” In an article that examines this often misguided confidence, cultural studies scholar Tony Bennett argues that the success of the event lies less in putting Brisbane on the world-stage than in the effect of Expo on the local population: “Brisbane imaginarily leapfrogged itself over the shoulders of Sydney and Melbourne to bask in a temporary metropolitan status” (Bennett 32). The constant comparisons with its much larger, more heavily populated East Coast peers meant that Brisbane almost always lost in terms of population diversity and momentum; new migrants to Australia settle overwhelmingly in the urban centers of Sydney and Melbourne. This is especially true of new migrants from Asian source countries.8 Though the size of birthplace communities in Sydney and Melbourne are on a larger scale, the smaller population and lower number of groups means that focusing on Brisbane can be advantageous. Particularly in terms of examining

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the ideas behind establishing CMoQ and community motivations in being involved, a more specific and smaller site lends itself to a more nuanced study. Museums and other public history sites are increasingly recognizing Australia’s diverse communities through expanding consultative processes, wider and more community participation, and acknowledging the exclusive nature of previous representations. The intertwining of historical and touristic discourses at many sites, coupled with escalating pressures to be more financially productive, result in complex negotiations of educational and entertainment potential. Sociologist and tourism researcher John Urry writes that “in recent years certain ethnic groups have come to be constructed as part of the ‘attraction’ or ‘theme’ of some places” (Urry 139), and, speaking as he mostly does of the context in the United Kingdom, he points to examples such as the marketing of Bradford’s South Asian community as part of the city’s points of interest. Urry also references the 1980s redevelopment of a particular area in Manchester as its “Chinatown,” a location that was “reconstructed and conserved as a now desirable object of the tourist gaze” (139). Critical “Chinatown literature” is an expansive and established field of research, from Kay Anderson’s influential work on Canadian and Australian contexts9 and Flemming Christiansen’s Chinatown, Europe (2003) to more specific modes of photographic and creative representations such as Anthony W. Lee’s Picturing Chinatown (2001). The ways in which governmental and commercial interests deploy “Chinatowns” and other ethnic enclaves or heritage areas is described by Michel Laguerre as “maintain[ing] or enhanc[ing] the visibility of the landscape as a tourist attraction or . . . stabiliz[ing] a business sector that provided tax revenues” (Laguerre 4). Laguerre distinguishes several phases for a city’s enclave development, marking the fifth phase of an enclave as “theme-parkization,” where “the neighbourhood is transformed into a commoditized site for tourists’ consumption” (10). In Australia, certain urban and suburban renewal projects involve this form of “theme-parkization” outlined by Laguerre. In New South Wales, this is most apparent in the recent decade’s marketing and renewal of Cabramatta, and the more recent designation of “Cabravale” (a merging of Cabramatta and its neighboring suburb Canley Vale) as a desirable commercial and cultural precinct. Shelley Kulperger and Sinta Widarsito describe 1997’s “Cabramatta Project” as “an attempt to recode the suburb’s image as one of providing exotic gastronomic delights. . . . [The suburb] became officially produced as not only an exemplary site of Australia’s multicultural identity, but also as a metaphor for reflections about it” (Kulperger and Widarsito 10). Ip’s study of the creation of Brisbane’s Chinatown in the inner-city suburb of Fortitude Valley, and the subsequent rise of the Chinese Australian “ethnoburb” in Sunnybank and its surrounds offers an excellent account of how these contrasting sites function in terms of tourist and local consumption

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of these “Asian” precincts. Ip defines one of the main distinctions of Brisbane’s Chinatown as the fact that it “emerged neither progressively over time, nor organically as the product of Chinese migrant residents and their local, socioeconomic activities” (Ip 63). The deliberateness of its creation, attached strongly to rhetoric about how it would symbolize the city’s successful and stimulating multiculturalism, was accompanied by a zealous drive for “authenticity” in its construction. Anderson, writing specifically about the Australian context, states: In the case of Chinatowns, [attributing blame for orientalising only to white Australian government and business interests] is insufficiently subtle in that . . . certain traders and investors of Chinese origin have themselves participated in the orientalising of Chinatowns. Certain class fractions of the Chinese-origin population have joined state and local governments in commercialising “Chinese” difference. (K. Anderson, “Otherness, Culture and Capital” 75)

Brisbane’s Chinatown functions in similar ways, and it is positioned strongly as part of the inner city’s urban renewal and marketing strategy. The precinct tries hard to connote cosmopolitanism and community diversity, and is presented as part of the city’s cultural smorgasbord. Fortitude Valley has housed Brisbane’s officially designated Chinatown since January 1987, with the Brisbane City Council and State government funding the establishment of the area. Duncan Street was deemed the heart of the commercial community and it subsequently became the “Chinatown Mall.” Eddie Liu, a high-profile Chinese community leader for many years, described the establishment of Brisbane’s Chinatown as “a monument to the Chinese Community,” saying that “[it was] going to be a landmark, a status symbol and a testimony to friendly relationships between two important countries” (“Chinese Club of Queensland” 42). After a period of decline, which saw increasing numbers of vacant office and retail spaces, minimal use of the Mall and its surrounds, and the deterioration of facilities, the area was refurbished and re-launched in February 1996. Both times, when the Chinatown Mall was being designed and then redesigned, local authorities and community groups called on the expertise of mainland Chinese architects and artisans. The chosen style of Brisbane’s Chinatown is described as “ancient Tang Dynasty” (“Duncan Street” 1), and features positioned in the Mall (including the stone lions fronting the main entryway) are gifts from the People’s Republic of China. Running parallel to the Duncan Street Chinatown Mall is the Brunswick Street Mall, a retail and entertainment strip that is touted by Brisbane Marketing as a place to “discover exclusive gifts with boutique retail shopping and bohemian markets” (“Chinese Club of Queensland” 44). These companion Malls are promoted jointly as the hub of Valley commerce

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Figure 5: Tseen Khoo, “Chinatown gateway, Ann Street side of the Duncan Street Mall.”

and activities; the advertising declares that it is “East meets West in this community of corners bustling with a colourful cross section of people, flavours and fashion” (“Chinese Club of Queensland” 44). Anna-Lisa Mak examines where Sydney’s Dixon Street Chinatown appeared to be heading in its various incarnations and states that the “tourist function [was] beginning to outweigh other functions” (Mak 97). Mak’s comment could apply to many Chinatown sites—Duncan Street included—but her argument that this “use of antiquated ‘traditional Chinese’ symbols to represent the Chinese community . . . failed to represent anything but a sterile, pre-digested version of a culture which omitted diversity and complexity” (96) fails to address the value that this symbolic space, however “inaccurate,” might have for the local Chinese communities who support and frequent it. Jan Lin’s astutely contextualized study about New York’s Chinatown discusses the competing demands of displaying “Chineseness” within these urban economic zones, stating that the “touristic presentation” is “not just a matter of functional cultural practices internal to the enclave but a performative repertoire of cultural displays that increasingly serve the consumptive and spectating demands of outsider audiences” (J. Lin 205). Lin’s argument clarifies that while critique often centers on Chinatowns and how they function in terms of representation for external stakeholders, they should also be considered as vernacular zones of diverse cultural maintenance for the various communities under the umbrella of “Chinese,” and a site for economic and intra-communal dynamics. Chinatowns are indeed manufactured zones, yet this manufacturing does not empty the space of meaning for local communities, nor should activities held there be automatically dismissed as “inauthentic.” Chinatowns have multiple, contested meanings for different sectors of the community, and no single function eclipses others.

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IV The Chinatown Mall as site for heritage This next section concentrates on the proposed establishment of the Chinese Museum in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley Chinatown. It focuses on the context of founding such an enterprise, and the motivations of members of the Museum steering committee. In the process of discussing this “marking” of tourism precincts in centralized urban spaces, I also briefly discuss the series of Chinatown storyboards that are part of the push to commemorate the contributory heritage of Chinese communities in Brisbane and Queensland. One part of the Chinatown heritage plan was the installation of storyboards along the length of the Mall. These four, bright-red markers are meant to detail the position of Chinese communities within Chinatown itself, the area of Fortitude Valley, the city of Brisbane, and Queensland more generally. They were installed in 2004, after consultation with the Museum steering committee and other stakeholders.

Figure 6: Tseen Khoo, “Close-up of the first Chinatown storyboard, ‘Heart and soul of Chinatown’.”

The first, placed at the Wickham Street main entry and titled “Heart and soul of Chinatown,” refers to the Mall itself and boasts that the Valley’s “Chinatown Mall is regarded as the most authentic in Australia.” Given the widely acknowledged mechanisms of constructing and maintaining “Chinatowns,” this statement is somewhat ironic, if not oxymoronic. The storyboard provides details about the building and refurbishment of the Mall and some information regarding the major Chinese community celebrations that are staged there, such as Chinese New Year and the 8th (Autumn) Moon Festival. Because of the centrality of Chinatown in perceptions of “where the Chinese are” in Brisbane, key community festivals are held there even though several “ethnoburbs” (such as Darra and Sunnybank) usually hold significant celebrations as well.

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Figure 7: Tseen Khoo, “Second storyboard marker in Brisbane’s Chinatown.”

The second, titled “Oriental hub of the Valley,” talks about the history of the Fortitude Valley area and lists some of the Chinese traders present in the 1901 Business Directory. It broaches the issue of American servicemen in Brisbane boosting a growth in the number of Chinese restaurants, and the establishment of the Chinese Temple in Breakfast Creek. Given the scarce history of Chinese concentration in the area, as Ip outlines in “Contesting Chinatown,” this second storyboard attempts to embed a Chinese presence with, perhaps, more enthusiasm than accuracy. The third marker, titled “Settling in the city,” tries to convey the Brisbanewide story. However, the information on this storyboard and the second one overlap significantly with mentions, once again, of the growth in the number of restaurants because of the presence of American servicemen, and the creation of the Breakfast Creek temple. The fourth and last storyboard, placed at the Ann Street end of the Duncan Street Mall and titled “Pioneers in a new land,” gives an overview of Chinese migration to Queensland since 1848. The storyboard talks about the Palmer River gold rush and the subsequent Chinese communities that formed in various North Queensland towns like Cairns, Innisfail, Herberton, and Atherton. It is by far the most content-rich and is also the only one to mention the White Australia Policy. It is also notable that the storyboard, in categorizing early Chinese groups as “pioneers,” echoes the conceit of colonial Australian narratives that ignore indigenous presence and their histories.

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The other storyboards contain information about census counts of Chinese in various areas, but no mention is made of immigration restrictions or the significant anti-Chinese riots in the Fortitude Valley and city areas in 1888.10 This is perhaps not surprising given the purpose of these Chinatown markers in guiding tourists (local and otherwise) to the area. Jennifer Craik, when writing about tourism in Australia and experiences of outback tours, states that “most visitors want an experience that is mediated, cossetted or inoculated” (Craik 103). This tendency, coupled with ethnic communities’ widely acknowledged desire to avoid a “black armband view of history,”11 means that representations of Chinese history in Queensland and Brisbane will tend to be a sanitized and celebratory affair. In general, the Chinese “heritage” of a region offers information and displays in which incidents of racist violence or isolation are almost always included, but they are also defused by their allocation and packaging as historical fact, as events of the past. From my experience on the CMoQ committee, past which versions of the storyboard text and design were run, it was clear that the momentum of the storyboard installation project came mainly from Brisbane Marketing, the official City Council agency that promotes the city and its surrounding regions. At the time of their consultation in 2003–04, there was some pressure to accept the wording and design, particularly because it was the lead-up to Chinese New Year, and Brisbane Marketing was hoping to launch them at the large public celebrations. This outline of the geocultural context of Brisbane’s Chinatown and the suburb of Fortitude Valley gives an idea of the complex, often ongoing, issues in this area. It is in this commercial, community, and heritage space that the proposed Chinese Museum of Queensland will be established.

V The Museum According to one of the original steering committee members, the initial idea for a Chinese Museum in Fortitude Valley was broached at a Queensland Chinese Forum meeting in 1993.12 At the time, there was not enough interest to take it further. On November 5, 2003, the initial meeting for the establishment of the Chinese Museum steering committee took place in the TC Beirne building, a development that faces both the Duncan and Brunswick Street Malls. Even though it was described as a public meeting, anecdotal advice suggests that most attendees were there by invitation from certain representatives, or as proxies for community group leaders. Indeed, there was anxiety expressed by a few attendees that the project would be “stacked” with certain groups at the

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expense of others. Community politics researcher Jen Tsen Kwok has written about the “strategic utility of ‘Chineseness’” and states that: Internal competition within Chinese communities for access to these institutional resources problematise clientelist relationships with political institutions. [He argues that] Part of the “relevance” of the ethnic performance in political contexts arises in legitimising a community leader, or a community group’s access to ethnic symbols, not only for these political institutions but also in raising the prestige of these individuals and groups within their own communities. (Kwok 7)

The suggested strategic and exclusive patterns of attendance should come as no surprise, then, considering Kwok’s analysis and given the perceived prestige of being involved in such a high-profile exercise. That said, contestation about leaders from the Chinese community and their representativeness are a constant element of minority/majority politics. At this initial meeting, during the speeches and outlining of the project, one of the Museum of Brisbane curators spoke briefly about the purpose of the proposed museum and the importance of presenting a balanced version of history. It was apparent that the Brisbane City Council, the prime funder of the Museum’s initial stages, was wary of CMoQ turning into a hagiographic or purely celebratory exercise. It was emphasized that, while the establishment of the Museum was indeed a celebration of Chinese presence and contribution to the area, city, and the state, the Museum’s content should reflect both successes and difficulties. At the end of the preliminary information session, outlines of the proposed Chinatown storyboards were handed out and there was a call for volunteers to participate on the Museum’s steering committee. Automatically on the steering committee was then councillor (now deputy-mayor) David Hinchliffe, a man credited with driving the establishment of the Museum through Brisbane City Council channels. The remainder of the committee was made up of community association leaders, Chinese Australian community historians, an academic historian, a representative from Brisbane Marketing, one from the Valley Chamber of Commerce, and myself. The Museum is to be housed in the TC Beirne building and the Council committed AUD15K in starting funds for the project. Since November 2003, the Museum has become an incorporated entity and had a preliminary version of a website created (though it is currently still not publicly accessible). The steering committee was dissolved and the project is now in the hands of a management committee. In June 2006, CMoQ was successful in securing an

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additional AUD50K from the Brisbane City Council. According to the CMoQ (“Media Release,” June 29, 2006), these additional funds will: 1. secure and set up a temporary site for the Museum; 2. commence campaigns to raise medium term operating funds; 3. conduct community awareness programs for the long term survival of the Museum. Unfortunately, a date for CMoQ to come into material existence remains elusive, with the initial Museum site now rejected because of difficulties negotiating a lease. The Brisbane City Council is continuing the search for an appropriate site to house the Museum in the Chinatown Mall. Meanwhile, the Museum committee has started plans for a virtual exhibition, as well as collecting resources for the Museum’s inaugural show. My ongoing research on CMoQ is interested in the resulting material space and its exhibits as much as the processes of creating such a cultural community resource. In April 2005, I interviewed a selection of the initial Museum steering committee members about their motivations for joining such a project, why they thought a Museum was necessary and what they felt it signified. The results of these interviews are necessarily informed by my own time on the committee, some of which was in the capacity of committee secretary. I chose to interview particular committee members who would provide a sample representation from within the group: chair (Peter Low) and deputy chair (Jeannie Mok) are high-profile members of the team who have established connections with local and state government bodies, as well as occupied leading roles within various Chinese community organizations. They are also involved in a range of broader committees and executives; for example, Low is on the Board of Directors for the Port of Brisbane Corporation and Mok created the Multicultural Community Centre in Fortitude Valley. The other two members I interviewed were Leong Teoh and Leonie Leong. Teoh is an interested member of the Brisbane Chinese community who had also been involved with the Malaysian Club of Queensland. Leong’s community efforts have focused on mobilizing Chinese youth to find out about their history in Australia; she was involved in the Chinese-Australian Historical Association (as inaugural president) and a range of cultural arts and multimedia projects exploring oral history and genealogy. For the purposes of this chapter, I want to foreground three types of responses to the idea of establishing the Museum. The interviewees expressed contrasting versions of “Chineseness” and discussed what being Chinese means to them in contemporary Australia through the notion of being part of establishing a Chinese museum. They configured the CMoQ project variously as:

Affirming Cosmopolitanism?

• a legacy; • a corrective education measure; and • a form of cultural insurance. These elements interconnect a great deal and I will tease them apart here for discussion’s sake. First, the notion of “a legacy”: This was the sentiment most expressed by the interviewees about the establishment of the Museum, that it would function as a legacy for themselves and the Chinese community in the city and the state. The Museum was conceived of as addressing Chinese heritage and history at the levels of area (meaning Fortitude Valley), city, and state. The specific envisioning of the museum as a legacy was discussed in detail by three of the four interviewees. Their view of Chinatown itself was very much in terms of the area as a memorial to Chinese contribution; as Mok commented, “[The Museum] is going to be a continual reminder, even as a Chinatown in every city is” (1). Indeed, the very existence of a Chinatown was viewed, as Eddie Liu aptly stated earlier, as “a status symbol.” The designation of Chinatown as the site for the Museum has met with general approval. Some think of it as a perfectly logical and complementary site. Others have commented that it would be more appropriate these days to place it in Sunnybank. Sunnybank is one of the suburbs of Brisbane that has a high concentration of Chinese communities and commercial concerns. In what is a familiar cycle to many scholars of the Chinese diaspora, it is considered the “new” Chinatown, much more dynamic, organic, and “authentic” in terms of everyday community interactions. Low, chair of the steering committee, discussed this issue at length and said, “Sunnybank is not recognised by the [Brisbane City] Council as a ‘Chinatown.’ I don’t think the Council will ever approve a second Chinatown, there’s no two Chinatowns in one town anywhere in the world, so whoever disagrees with it will have to put up with it, that it’s going to be in Chinatown [in the Valley]” (Low 2). The Chinatown storyboards shown earlier make no mention whatsoever of other areas in Brisbane with concentrations of Chinese communities, such as Sunnybank or Darra. Low goes on to state that the Valley landmark is recognized outside of Brisbane, and is viewed as “where the Chinese are.” So, even as local recognition of “where the Chinese are” shifts, the site of concentrated Chinese heritage and history in the Valley is set to become even more embedded as a community legacy through CMoQ’s establishment. This functions as a process of legitimating Chinese presence in the city and, by extension, the state and nation. The second stream of motivation for establishing this Chinese Museum, according to my interviews, is as “a corrective educational measure.” All the interviewees talked about how the “real” contributions and history of Chinese

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communities and individuals are not represented in current institutions or material—and by this they meant other museum exhibits, textbooks about Australian history, and the public sphere in general. They were generally critical of existing museums and their perceived inability (or refusal) to give Chinese Australian histories their due. Teoh commented on how the “dead objects” in current museums have no relevance to his son, while Leong points to the importance of taking history to the community, not keeping it behind glass in “dusty, crusty types of museums” (L. Leong 1). All interviewees expressed the importance of knowing these Chinese Australian histories, and the pressing current need for documentation and oral histories to be gathered as key community members are becoming older. The familiar anomaly here is that the interviewees are almost all from Southeast Asia, and are first or second generation in Australia. The colonial history of the Chinese in Queensland is not “theirs” per se but, as Marita Sturken has argued with regard to cultural memory, “[w]e need to ask not whether a memory is true but rather what its telling reveals about how the past affects the present” (Sturken 2). In a similar way, the desire of these members to create a museum that they view as a corrective measure reveals the extent to which the past can be mobilized for contemporary affirmation. This longing for a connection to deeper histories in Queensland and Australia leads to the third reason articulated by interviewees for helping in the establishment of the Valley’s Chinese Museum. They view its creation and purpose as part of a corrective project, with these corrections becoming “a form of cultural insurance.” Mok, who considers herself “activated” by the Blainey debate and ensuing anti-Asian sentiments in 1984, spelled this out most explicitly when she stated that “when one’s aware of those sorts of things [i.e. Chinese Australian history and, more specifically, their contributions] . . . who is anybody to tell us that [we] shouldn’t come in” (Mok 1). She believed that “part and parcel” of asserting one’s right to belong is “to show your contributions” (1). Low lamented his lack of knowledge about Chinese Australian history during the rise of Pauline Hanson and the subsequent founding and popularity of the One Nation Party. In particular, he talked at length about his involvement with the Chinese servicemen’s commemorative bell that was installed and launched in the Duncan Street Mall in March 2007. He says: “The whole reason why I’m backing this project on the memorial [bell] is because I wanted people to know that there were Chinese that fought for Australia. A lot of people don’t know. I wish I knew about it before Pauline Hanson” (Low 3). This latter point of Queensland and Brisbane communities having more to prove in terms of Chinese Australian belonging and worth is one that came through the interviews as well as during committee meetings. The state and city are the birthplaces of One Nation and

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its founder, as mentioned above, and this is something that obviously has a continuing effect on Brisbane’s Chinese Australian communities in terms of their need to redeem their city’s multicultural and cosmopolitan credentials, as well as justify their place in the nation.

VI Conclusion This chapter has been a preliminary discussion about issues surrounding the establishment of the Chinese Museum of Queensland in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. The fact that the museum does not yet physically exist points, of course, to the ongoing nature of this research. The complexities of creating a racialized museum space such as CMoQ, within the confines of a designated ethnocultural precinct such as Chinatown, reflect the variety of perspectives present in efforts to represent contemporary Brisbane and Queensland. For fairly obvious economic reasons, a cosmopolitan “face” for the city is a major priority for its tourist bodies and Fortitude Valley’s business bureaus. What does this appeal to and showcasing of the cosmopolitan mean for community-driven projects such as CMoQ in the longer term? Can the Chinese community of Brisbane maintain its momentum and vision to create an entity that speaks beyond particular group interests and endures after the initial glare of publicity and interest? The contentions that took place in committee meetings (many common to all community projects, such as communication difficulties, lack of administrative support, and uneven workloads) and that will continue to surface at each point of development can be frustrating. Rey Chow argues that these competing voices demonstrate the awareness that: there is no unanimity, no absolute consensus on this issue; that conflict is actually a locus of reproduction and regeneration; and that even the most long-held and cherished assumptions about the ethnic culture are contestable and potentially dismantleable. (Chow, Protestant Ethnic 190)

Representing the malleability and constructed nature of Chineseness appears to be an aim that is counterproductive for a Chinese Museum. However, if the Museum hopes to engage its local communities as much as tourists and other visitors to Chinatown, future exhibitions will inevitably need to tread a fine line between defining and deconstructing what Chineseness in Australia can mean. Ip argues that the newer “ethnoburbs,” such as Sunnybank in Brisbane, are “a much more grounded and integrated locale increasingly

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representative of life in contemporary Australian cities,” and more convincing in their cosmopolitanism because of, among other things, their “‘spontaneous’ emergence” (Ip 73). Given the crafted nature of Chinatowns and their role in signifying a cosmopolitan city, they could be viewed as areas that “museumize” Chineseness with the antiquated accoutrements that Mak mentions earlier. The challenge for CMoQ is to resist being merely a museum within a museum, and to connect with the localized, organic facets of its Chinese communities while performing its informative role.

13 Our Space? Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Online Life David Parker*

I The globally dispersed population of Chinese migrants and their descendants has attracted growing attention in discussions of transnational social practices. Chinese networks of capital investment, education acquisition, and familial accumulation are a force for social change in Asia, the Americas, and Europe (Ong and Nonini; Pan, Encyclopaedia). The transmission of the cultural cargoes through which Chinese and other migrants make sense of their lives has taken on new forms with the emergence of the Internet. Manuel Castells’s portrayal of the network society sees “the search for identity” in global flows of information and imagery as “the fundamental source of social meaning” (Castells 3). New communications technologies have radically disrupted relationships between culture, identity, and place, generating complex geographies of affiliation with loyalties often stretched between disparate locations (Barney; Ericksen). Researchers have begun to explore how diasporic populations are using online forums to express changing identities, reconnect with homelands, and reshape social networks across national boundaries (Brouwer; Ignacio; Mitra, “Marginal Voices” and “Creating Immigrant Identities”; Parham; Siapera, “Minority Activism” and “Multiculturalism Online”). In this emerging literature, the everyday cultural practices organizing the global Chinese

*

The research on which this chapter is based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, award (RES-000–22–1642) for the project Britsh Chinese Online identities, with co-researcher Dr. Miri Song, University of Kent at Canterbury. The ESRC’s support and Miri’s work on the project are greatly appreciated.

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mediascape through new communications technologies have attracted serious scrutiny (Ong, “Cyberpublics”; Y. Shi; L. Wong; G. Yang, “The Internet and the Rise”). This chapter explores some of the formations of identity emerging through online interaction among second generation Chinese migrant populations. The discussion draws on a survey of Internet use among Chinese young people in Britain conducted through two of the best-known British Chinese websites in late 2006. The preliminary survey findings are discussed here, together with material from some of the thirty-five follow-up interviews conducted with British Chinese young people.1 The chapter addresses four issues. Firstly, online discussion forums have become an important site for expressing complex emotions about being Chinese and living outside of East Asia. Secondly, the enhanced profile of China prompts ambivalent responses. A renewed pride in China can coexist with a distancing from newly arrived undocumented mainland Chinese migrants. Thirdly, experiences of travel to East Asia stimulate new forms of identity self-fashioning incorporating Web 2.0 technologies such as interactive forums, weblogs, and video download sites. This combination of textual dialogue and visual stimuli generates a rapidly evolving informational ecology of spaces for reflection and the testing out of senses of belonging. Fourthly, the chapter discusses the relationship between online and offline interaction, and the potential for long-standing social networks and institutions to emerge. The apparently superficial exchanges in chat rooms, discussion forums, and blogs provide a new context for reflexive racialization and critical reflections on the experience of being a racialized minority (Parker and Song). These online interactions stimulate fresh perspectives about what being Chinese means, and reconfigure the social and political networks of the global Chinese population.

II Analyzing online life: Why websites matter Rather than a separate “second life” in a wholly distinct virtual world, online interactions are increasingly embedded in the everyday lives of Internet users, offering a rapidly evolving fusion of fantasy and reality, the frivolous and the serious, that demands extended investigation (Cavanagh; Nunes). The analysis of how ethnic minorities in affluent societies communicate online is a developing field (Lee and Wong; Nakamura). One of the most perceptive analysts of new media stresses their importance in reorganizing the relationships between postcolonial subjectivities and structures of

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domination (Poster). Transnational migrant populations with access to forms of communication having relatively low entry barriers and rapid dissemination potential are implicated in “new configurations of subjectivation” (Poster 38). According to Poster, the digital public sphere “constructs the subject through the specificity of its medium in a way different from oral or written or broadcast models of self constitution” (41). The digitally projected self is more like a broadcaster than an individual speaker at a meeting, but with the difference from established media that the audience can produce as well as consume the messages. In this user-generated mediascape, websites increasingly animate the “circulatory diasporic socio-cultural and psycho-cultural space” (Kuah-Pearce 234) in which migrants and their descendants reflect on their experiences and occasionally mobilize to challenge dominant representations. The concepts used to describe Chinese online forums have tended to emphasize the transnational dimensions of these social practices. Guobin Yang develops Turner’s influential idea of liminality to explore the Internet as a liminal space of worldwide interaction among Chinese migrants and scholars (G. Yang, “Internet Protests”). For Turner, liminal states are “suspensions of quotidian reality, occupying privileged spaces where people are allowed to think about how they think . . . or to feel about how they feel in daily life” (V. Turner 102). This reflexive potential of online discussion forums is particularly significant for minorities lacking such opportunities in mainstream media. Aihwa Ong has drawn attention to the “transnational cyberpublic” of the Chinese diaspora using the Internet to communicate with each other, maintain connections with East Asia, and monitor anti-Chinese racism worldwide (Ong, “Cyberpublics”). Her focus is less the discursive features of the medium than the disposition of the population connected through it. She is particularly critical of the tendency for some transnational Chinese online networks (notably http://www.huaren.org in the late 1990s) to presume and promote a racially exclusive sense of global Chinese kinship. The very distances spanned by the online rallying calls to defend Chinese interests can invest “disembedded diaspora identifications” with a dangerously simplistic fervor (Ong, “Cyberpublics” 82). Important as they are, these formulations may overlook the local and national focus of much online communication. Websites stimulate face-toface interaction as well as long-distance information sharing. They are nodes of often intense interpersonal exchange disseminating ideas, images, and identities along routes in the Chinese diaspora, and these networks operate at local and national scales as well as through transnational exchanges. The opportunities offered by the Internet are particularly important for small, geographically dispersed, and culturally marginal populations such as the Chinese in Britain.

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III British Chinese websites The significance of British Chinese Internet activity stems from the historical and socio-economic forces shaping Chinese lives in Britain. Although there has been a British Chinese population for two centuries, like other British ethnic minorities until recently, the bulk of Chinese settlement resulted from the 1950s and 1960s migration flows from Britain’s former colonies, in this case mainly from Hong Kong. Yet in contrast to the Black and South Asian British, the cultural presence of British Chinese people is barely marked in mainstream media beyond stereotypical associations with Chinese restaurants, Chinatowns, and, latterly, undocumented migration from China. The 2001 population census recorded the Chinese population in Britain to be 247,000, an increase of over 90,000 on the 1991 figure. The concentration of employment in the catering industry continues, albeit to a lesser extent than in previous estimates. In 2001, half of Chinese men in employment and twofifths of Chinese women worked in the “distribution, hotel and restaurant” sector (National Statistics). In 2001, about one in four Chinese of working age were in a managerial or professional occupation, and the Chinese population had the smallest proportion of any ethnic group in a routine or manual occupation (17%) and the largest proportion of full-time students (30%). Chinese children achieve the highest academic results of any ethnic group in Britain (DFES, 2006). The concern for educational achievement and a desire to move away from the catering trade are significant themes in the lives of second generation British Chinese people. Their experiences and their readiness to utilize online communication are profoundly shaped by the spatial distribution of the Chinese population throughout Britain. There is no local authority area where the resident Chinese population exceeds 2.2% of the total. For example, although one-third of the British Chinese population lives in London, Chinese people account for only one in a hundred of the capital city’s residents (Dobbs et al. 55). This geographical dispersal means that most Chinese young people grow up without an extensive Chinese peer group, which helps account for the significance of online forms of social networking afforded by specifically British Chinese Internet sites in recent years. By the late 1990s, the continued absence of Chinese coverage within mainstream media prompted a number of computer-literate British Chinese people to utilize the emerging technologies of the Internet to develop new channels of communication and selfrepresentation. The two longest-established British Chinese Internet sites are the British Chinese Online site (http://www.BritishChineseOnline.com) and

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Dim Sum (http://www.dimsum.co.uk). Each is not-for-profit, produced and moderated on a voluntary basis, and currently free from advertising. The British Chinese Online website has been operating since late 19992 and by March 2008 had hosted over one million messages on its discussion board. Membership is a requirement for contributing to the discussions, although anyone can read the threads. By March 2008, the site had over 7,500 registered members. Dim Sum is a less interactive site, with more editorial material discussing East Asian food, culture, and travel. However, it has also developed a discussion forum and has begun to host social events. For example, in April 2007, Dim Sum advertised the “British Chinese Community Network” as “a place for us to meet and network with like-minded people” to deal with the issue that “as an organisation representing second generation British based Chinese we recognise that there are limited opportunities for groups to meet” (April 2, 2007, http://www.dimsum.co.uk). Since their inception, these sites have played an active role in mobilizing British Chinese people around issues of concern. For example, in 2001, notices and articles published on their pages helped attract several hundred people to a demonstration in central London against accusations that Chinese food was the source of the foot and mouth disease outbreak on Britain’s farms (Parker, “Is There a British Chinese Public Sphere?”). As a later section of the chapter illustrates, these websites continue to highlight issues affecting Chinese people in Britain.

IV British Chinese online life The online survey of British Chinese young people on which this chapter draws was part of an eighteen-month study of British Chinese Internet use from September 2006 to March 2008. The research explores the potential of online communication to counteract the geographical dispersal of the British Chinese population by offering new spaces for identity expression, social networking, and political mobilization. Empirically the study responds to the disparity between the British Chinese being the most educationally successful of Britain’s ethnic minority groups and yet not seeing that achievement matched in the cultural and political domains. Conceptually, the research contributes to ongoing discussions about the potential of online activity to reshape existing social identities. The survey was undertaken in autumn 2006 via messages posted on the British Chinese Online and Dim Sum websites and linked to an online questionnaire. Aggregating the returns from each site, 282 replies were

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received. A minority of respondents are intensive users of these forums, 22.5% using them at least four times a week. A small but significant group has expanded its social networks significantly as a result, with 14% of respondents having made at least ten friends through their use of these websites. Like other online forums the British Chinese sites offer a rich “sociolinguistic ecology” in which a variety of codes, discursive practices, and self-presentational strategies coexist (Androutsopoulos 523). Their specific combination of British and Chinese influences is immediately evident in what Nakamura terms the “primal scene of cybernetic identity” (37), the signifiers of distinctive selfhood, such as user names, avatars, and signatures used to represent individuals as they post messages. In the British Chinese Online discussion forum, user names range from real surnames, to place names from East Asia such as “Tai Po Boy”—referencing a part of the New Territories area in Hong Kong with which many British Chinese people have ongoing ties— and evocations of China such as “Peach Blossom.” In addition, user names can also reflect affiliations with British localities, for example “manicmanc” used by a resident of Manchester. In these displays of self-identity, “ethnicity is blended with or superseded by other cultural affiliations in the kaleidoscope of self-presentations in signatures” (Androutsopoulos 540). In previous research, anxiety about fluency in the Chinese language, both spoken and written, was a significant theme for young British Chinese people (Parker, Through Different Eyes). The online discussions in these two forums are predominantly in English. They provide a safe context in which relative ignorance of the Chinese language can be disclosed and occasionally help sought to alleviate it. For example, in one discussion thread on the British Chinese Online site, “Help each other—learn to read Chinese,” users posted short extracts of Chinese language, both in Chinese characters and transliterated into Pinyin romanization, as well as advice about which dictionaries to use when reading Chinese. The sporadic use of Chinese dialect words in a predominantly English language forum is one practice through which the diversity of Chinese identity is explored. This is most evident when site members discuss their nostalgia for the dialect of Hakka, spoken in the New Territories area of Hong Kong from where many British Chinese families originate, but increasingly displaced by Cantonese and Mandarin in Hong Kong, and English in Britain. As one message stated, “It’s almost like there is a family connection when you wonder [sic] past hakka ngin [people]. At restaurants my hakka ears will pick up any hint of hakka and I’ll just sit there listening” (posted by “Aji Ichiban,” April 2, 2007, British Chinese Online forum).

Our Space? Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Online Life

V British Chinese online identities There are several ways in which Chinese identity is simultaneously emphasized and questioned in the websites’ discussion threads. Firstly, reflections on experiences of racism; secondly, positioning in relation to recent Chinese migration; thirdly, exchanges of views on China’s place in the world, particularly in relation to Japan and the United States; fourthly the use of other new media technologies to reflect, often ironically, on being Chinese. Reflections on racism are one of the recurrent topics on the discussion forums. The experience of dealing with abuse from customers whilst working in Chinese catering establishments elicits strong recognition from young British Chinese. A long-running discussion followed the murder of a Chinese man, Huang Chen, in April 2005 outside his takeaway business by a gang of white youths in Northern England: I bet they were shouting racist abuse as well during the onslaught. Attacks on Chinese takeaways are becoming more common. The community must surely start of thinking [sic] to support each other in the best way possible. Right now, I cannot help getting flashbacks/reflect on some of the bad “racist” provocations we (as a family) had to endure on numerous of occasions, of once running a takeaway. (Posted by “bbc1683,” April 29, 2005, British Chinese Online forum)

In the aftermath of the incident, a Chinese community worker used the British Chinese Online discussion board to seek advice in drawing up a bilingual leaflet aimed at advising catering employees on how to deal with racial harassment. More implicit forms of discrimination faced by British Chinese people aiming to progress beyond the ethnic catering trade have been highlighted by recent research. Self-employment rates for Chinese people are falling as the second generation moves into professional spheres. Yet Chinese people, like other British ethnic minorities, earn less than their white counterparts in equivalent occupations (Clark and Drinkwater). The qualitative experiences of thwarted upward mobility are related in the online forums: We often complain about racism against Chinese people in this country and cite incidents which are openly racist like name calling or assaults. I personally think that the problem is worse than you think even if you are never called a name or assaulted. This is the area of racial disadvantage that inhibits you from getting a fair bite

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at the cherry. Grey incidents which are a complex interplay of many factors as opposed to black and obvious. (Posted by “redscouse,” December 17, 2005, British Chinese Online forum)

The second theme in the online forums is the growing presence of new migrants from the Chinese mainland, and the implications for how the existing British Chinese population is perceived. Many of the discussions on the forum exhibit a discursive distancing on the part of established British Chinese from newly arrived Chinese migrants. For example the thread “What do you think of the migrant ppl [sic] from China?” attracted the following comment: Whenever I mention them to other Chinese friends all I get is negative comments. When talking to my neighbour this morning he said “your lot” are all over the place selling fake DVDs and claiming benefit. The guy usually has a lot of praise for hard-working Chinese people. (Posted by “scooby,” April 8, 2007, British Chinese Online forum)

The forum discussions express and cultivate complex senses of belonging to both Britain and East Asia. In the British Chinese Online forum, a thread asked “How do you feel about England,” and one user replied: Although I am not patriotic I do support the England team on sporting occasions, purely because I was brought up in this country. This does not mean my heart is with the English, quite the opposite, I feel more Chinese than being English. What I do treasure is being able to understand and experience two different cultures. I think us British Born Chinese along with other ethnic minority people born here are quite lucky and unique. (Posted by “Stevie T,” May 14, 2006, British Chinese Online forum)

Allegiance to England or Britain is not all-encompassing, as the idea of a “more complete identity elsewhere” (Karlsson 310) circulates through many of the messages, notably in discussions of China and its re-emergence as a global power. One strand of online expression enacts what Stuart Hall terms the “one true self” narrative of identity, the collective sensibility drawing strength from reconnecting with the imaginary plenitude of one’s origins, offering “stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning” (Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” from Identity 223). One site user expressed a resurgence of pride in China: Personally, I love China. It’s the original. It’s been “uncool,” but now people are thinking otherwise because it’s getting wealthier. But in my opinion, what makes China great is its heritage, the culture, the

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authenticity that makes a country itself. Not some wannabe-West, whose constant copying just doesn’t match up to the real thing. (Posted by “dinky chinky,” February 12, 2005, British Chinese Online forum)

Such love for the homeland can all too readily draw on hatred of an enemy. Another cause for consolidation around a strong sense of Chinese identity is the regular invoking by forum users of Japanese wartime atrocities against the Chinese and Hong Kong populations. For example the thread “Japanese again” was started on March 2, 2007 on the British Chinese Online website in response to the Japanese prime minister downplaying the violence suffered by Chinese women during World War II. One site member posted the following comment: It’s the same thing on and on again. Doubt it will change . . . The important thing is us Chinese recognise and still remember what happened. And we all know what really happened. (Posted by “rayskyhigh84,” March 3, 2007, British Chinese Online forum).

Yet this sense of injustice is often tempered as respondents stress their argument is with the Japanese government, not the current generation of Japanese people: it wasn’t today’s Japanese who did all these things, so to get extremely upset about it is I think pointless. Why hold a grudge against something that these people did not do? (Posted by “hannioli,” March 3, 2007, British Chinese Online forum)

For the most part, the aggressive long-distance nationalism and unequivocal assertions of Chinese cultural superiority noted by analysts of some Chinese diaspora websites (Ong, “Cyberpublics”) is tempered on the British Chinese sites by recognition of multifaceted identities and loyalties. For example, one China-born but British-raised user of these sites identified with both China and Britain as hosts of the Olympic Games in 2008 and 2012: I’m very pleased that both London and Beijing have been given the Olympics, one after the other. (Interview with “Mylene,” aged 20)

Another user of the British Chinese Online site summarized its importance in prompting awareness of a distinctive social location: A lot of the time, this board gives me food for thought, and lets me grasp a clearer image of identity. It also raises a lot of issues which I find interesting, and has a lot of motivating stories. Often, they make me proud to be a BBC [British Born Chinese], and genuinely

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give me hope in the thought that perhaps in the next generation or so, we can break down negative stereotypes, and portray ourselves as a people that we (and others) admire. (Posted by “Lawrencew,” April 16, 2007, British Chinese Online forum)

Such reflections illustrate how these websites can be arenas for the working out of modes of convivial discourse (Gilroy, “Multiculture”) where diversity and solidarity co-exist, and where living with multifaceted identities becomes ordinary.

VI Our space? British Chinese 2.0 The two websites highlighted in this chapter form part of a wider informational ecology disseminating elaborations of a diasporic Chinese identity. These include weblogs, the video download site YouTube, and social networking sites such as MySpace, Xanga, and bebo. Thirty-four percent of the survey respondents produce their own website or weblog. Many of the regular posters of messages on the British Chinese Online forum have links to personal weblogs and websites in their signatures. Putting “British Born Chinese” into the YouTube search box in spring 2007 linked to a ten-minute video, “bbc house special” (http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2lhsnx8iGLo). This tells the day in the life of a Chinese takeawayfood business in Britain, shot to the soundtrack of a conversation between two British born Chinese about their family backgrounds and lives growing up in the family business. The clip includes such thoughtful observations as: “Because you’re sat in the middle of these two cultures, there’s [sic] things that you see that if you were a Chinese person you might not see, and if you were an English person you might not see.” The significance of such representation for British Chinese people was immediate to one viewer who left a comment on YouTube: as a BBC (British born Chinese) I enjoyed watching this, I swear BBCs go through all the same stuff in their lives.

Besides personal websites, there are also a number of specifically British Chinese–themed weblogs. The most obvious is the self-styled “British Chinese blog” at http://www.british-chinese.blogspot.com. This offers a daily reflective commentary on Chinese cultural practices and memories. For example, one entry, “frozen in time,” carried a photograph of a Chinese restaurant in London that had hardly changed in the last twenty years:

Our Space? Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Online Life

I like places like this. They have a sense of age and endurance. They are survivors in a world of ever-changing shop fronts and constant re-vamping. They also stir up feelings of nostalgia and memories of the takeaways I knew as a child. From the plastic, laminate counter to the scuffed, grubby lino flooring; Multi-coloured plastic strips in the doorway and cans of coke stacked up in threes. (British Chinese blog, March 27, 2007)

The entry of April 1, 2007, “From Potter to Popworld: the bbcs are coming,” expressed a specifically British Chinese viewpoint in more forward-looking terms. It noted the presence of British born Chinese actors, Katie Leung, in the film Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Benedict Wong in the film Sunshine. The entry asked, “Are we reaching the tipping point where Chinese and Asian faces can be seen in other situations besides adverts for noodles and martial arts parodies?” Several British Chinese weblogs offer rich visual cues for the exploration of Chinese identity. One example is www.oneinchpunch.net, “East Asia inspiration,” by the British born Chinese web designer Mark Wu. The One Inch Punch site draws its name from a martial arts technique unleashing explosive internal power from a very short distance. It aims to become “a brand that showcases all that’s good about East Asian culture.” Like the British born Chinese blog, One Inch Punch has a regular visual reference back to Hong Kong, in this case a regular “Hong Kong picture moment.” For example, on April 5, 2007 the image “Flat ducks and chickens for sale in Causeway Bay” represented one of many on this blog whose deeply saturated colors and very specific evocation of Hong Kong place names added to the texture of affectionate remembrance. Online technologies like weblogs and photo-satellite mapping programs facilitate novel connections with Chinese-related memories and family histories. One interviewee in the study described using Google Earth’s imagery of Hong Kong to pinpoint where her parents grew up: H: Recently, I’ve used Google Earth, and from bits of what my parents have told me I’ve searched for the actual village where my Dad lived, and I’ve tried to look for where my Mum lived. DP: So Google Earth extends to that part of the world as well? H: It does, but it’s not as clear. For some reason every time we look at my Mum’s there’s always clouds over it, so she’s always a bit annoyed by that. With my Dad’s it was a bit of guesswork, actually, it doesn’t have village names as far as I’m aware. We’re guessing, we’re saying, “we think the river’s here. . . .” (Interview with “Hannah,” aged 23)

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Besides technologically mediated visits home, increasing tourism and periods working in East Asia have given British Chinese people a new way of exploring their identities, as one interviewee related: There is a little turmoil going on, and I think it’s true of a lot of British Chinese. We do feel a sense of belonging with the British, like with my friends, but when you go back to China there is a special sense of belonging, that is something else. Maybe it’s because you are with family. (Interview with “Mylene,” aged 20)

VII Reflections on home “The desire to find an authentic self by travelling to the homeland is not new” (Ignacio 6); what is new is the ability to share reflections on the experience of traveling home, retrace diverse migration trajectories, and express different orientations to the so-called homeland with a potentially global online audience (Mallapragada). Lena Karlsson has described the online diaries of the Asian American website www.ricebowljournals.com as “acts of life writing” (Karlsson 302). These “invocations of home and ethnicity” can be profoundly significant acts of public self narration (Karlsson 306). Notions of authentic identity are disrupted, the boundaries between home and abroad are disputed. Shuttling between east and west both physically and symbolically is also evident on weblog and Internet forum postings by British Chinese people who spend time in East Asia. The ambiguous partial self-Orientalisation the web can host is exemplified by www.yongfook.com. This is the weblog of a part-British part-Singaporean Chinese young man based in Japan. In one entry comparing Hong Kong and Japan, the author makes full use of the license he feels being of mixed heritage gives him to “objectively dissect two societies with my tweezers of biracial authority” (September 19, 2006, www.yongfook.com). The irreverent tone allows for Orientalist images of East Asia to be cited, critiqued, and played with, often in the same message: “It is because of this unique combination of Chinese, British and Japanese experiences that I think you’ll find I am the law on any and all things related to the comparison of Japan and the ex-abusedchild-to-Britain’s-violently-drunk-colonially-ruling-father, Hong Kong” (entry September 19, 2006, www.yongfook.com; emphasis as in original text). Drawing on Georg Simmel’s essay on the sociology of sociability, these websites can present “play forms” of ethnicity, reworking and refashioning inherited categories, “accompanied by a feeling for, by a satisfaction in, the

Our Space? Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Online Life

very fact that one is associated with others and that the solitariness of the individual is resolved into togetherness, a union with others” (Simmel 121). The form of the discussions—give and take, reciprocity, information sharing— is at least as important as their content. Britain’s colonial histories in parts of Asia give a particular edge to the contingent and contested forms of belonging expressed notably in discussions over the retention of Hong Kong Identity Cards and “things you hate about China.” Evident in these often anxious, jokey exchanges are selective affinities, partial identifications imbued with an awareness that the physical similarity of looking Chinese when in China or Hong Kong can heighten awareness of cultural and linguistic differences. Regular threads on the British Chinese Online site share the experiences of “returning” to Hong Kong: I’ve been seriously thinking about going over there to start a new life. I feel more at home in Hong Kong than I do here, simply because I look like everyone else and I’m not judged by my race. (Posted by “stawbelly,” March 21, 2007, British Chinese Online forum)

A number of replies to this request for comments concurred: I personally felt more at home [in Hong Kong] because people stopped making assumptions and decisions just by looking at me, to me it does feel like a big difference, the stress of the situation where you stick out is totally gone. . . . (Posted by “cirrus888,” March 23, 2007)

One reply about the experience of living in Hong Kong neatly encapsulates the intercultural and outernational sensibility among some of the globally mobile British Chinese Online site users: To be able to roam and to be free. To meet people and friends. To travel across culture and breathe in difference. To live before one dies . . . the place [Hong Kong] does make me think where my cultural home is, and for me it’s neither here or there. And that’s the best thing. (Posted by “CharlieAddict,” March 23, 2007)

VIII Social networking Regular offline meetings and embryonic social institutions have begun to emerge via these websites, generating forms of what Putnam and others

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term “social capital”—connections and networks that can be drawn on as social assets (Putnam; Parker and Song). In addition to the regular social events organized through the British Chinese Online website in London and other British cities, a “British Born Chinese in Hong Kong” group meets every month in central Hong Kong for social gatherings, and advertises its meetings on the British Chinese Online website. A further example of how the British Chinese Online website connects beyond Britain is the thread “What to do in Shanghai?” which had 230 responses by May 2007. One message highlighted the formation in Shanghai of the Overseas Chinese Network www.ocnetwork.org which hosts regular social gatherings for the growing population of overseas born Chinese who are based in Shanghai. The interplay between online and offline interaction can be intense and immersive. Face-to-face social gatherings, mobile phone conversations, and MSN Messenger chats complement the public online discussions of the Internet forum boards: We would do it [socialize] across all forums, I guess you could say the Internet ended up being part of the society as well as the face to face meetings as a society. You’d end up having social life with them online, so to speak. Rather than going out the door and meeting up with each other, you would meet up online . . . The internet kind of enhances it, as opposed to kind of being fake, as long as you have that real element to it, I think it’s a combined effort. As long as you see each other as well. (Interview with “Lai,” aged 28)

This interviewee emphasized the importance of the site in facilitating British Chinese friendship networks that would have been difficult to acquire without it: It’s a really important site, I think most of my social activities for the last four years have been linked in some way to the British Born Chinese website. . . . It’s socialising but it’s also embracing your culture. And embracing a community that I’ve been alien to for such a long time. . . . It’s a meeting of people who are similar in your culture. It’s a meeting of people who understand your culture, who understand something more than the average Joe Bloggs about your background. Even though they might not know your background, they will know aspects of it, and of your culture. I don’t think you can get that with an English person. (Interview with “Lai,” aged 28)

One interviewee recalled how a weekend hiking trip organized through the website enhanced the connection she felt with other British Chinese present:

Our Space? Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Online Life

At the Lake District, when we were writing down our names in Chinese, to me that’s something I wouldn’t do with any of my white friends, there’s not really that talking about your background and stuff like that. . . . There are little things. For example, as you’re walking along, it’s nice to have someone talking in Chinese. (Interview with “Wendy,” aged 29)

The sharing of experience on these sites has developed into more formal networks. Messages exchanged on the British Chinese Online discussion forum led some design professionals to set up a website for British Chinese in the creative industries, www.bbccreatives.co.uk. As one of the founders put it: Our profession is frowned upon by our parents. Most wanted us to become doctors and whatever profession that made the most money. To be a creative, to be a graphic designer, a fashion designer, a lot of them had it hard. They had to overcome a barrier, and I found that really interesting. I wanted to get these people together, to show unity and support for aspiring “artists” to follow their dreams. I always had a vision in the back of my mind to do something. So this bbccreatives.co.uk was born. (Interview with “Simon,” aged 25)

IX Online mobilization The geographical dispersal of the British Chinese population has given online communications media a particular significance in generating and mobilizing collective sentiments. Campaigns to remedy perceived social injustices and counter adverse representations are regularly highlighted on both the British Chinese Online and Dim Sum discussion forums. In 2004 discussion threads and an online petition drew site users to the “Save Chinatown” campaign when developers wanted to redesign part of London’s Chinatown district, as one interviewee recalled: I’ve put my name to [an online petition] to save China Town. Because that was the biggest thing to me, and to take away the Pagoda in China Town and to take away China Town from its position is a defamation of something that I’ve known as a child, and it’s a defamation of something that a lot of us have known as a child, whenever you go to Leicester Square, it’s China Town. (Interview with “Lai,” aged 28)

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A similar petition was set up at www.saveorientalcity.co.uk to try to save the Oriental City retail complex in Colindale, North West London. Originally owned by the Japanese firm Yaohan, the out-of-town plaza evolved into a focal point for London’s suburban East Asian residents. In November 2006, the property company Development Securities submitted plans to redevelop the complex, and thereby remove the forty East Asian businesses based there. The petition formed part of a larger campaign culminating in a demonstration at the Houses of Parliament and a letter from the Chinese consular representative to London’s mayor Ken Livingstone asking for the development to be modified. In the end these efforts did not prevent the approval of the redevelopment in spring 2007. Once again, however, the online board was able to mobilize British Chinese sentiment behind the defense of a rare space outside Chinatown with specifically East Asian resonance. As one of the messages on the British Chinese Online website put it: The businesses aside, that place is a central point for the community to get together and organise events for the older generation. (Posted by “Drinky,” March 23, 2007, British Chinese Online forum)

Rather than direct, formal party politics, online interaction has increased the propensity for young people to be mobilized episodically. Whether this translates into long-term social institutions is unclear, but these communications media may prefigure novel forms of social involvement outside mainstream political channels (Owen).

X Conclusion For a geographically dispersed minority population like the Chinese in Britain, online social networks are fostering the emergence of a specifically second generation civil society. In this emergent public sphere of both face-to-face and mediated social contact, the concerns and experiences arising from the negotiation of identities in a multicultural social context are aired and rapidly disseminated. The British Chinese social fabric of the future is being woven through these often tenuous and temporary connections. In offering an “apparently self-governing play” for the expression and testing out of identities, British Chinese websites can exhibit what Simmel termed the pure form of sociability where “the heavily burdened forces of reality are felt only as from a distance” (Simmel 129–30). However, the combination of intimacy from afar, empathetic message posting, and regular social gatherings adds a serious dimension to the apparently playful online discourses.

Our Space? Ethnicity, Diaspora, and Online Life

The often intense online exchanges express three dimensions of identity formation: the possessive, the positional, and the performative. The possessive aspects of identity place a premium on cultural authenticity, laying a claim to “our” culture, “our” heritage, and the defense of “our” space, notably from the forum discussions of London’s Chinatown when apparently threatened by redevelopment. The positionality of identity is evident from the ongoing acknowledgement of the relatively marginal status of the British born Chinese in racialized hierarchies, both within and beyond Britain. The most important consequence of the Internet is an accentuation of the performative dimension to identity. Expressive online cultures on these new media blend indignation at social injustices with irony about ever-evolving allegiances, citing and questioning notions of both British and Chinese identity. Among the discussion topics on the British Chinese Online site in May 2007 were “What essentially makes us British Born Chinese?” and “An imagined community?” These debates indicate the use of the websites to explore the dilemmas of multiple potential sources of belonging, seek advice over how to respond to racial discrimination, and search for perspectives from which to fashion distinctively British Chinese forms of personhood. The resulting experimental configurations of subjectivity reflect how “the self that appears in the digital public sphere is a new construct, one that does not conform nicely to earlier incarnations of individuality” (Poster 42). Both individual and categorical identities are reworked through complex combinations of online and offline interaction. Collective responses to racism are personalized, in dialogues which offer identity possibilities that cannot be confined to singular national categories such as British or Chinese. These websites and the connections they foster demonstrate how “a localised Chinese diasporic identity emerges and takes root in the foreign soil that is now home” (Kuah-Pearce 236) and how this can re-migrate to new territories, with British Chinese identities now produced in China and Hong Kong as well as Britain. A distinctive set of social goods circulates through these online networks among a geographically dispersed, but experientially connected, social group. The re-imagining of China and Hong Kong as homelands operates through symbolic and physical attachments via Google Earth, personal websites, photographs, and the formation of social networks with other British born Chinese in cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. The ties and informational resources specific to this emerging generation reflect a negotiation of competing pressures towards assimilation and identity assertion in the face of ongoing discrimination. The sense of a generation using the Internet to come to terms with being British Chinese was marked by the formation in spring 2007 of a parents’ discussion channel on the British Chinese Online site. When the first sizeable

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British born Chinese generation deploys the Internet to display images of its own British born Chinese children, this says something significant about the long-term orientations of both the medium and its messengers.

Notes

Chapter 1

1. Among the seminal texts that affirm diaspora as the common condition of late modern existence are Masao Miyoshi (1993), Benedict Anderson (1994), and James Clifford (1997). 2. I refer, for example, to Rey Chow (1993) and, in an Asian American context, Lisa Lowe (1996), especially Chapter 3, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences.” 3. See Robert C. Neville, Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (2000), which has a preface by Tu, and a chapter on how Tu’s Confucianism can be regarded as world philosophy. 4. In his essay on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, and specifically Indonesian Chinese, Pheng Cheah critiques how Indonesia’s postcolonial national memory commonly represents the Chinese as neo-colonial capitalists who exploited the indigenous population for their own gains. This representation, together with their identification as Confucianist, has obscured the “indelible contributions of revolutionary Chinese cosmopolitanism to the native awakenings of Southeast Asia” (“Chinese Cosmopolitanism” 151). 5. Liu Shu-hsien wrote on a section of the Manifesto as the “third wave” in the “three waves” of neo-Confucian thought. He submits that the signatories “have made a serious attempt to work out a synthesis of the East and the West, though their guiding spirit remains Confucian . . .” (Liu, from Tu, Confucian Traditions 103). Liu’s essay is in a volume edited by Tu Wei-ming (1996) about Confucianist capitalism in East Asia, but Liu does not really examine what is Confucianist about the Four Mini-Dragons. He simply assumes it to be so. 6. ＜為中國文化敬告世界人士宣言＞. See Collected Works of Tang Junyi ＜唐君毅全 集＞. Vol. 4, Part 2. Taipei: Taiwan Student Bookstore, 1991. 7. Chang’s translation does not follow exactly the Chinese original but does convey its outline and main issues. 8. The culturalization of China through reinterpreting Confucius is not a new phenomenon. Recently, Wang Hui has explored how in the Qing dynasty, China was redefined “as a ritual term rather than as a racial or a territorial country” (169) by Confucian scholars. However, as Wang also shows, this redefinition was closely connected with the legitimization of the Qing empire and the identity of the scholars as both its subjects and critics.

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Notes to pp. 15–18 9. Section two of the Manifesto is headlined, “Why people from different parts of the world study Chinese learning and culture:「世界人士研究中國文化之三種動機 與道路以及缺點」. 10. For a discussion of these issues, see Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate. Vol. 1. Chapter 9. 11. Xu Fuguan gives an account of how the declaration came into existence and his own role in Materials on Xu Fuguan’s Biography ＜徐復觀傳記資料＞. In Hong Kong, Tang founded New Asia College for the study and promotion of Chinese culture, which later became one of the colleges of the Chinese University of Hong Kong when it was established in 1963. Tang became the head of the Philosophy Department of the University. See Mou Zongsan, Hsuyu, et al. In Memory of Tang Junyi: A Collection ＜唐君毅記念集＞. 12. Mou taught at the University of Hong Kong from 1960 to 1968, when he moved to New Asia College on the invitation of Tang. 13. The party, earlier known as the China Democratic League, was founded by Chang on the mainland in 1933. It continued to survive in Taiwan, in the absence of Chang and at times complicit with Kuomintang rule. See Roger B. Jeans, Jr. (1997). Also http://www.carsunchang.org.tw/. For a study of Confucianism in Taiwan, see Ambrose King (1996). King makes the point that from 1949 to the early 1980s, “the party-state of Taiwan saw itself as the custodian of Chinese culture [but] . . . [i]t is clear that Confucianism no longer serves as a state ideology intermeshed with political authority” (King 233). In this way, King dissociates Confucianism from “the interventionist stance of the party-state toward society [which] may resonate directly with traditional practice in imperial days” (235). 14. Recently, the historian Steve Tsang has shown how the British and the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan were forming a partnership all through the 1950s on the basis of their common interest as American allies in the Asian Cold War. This supplements the established view that it was the People’s Republic on the mainland which monopolized the British and Hong Kong governments’ strategic attention (Tsang, Cold War’s Odd Couple). 15. “Convention between the United Kingdom and China respecting an extension of Hong Kong Territory signed at Peking, June 9, 1898.” London: HMSO. 16. On the anomaly of Hong Kong as colony in an age of decolonization, and the internal and external factors which enable this, see Louis, and Tsang, Democracy Shelved and A Modern History of Hong Kong, Part III. 17. For the British and American view on the strategic use of Hong Kong in the containment of Communist China in the Cold War, see Mark Chi-kwan (2004). For the impact of the establishment of the People’s Republic and the Korean War on Hong Kong, see Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong 157–69. The Hong Kong Census reports recorded a rise in population from around 600,000 immediately after World War II in 1945 to 2.5 million in 1955, most of which was accounted for by refugee arrivals from the Chinese mainland. 18. These lines are from Blunden’s poem “View from the University of Hong Kong,” written when he was chair professor of English at the University in the 1950s, and published in the collection, A Hong Kong House (1962). The poem, originally entitled “View from a Hong Kong Office,” is quasi-official in that it is one of five honorific items that introduce Hong Kong Business Symposium (1957), a collection of 190 short pieces on different aspects of the colonial economy whose authors

Notes to pp. 25–37 read like a roll-call of the (often inseparable) political and business elite. As a kind of marginal embellishment in a business publication, the poem’s colonial-capitalist co-optation is all too visible. For a broader discussion of Blunden in Hong Kong and early postcolonial responses, see my article, “‘Imagination’s Commonwealth’: Edmund Blunden’s Hong Kong Dialogue” PMLA (January 2009, forthcoming). Chapter 2

1. See also Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini’s collection, Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (1997), in which the editors acknowledge, both in the Introduction and the Afterword, an indebtedness to the concept of diaspora despite their choice of the word “transnationalism” for their title. 2. Tu Wei-ming may stress in his “Preface to the Stanford Edition” that “[r]ace may be a biological reality, but ethnicity, as experience and consciousness, is mediated by a complex of social and political factors and thus cannot be reduced to mere empirical facts” (1994: vi), but, arguably, Wang Gungwu’s reduction of people to “the Chinese” and the “non-Chinese” in his contribution does not quite fulfill Tu’s promise of a clear differentiation of terms throughout, particularly when Wang prefaces his discussion of being Chinese in a non-Chinese environment by clearly racial contemplations about “look[ing] different,” “speaking differently,” and being “regarded as Chinese by others” (1994: 128). See also Wang’s full-length study The Chinese Overseas and “China in Transformation” (special issue), Daedalus 122:2 (1993), both of which see Chineseness in the context of culture or the nation state. 3. As such she is rather critical of the work of Tu Wei-ming in The Living Tree (1994), which, despite the metaphor of the tree, builds on the idea of roots (Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese 44). Wang Gungwu’s The Chinese Overseas would probably be found in the same category. 4. The inner quotation is taken from Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem” 24. 5. Dingwaney’s introduction to the appropriately called collection Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and the Cross-Cultural Text at this point stresses that the translation zone is also the zone of transculturation (Dingwaney 8), returning to the term popularized in anglo-academia by Mary Louise Pratt. And Pratt refers in the more recent essay “The Traffic in Meaning” also to the “use of translation as a . . . metaphor for analyzing intercultural interactions” (Pratt 25). 6. I am aware of the problems associated with Harry Zohn’s translation, from which I quote nevertheless. See the debate in specifically de Man’s essay “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” (in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory) which suggests that Zohn’s translation ultimately fails in following Benjamin’s quest to reveal the kinship of languages. However, for want of a better English translation, I can only point to the critical debate. 7. I cannot in this chapter go into the details of deconstructionist readings of Benjamin’s essay, as in Derrida’s “Des Tours de Babel” and Dissemination, or in de Man’s “‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’” both of which elaborate on the impossibility of translation. To terribly simplify their arguments, these critics see the main fault of translation in the very fact that the realm of pure language can never be fully represented, and remains only accessible in an outgrowth or a trace, in différance. See also specifically Chow’s critique of de Man’s reading in Primitive Passions (187–88) and my note 6 above.

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Notes to pp. 39–53 8. Sturrock’s examples are taken from Bronislaw Malinowski’s anthropological study, Coral Gardens and Their Magic, of the Kiriwinian language of the Trobriand Islands; Talal Asad gives a comparable example in his study, referencing Ernest Gellner’s work on the Berbers. As problematic as particularly Malinowski’s examples might be considered because of the underlying stance of the anthropologist’s (colonialist and racist) superiority, the idea of the usefulness of an interlinear translation remains. (Interlinear) translations, confirms Asad, show that “[a]ll good translation seeks to reproduce the structure of an alien discourse within the translator’s own language” and that “pushing beyond the limits of one’s habitual usages, this breaking down and reshaping of one’s own language through the process of translation, is never an easy business” (Asad 156–57). Chapter 3

1. For a brief survey of media coverage of Guo’s mission in major British newspapers, see Owen Hong-hin Wong, A New Profile in Sino-Western Diplomacy: The First Chinese Minister to Great Britain, especially 116–24. 2. At the time of his departure for Britain, about seventeen years after the Second Opium War, the Times still found it worthwhile to mention this in a article introducing Guo to the British public: “He was attached to the staff of [Senggelinqin] at the time of the treacherous attack on the British gunboats in the Peiho in 1859, and is said to have strongly opposed that proceeding” (Times, January 2, 1877). 3. Guo Songtao; hereafter quoted parenthetically in the text as Diaries. 4. Due to, in no small measure, the delay of the publication of his diaries and therefore the unavailability of his personal records, serious scholarly interest in Guo started to emerge only quite recently, in the late 1980s, when China had already begun its reform program. Scholarly attention has been largely focused on Guo as a diplomat or a reformist rather than an intellectual. There are numerous biographical studies of Guo Songtao in Chinese, but I am not aware of any fulllength biography of him in English. For a biographical sketch of Guo, see the entry on him in Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644–1912), Ed. Arthur W. Hummel (1943). Frodsham’s introduction to The First Chinese Embassy to the West provides useful information and analysis of Guo Songtao and his mission to Britain. 5. Li made this comment in support of his proposal that more schools of western languages be established, following the Tongwen Guan (“the school of combined learning”) that had been founded a year earlier. See Teng and Fairbank 74–75. 6. Critical analysis of the literati and scholar-officials abounds in Guo’s writing. For example, in 1875, two years before his departure for London, Guo wrote in a memorial: “during the past thirty years in dealing with foreigners, our officials both at Court and in the provinces, have imitated the attitude which developed after the Southern [Song] dynasty, considering it disgraceful to make peace treaties, but excellent to make war.” Guo, “Memorial on Foreign Affairs Submitted on the Occasion of the Termination of His Leave of Absence” (1875), in Frodsham 91. 7. One wonders, however, what Ku might wish to say exactly by specifying the existence of a “middle class Liberalism” in China. It seems that those “liberals” he referred to, surely including Guo Songtao, were merely interested in western methods and ideas, rather than in the representation of the “middle class,” which, of course, could not have existed in the Qing period. For a gently satirical but

Notes to pp. 54–67

8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

vivid sketch of Ku, see W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Philosopher” in On a Chinese Screen (1922). He had to abandon this idea for fear of more attacks from the literati. See Hao and Wang xi, 187. Between 1872 and 1875, the Qing government sent to Yale College 120 students aged from twelve to fifteen. Guo himself admired the impartiality of the British legal system. On his way to Britain, he stopped over in Hong Kong, where he was shown the legal practice in the colony. He was deeply impressed by “the pains taken in order to investigate the circumstances of the case, their caution in arriving at a decision, and their respect for human life evinced in their passing sentence.” See Frodsham lxi. Just as Guo Songtao had been considered to be the most knowledgeable about the West and the ablest in handling foreign affairs two decades previously, with the publication of his translation of Ethics and Evolution, Yan was then accepted as China’s leading man in the domain of western learning. In 1909, the Qing government decided to confer upon those educated abroad traditional Chinese academic titles based on the results of the imperial examinations, and Yan Fu was given the title of jinshi, the candidate who achieved the highest score in the imperial examinations. See Zhu 366. See Wang Xingguo 174–75. Frodsham is inaccurate in claiming that Guo received such a posthumous honor: “[Li Hongzhang] paid him belated tribute by having his name inscribed in the Bureau of National History, much against the wishes of his enemies. This posthumous honour was the only reward [Guo] was to reap for a life-time of brave and faithful service to a country which, as he was well aware, was proceeding to its downfall with all the blind assurance of a sleep-walker” (Frodsham lxii). See “Constitution and By-Laws of the Confucius Institutes (Draft),” March 17, 2008, http://www.ldbj.com/kongzixueyuan0.htm. For an example of such celebrity, see “Animating the Chinese classics: Yu Dan, the super-girl of Chinese thought,” the cover story of Yazhou zhoukan (Asiaweek) February 25–March 4, 2007.

Chapter 4

1. For recent studies of the US literary left in the 1930s, see Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (1989); Paula Rabinowitz’s Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression American (1991); James Murphy’s The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature (1991); Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996); and Alan Wald’s Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left (2002). 2. See Margaret Beetham’s article “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre” (1990). 3. For a recent study of Shen Bao, see Barbara Mittler’s book A Newspaper for China?: Power, Identity, and Change in Shanghai’s New Media, 1872–1912 (2004). Shang Wei’s article “Jin Ping Mei and Late Ming Print Culture” (2003) contains a brief account of the origin of the modern Chinese-language periodical. 4. See Chapter 4 of my monograph, Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai (2009).

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Notes to pp. 67–73 5. Among the short stories and essays Snow chose to include in his anthology, Ro Shi’s “Slave Mother” and Ting Ling’s “Flood” had already been published in China Forum and the non-left magazine People’s Tribune. Ba Jin’s short story “Dog,” Lu Xun’s essay “A Little Incident,” and Mao Dun’s short story “Mud” had first been published in Voice of China and China Today before they were included in this short story collection. The translator of these three stories, T’ung Tso, was in fact the pseudonym of Snow and his Chinese collaborator Xiao Qian. When these three pieces were published in the magazines, they were followed by a brief explanatory note that they were “especially translated” for China Today or Voice of China. These details suggest that this collection was not a self-contained cultural production but was closely related to other anglophone publications of the same era, some of which were overtly political by nature. Before the publication of this anthology, Snow’s article “Lu Shun, Master of Pai-hua,” one of the earliest English-language studies of the author, had been published in the magazine Asia along with some translations of the short stories to be included in Living China. Other pieces from the collection, including Snow’s wife Nym Wales’s long essay on “The Modern Chinese Literary Movement,” had also been published in the British magazine Life and Letters Today. Neither Asia nor Life and Letters Today was an underground party-affiliated magazine, unlike China Forum or China Today. Thus, one could argue that Snow’s translations and collection brought Lu Xun and modern Chinese literature to a wider and more mainstream audience in the West. 6. See Chapter 1 of my monograph, Cosmopolitan Publics. 7. See Shu-mei Shih’s book, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in SemiColonial China: 1917–1937 (2001). 8. See Jameson’s article “Third World Literature and National Allegory.” But in addition to Jameson’s reading, interpretations of Lu Xun’s works in the Chinese mainland also try to align him with one political establishment or another depending on time period. 9. Elsewhere I give a close reading of a series of translation debates that involved Lu Xun, a Harvard-trained literary scholar Liang Shiqiu, and a Communist activist and literary critic Qu Jiubai in the early 1930s. See Chapter 4 of my monograph. 10. See the biography of Agnes Smedley by Janice R. MacKinnon and Stephen R. MacKinnon (1998), 153. 11. See “CFRA Groups Organize, Conference Scheduled,” China Forum. November 7, 1933, 17. 12. Lu Xun, Collection of Lu Xun’s Works, Vol. 4, 460. The translation is mine. 13. In his 1985 book Re-Encounters in China: Notes of a Journey in a Time Capsule, Isaacs gives a short account of editing China Forum in Shanghai. He says that “doubts about Communist affairs elsewhere in the world, the merits of StalinTrotsky struggle in Russia, and perhaps most of all, the crushing events in Germany where Stalin’s insistence upon regarding the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the main enemy, had opened Hitler’s road to power” led him to diverge from the official line of the Comintern carefully guarded by the underground Communist Party in Shanghai that supported his magazine (30). His report on anti-Japanese resistance in the Shanghai battle in 1932 and published in China Forum differed from the official story and was “criticized” in a letter to the editor, which he dutifully published in the magazine. When he refused to publish a tribute to Stalin, “all support was abruptly withdrawn” (31). Isaacs then left Shanghai for Beijing, where

Notes to pp. 74–88

14.

15. 16.

17.

he worked on the short story collection titled Straw Sandals and a controversial history of the Chinese revolution that focused on the problematic intervention from Stalin and the Comintern in the 1920s. It was this book that further turned him into an outcast among his Communist comrades in China and abroad. Him Mark Lai’s manuscript “To Bring Forth a New China, to Build a Better America: The Chinese Left in America to the 1960s” contains the most detailed description that I can find of Chi Ch’ao-ting’s background and activities as well as the magazine China Today (8–25). Chi was a student of Tsing Hua University in the early 1920s. He was a member of Chaotao, a “policy-making core group” within the left-leaning political organization Weizhen Xuehui. Weizhen Xuehui was founded by Chi’s schoolmate, another leftist student by the name of Shi Huang. In 1924, Chi left China for the United States and was enrolled in the University of Chicago, where he organized and participated in various anti-imperialistic activities. He was the first Chinese member of the American Communist Party. Chi was married to Harriet Levine, an American from New York. In 1933, Chi founded Friends of the American People along with several American Communist Party members including Philip J. Jaffe, who was Chi’s wife’s cousin. In addition to publishing China Today, the group also organized many street demonstrations for anti-imperialist and anti-Fascist purposes. It often worked together with the American League against War and Fascism. China Today was published between 1933 and 1937, at which point it was replaced by another magazine, Amerasia. See Him Mark Lai, “To Bring Forth a New China, to Build a Better America.” The People’s Tribune (1931–41) published six short stories by Lu Xun translated into English by Lin Yi-chin. Although Lin Yi-chin’s choice of titles suggests a personal preference for the more introspective pieces among Lu Xun’s short stories such as “Old Friends at the Wine-Shop” (“Zai Jiulou Shang”), some representative pieces such as “The Tragedy of K’ung I-Chi” were also included. With regard to both the background of this magazine, see MacKinnon and MacKinnon 168.

Chapter 5

1. There are two main sources of biographical information on Wong: his series of essays, “Bygone Travel Notes” about his early childhood, and the obituary, “In Memory of Dr. Wong Man,” by J. M. Tan and Rose W. Y. Tan, Eastern Horizon III:1 (January 1964), 62–63. 2. Michael Herzfeld defines “structural nostalgia” as the ways in which the people of a nation represent a lost, Edenic past in order to legitimize present actions, and in so doing, constitute themselves as social and political agents. 3. Translation mine. See also the selections of poetry and fiction by Tay and his two collaborators, Huang Jici and Lu Weiluan, in Works Cited, and also the short summary article on Hong Kong literature by Tay: “Colonialism” (2000). 4. See Tay et al. Ed. Chronology and Tay, “Colonialism” for a list of titles of publications sponsored by either the United States or Communist China. 5. It was easy for someone to obtain a license to publish before World War II. All the person needed to do was register with the government, obtain a guarantee from someone of recognized social standing, and pay a three-thousand-dollar deposit. The situation remained similar after the war (Lu Weiluan 41). Historians have shown that the British position vis-à-vis the Chinese mainland, Taiwan,

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6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

and the United States from after World War II to the early 1960s was constantly shifting because of regional instability. But amid change, the continuation of colonial rule remained paramount to the British. For example, they tolerated Communist Chinese activities in Hong Kong when World War II ended because the Kuomintang Nationalists had plans to seize Hong Kong and attempted to get American backing (Louis). Later, in the 1950s, the British renewed relations with Kuomintang-ruled Taiwan because of the Cold War and the rebuilding of the Anglo-American alliance (Mark). According to Tay, Huang, and Lu, some of the writers did not have a clear idea where the funding for the publication they were writing for came from. For a discussion of Blunden’s Hong Kong poems and activities and his students’ response to him as poet and teacher, see my article, “‘Imagination’s Commonwealth’: Edmund Blunden’s Hong Kong Dialogue.” PMLA (January 2009, forthcoming). Zhao’s discussion of Hong Kong literary culture also includes the transition from earlier writing that represents “Hong Kong as a part of China” (iv) to later work showing how “Hong Kong finds herself” (iv), critiques commercialism and urbanization, and the influence of mass culture. In this respect, it tries to avoid approaching Hong Kong literary culture from exclusively Chinese nationalistic perspectives. My main disagreement with Zhao here is focused on the first section on anglophone writing. It could have been the editor who invented the headline or Wong himself, for he was a regular contributor to the magazine and clearly on friendly terms with its publisher. Or it may not be that whimsical after all. Wong’s plan about how to gather information on different national cultures sounds remarkably similar to the one proposed recently by Franco Moretti which argues for an institutionalized center for researching world literature that draws on specialist studies of nationalist literature. Progressive anthologists sometimes tried to get round this. W. H. Auden did an anthology in the 1930s organized democratically in alphabetical order of poet’s name. The official start date of the Korean War is June 25, 1950. See, for example, Ngg’s essay “The Language of African Literature” in Decolonizing the Mind 4–33. See “John Rodker, 1894–1955: Biographical Sketch,” Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin, March 18, 2008, http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/ fa/rodker.bio.html, and also Crozier. The 1966 and 1977 editions of Auden’s work reprint two versions of the poem where the main difference is in the final tercet. For a history of cultural internationalism and its emergence in relation to socialist nationalist history and politics, see Forman. From a different, liberal vantage, Akira Iriye studies cultural internationalism as part of the history of non-governmental, cross-national relations since the late nineteenth century.

Chapter 6

1. Such films include the Lunar New Year films Mad, Mad World and its sequels to art-house fare such as Clara Law’s Autumn Moon, Evans Yang’s To Liv(e), Stanley Kwan’s Full Moon in New York, and Mabel Cheung’s An Autumn’s Tale. 2. For the actors and filmmakers who continued to work in Shanghai while it was under Japanese control, returning to the mainland was also impossible, as neither

Notes to pp. 108–141

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

Communists nor Nationalists would have viewed their Japanese links with sympathy. The irony is that while Shanghai, from the vantage point of Hong Kong, was considered a source of “true” Chineseness, it was long considered as “the other China” and an “object of nationalist outcry and conservative attacks” (Fu, “Between Nationalism and Colonialism” 206). Fu in his examination of a range of Hong Kong films from 1937–41 concurs with the former. Patriotism meant leaving Hong Kong for the “authenticity of China” (“Between Nationalism” 210). Southeast Asia was also to become an important focus for right-wing Hong Kong films. In Cantonese, the film is called Nam Pak Wo. In English, this would roughly mean the union of north and south. Feng Jiau is the only woman of the three whose personal journey has little to do with reassessing Chineseness. Instead, hers is more to do with her renunciation of lesbianism.

Chapter 7

1. See, for instance, Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy 1850–1990 (1993); Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (1991); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1998); and Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts (1996). 2. This is reflected, for example, in the fierce debate over the “fake” and “authentic” Chinese and Asian American identity between the masculine pan–Asian American nationalists and feminist critics, or in some Chinese American literary critics’ problematic othering of American-born Chinese American writers in opposition to diasporic Chinese writers. Cf. Frank Chin, “This Is Not an Autobiography” 110; “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature 1– 92; Sheng-mei Ma, Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). 3. This includes such canonical classics of American literature as Cooper’s LeatherStocking Tales, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For a list of more mainstream American literature on the theme of mobility, see Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature 118–19; Janis Stout, The Journey Narrative in American Literature 3. 4. For Lacan’s signifying formulas of the “metonymic structure” and “metaphorical structure,” see Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection 155. Chapter 8

1. An account of these immigration laws and their effect on the Chinese population is available in I. Chang 103–56. 2. For a reading of “male hysteria” in this novel, see Eng 179–93. 3. A good introduction to Lim’s fictional work between 1967 and 1990 is the collection of short stories entitled Life’s Mysteries: The Best of Shirley Lim (1985). She has also published two novels to date: Joss and Gold (2001) and, more recently,

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

Sister Swing (2006). Lim has further produced at least five volumes of poetry between 1980 and 1998. Tracking a sampling of Lim’s critical work, beginning from the late 1980s, reveals a vibrant voice weighing in on debates in Asian American literary and feminist studies, while remaining connected to the literatures of Malaysia and Singapore. Debates on the theorization, formation, and pedagogy of Asian American literature were of specific concern to Lim: Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Reconstructing Asian American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics” (1987); “Assaying the Gold: Or, Contesting the Ground of Asian American Literature” (1993); Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Ed., Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1991); Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, Ed., Reading the Literatures of Asian America (1992). Lim has also consistently championed Asian and Asian American women’s writing and addressed ethnic specificities in American and global feminisms: Shirley Geoklin Lim, Mayumi Tsutakawa, and Margarita Donnelly, Ed., The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology (1989); Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “Japanese American Women’s Life Stories: Maternality in Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan” (1990); “Semiotics, Experience, and the Material Self: An Inquiry into the Subject of the Contemporary Asian Woman Writer” (1990); “Asian American Daughters Rewriting Asian Maternal Texts” (1991); “The Tradition of Chinese American Women’s Life Stories: Thematics of Race and Gender in Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior” (1992); “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature” (1993); “Hegemony and ‘Anglo-American Feminism’: Living in the Funny House” (1993); “Up against the National Canon: Women’s War Memoirs from Malaysia and Singapore” (1993); “The Center Can(not) Hold: US Women’s Studies and Global Feminism” (1998); and “Where in the World is Transnational Feminism” (2004). Lim’s book is one of the many “academic memoirs” written by women, a genre that has proliferated during the 1990s. See Nancy K. Miller 1997. The subtitle “Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist” is used in the Singapore/Malaysia edition published by Times Books International, while the US edition is entitled Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1996). For the purposes of appealing to a local readership, the term “Nyonya” obviously has more resonance for Singaporeans and Malaysians. Of course, it is also tempting to read this marketing strategy of retitling the memoir as revelatory of the different cultural politics of ethnic/gender identity formations that the diasporic Chinese American negotiates. A brief but lucid account of the Peranakans is available in “Hybrids,” Lynn Pan 1990. Chapter 8. For a glossy pictorial depiction of Peranakan culture, see Joo Ee Khoo 1996. Hokkien is a major dialect group among the Chinese in Malaysia and Singapore. A more literal translation of “Kelangkia-kwei” would be “an Indian-child devil,” though Lim is probably referring to the derogatory expression’s usage by the Chinese to denote, in a more broadly encompassing way, those who are racially or culturally “tainted.” The relations between Chinese and Malays have been tense, to say the least, during much of the colonial and postcolonial history of Malaysia and Singapore. Racial riots between the two groups erupted during the 1960s in both countries. The Malaysian government has been guilty of instituting an unfair affirmative action-

Notes to pp. 144–156

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

type policy on behalf of the Malay majority, also known as the Bumiputra (roughly translated as the “Princes of the Land”). This policy discriminates against the Chinese and Indian minorities, especially in terms of government employment, university education, financial aid, and political appointments. But to solely excoriate Malay racism and discrimination against the Chinese would also be an injustice, as the rich Chinese elite also have a part to play in manipulating and exploiting the economy to their advantage (not unlike the Indonesian Chinese), hence drawing the ire and resentment of the Malay majority. Eurasians in Malaysia and Singapore are products of Asian and Caucasian intermarriage. They are often seen in a postcolonial context as more socially privileged because of their racial whitening. This last issue surfaces in the second half of Lim’s memoir, which my chapter does not address because of space and topical constraints. The City in Which I Love You was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets, and the Poetry Society of America bestowed on Books of My Nights its William Carlos Williams Award. For more critiques of an elitist cosmopolitanism, see the essays in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins 1998. Ba is the Chinese version of “Dad,” constituting a more casual form of address than “Father.” The politics of language and speech patterns is a problematic well laid out by Chinese American authors Maxine Hong Kingston 1976 and Amy Tan 1996. The language and metaphors here parallel those in Ephesians 5.23–25, though with subversive differences: “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing. Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.” The garment also has biblical precedence: one thinks of Joseph’s garment in the Old Testament book of Genesis. Basford discusses briefly the interracial dynamic of sexual desire between Donna and the poet in Lee’s poem “Persimmons,” which is part of his first collection of poetry Rose. “The terror the butcher / scripts in the unhealed / air, the sorrow of his Shang / dynasty face, / African face with slit eyes. He is / my sister, this / beautiful Bedouin, this Shulamite, / keeper of sabbaths, diviner / of holy texts, this dark / dancer, this Jew, this Asian, this one / with the Cambodian face, Vietnamese face, this Chinese / I daily face, / this immigrant, / this man with my own face” (L. Lee, “The Cleaving,” 1990: 86–87).

Chapter 9

1. This and subsequent reference to numerical counts of Asian American literature are based on texts listed in King-Kok Cheung and Stan Yogi’s annotated bibliography which, though twenty years old now and therefore not inclusive of more contemporary developments, is still the most comprehensive to the date of its publication. (See Cheung and Yogi 1988). 2. For a discussion of the 1961 musical film adaptation of The Flower Drum Song that helped to initiate the critical reassessment of Lee’s text, see Cheng 31–63. For the treatment of Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna that pioneered her recovery, see A. Ling 21–55. For the conservation of patriarchal relations in Eat a Bowl of Tea, see Hsiao 1992.

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Notes to pp. 156–163 3. For the potentially dehistoricizing and formally naïve aspects of the approach to Asian American literature as only an articulation of differences, see Jinqi Ling 3–23. 4. For an astute critique of “the fiction” of “Asian American literature,” see Koshy 1996. 5. In Michael Omi and Howard Winant, this limitation is due both to the dehistoricization of racism and to an investment in the political resilience of the racialized (see Lye, Introduction). 6. The term used by Gayatri Spivak in her sympathetic critique of the contradictory essentialism of the Indian subaltern studies group has been borrowed by Asian American crities to conserve field identity. See, for example, L. Lowe 82. For a similar move that describes “Asian American” as a “rubric we cannot not use . . . [that] should rehearse the catachrestic status of the formation,” see Koshy 342. 7. For Asian American identity as hybrid and heterogeneous, see L. Lowe 66–68. For Asian American racialization as a triangulated and interrelational process, but in terms of black racialization, see Claire Jean Kim 2001. For the original conceptualization of Asian American identity as a pan-ethnic construct, see Espiritu 1992. 8. For a reading of the abuse episode as an instance of the American-born Asian’s encounter with a racial shadow that reminds her of her “disowned Asian descent,” see S. Wong 1993, 92. 9. To 1988, roughly as many books (fiction and nonfiction) have been published by South Asian Americans (74) as by Japanese Americans (76), while Filipino Americans have produced more novels (35) than Japanese Americans (30) and almost as many prose works overall (including books, essays, and short stories) (274) as have Chinese Americans (295). Nevertheless, South Asian Americans are still “a part yet apart,” and Filipino (Americans) were long “forgotten” (see Shankar and Srikanth 1998; Campomanes 1995). 10. In the 1920s, there were two books published by Chinese Americans and three by Japanese Americans; in the 1930s, eight by Chinese Americans and ten by Japanese Americans; in the 1940s, nineteen by Chinese Americans and six by Japanese Americans; in the 1950s, seventeen by Chinese Americans and ten by Japanese Americans; in the 1960s, eighteen by Chinese Americans and eight by Japanese Americans; in the 1970s, seventeen by Chinese Americans and fourteen by Japanese Americans. Since the absolute numbers are low enough to be statistically inconclusive, such quantitative comparisons are intended only to be suggestive. 11. The exceptions here are Matsumoto’s Beyond Prejudice: A Story of the Church and Japanese Americans (1946), an account of the church’s social work with Japanese American internees, and Lin’s Chinatown Family (1948), a novel about an immigrant family in New York. In the introduction to a recent reissue of Lin’s novel, C. Lok Chua writes that, as the author of more than thirty-five books, Lin was “arguably the most distinguished Chinese American man of letters of the twentieth century”; nevertheless, “if one hesitates to call him Chinese American at all, it must be because he was such a quintessentially diasporic citizen of the world” (Chua xxii). That said, while Lin has received passing mention in Asian American literary history, if as an antithetical or ill-fitting figure, Matsumoto is recollected hardly at all. 12. “Ambassadors of goodwill” is Elaine Kim’s term for the earliest “Asian American” writers who “were not representative of the general population of Asian

Notes to pp. 167–192 Americans.” In this category, she includes Lee Yan Phou, New Il-Han, Chiang Yee, Anna Chennault, Etsu Sugimoto, Park No-Young, Wu Tingfang, Huie Kin, as well as Lin Yutang (E. Kim 24–32). 13. For the original conceptualization of the Asian American as a third term that is neither identically American nor Asian, see Chin et al. xii–xxii. For an account of Nisei women’s autobiography as portraying a split self “inaugurated by the recognition that what was unrepresentable was a fully realized Nisei subject,” see Yamamoto 126. 14. It is no coincidence that for examples of texts that demonstrate how the “mutually reinforcing interaction between race and gender discourses endemic to certain feminist plot structures does not necessarily articulate antagonism to American ideology but can service national agendas,” Leslie Bow turns to Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter and Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club (Bow 31). 15. In a study of Japanese American women’s literature, Traise Yamamoto makes the point that the female subjects of Japanese American literature are more likely to “identify and align themselves with, and not against, their mothers” (Yamamoto 197). Chapter 10

1. By “Chinese” here, and throughout this chapter, I am referring to ethnic Chinese culture rather than the culture of the Chinese mainland. Although this primarily signifies Han ethnicity, I include under the rubric of “Chinese” those artists and fictional characters that self-identify as ethnic Chinese. 2. See Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable (1935; rpt., 2003). 3. The figure of the self-identified Chinese diasporic writer who self-Orientalizes was established by Sau-ling Wong’s foundational essay, “‘Sugar Sisterhood’: The Amy Tan Phenomenon.” 4. Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theory cannot explain the specifically Chinese context of these diasporic cultural productions; I contend that the rhetorical relations established between Chineseness and waste can be clarified with reference to the concept of Orientalism. For a very different use of the concept of “abjection” in an Asian American context see David Leiwei Li’s introduction to his study, Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (1998). 5. This 24-carat gold toilet was in 3-D Gold Store, 21 Man Lok Street, Hunghom/ Kowloon, Hong Kong, China. See also the CNN article, “Hong Kong Jeweler’s Lav of Luxury,” February 23, 2001: http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/ east/02/23/hongkong.toilet/index.html. The shop has closed recently. Chapter 11

1. For a discussion of the make-up of “imperial diaspora,” see Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction. 2. See my “Assimilation and Identities in French Indochina.” 3. During the French colonial era, Vietnam was divided into three administrative parts: the colony of Cochinchina in the south, the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin in the center and the north respectively. Cambodia and Laos were also given the status of protectorates. 4. For English language scholarly studies of the relation between Vietnam and China before the French colonial era, see Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam and Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model.

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Notes to pp. 192–200 5. For detailed discussions of the structure of these congrégations and the roles they play for their members, see “Notice sur la situation des Chinois en Indochine” (1909); René Dubreuil, “De la condition des Chinois et de leur rôle économique en Indo-Chine” (1901); the doctoral dissertation of Ky Luong Nhi entitled “The Chinese in Vietnam. A Study of Vietnamese-Chinese Relations with Special Attention to the Period 1862–1961” (1963); Tsai Maw-Kuey, Les Chinois au SudVietnam (1968); Alain G. Marsot, The Chinese Community in Vietnam under the French (1993); and William E. Willmott, The Chinese in Cambodia (1967) and The Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Cambodia (1970). 6. For an example of how the Chinese brought supplies to the French expeditionary forces, see Paul Doumer 36–39. 7. This same observation was also made by Joleaud-Barral, who notes that in the early years of the conquest French merchants in Tonkin charged very high prices for their goods as they believed that the European community would have to buy from them. Later they lost their business to the Chinese (94). For a discussion of the competition between Chinese and French retail business in Indochina, see Kham Vorapheth, Commerce et colonization en Indochine 1860–1945. 8. For a detailed account of the role of Chinese as farmers of alcohol, salt, and opium, see Dubreuil; Chantal Descours-Gatin, Quand l'opium finançait la colonisation en Indochine: l'élaboration de la régie générale de l'opium, 1860 à 1914 (1992); and Philippe Le Failler, Monopole et prohibition de l'opium en Indochine: le pilori des chimères (2001). 9. For details, see Dubreuil 1910. 10. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are mine. 11. The same remark about the Chinese as the “indispensable middleman” in the colony is found in Métin and Boudet and Coulet 1929. 12. For example, in The Economic Development of French Indo-China, Charles Robequain divides the people of the colony into three categories in the following order: Europeans, Chinese, and natives. See in particular Chapter 1. 13. The status of the Chinese also changed according to the changing relations between France and China over the years. For details about the laws that governed the different aspects of the lives of the Chinese, see “Notice sur la situation des Chinois en Indochine”; Dubreuil; Métin; Ky; Tsai; Willmott 1967; Huang Tsenming 1954; and Melissa Cheung 2002. 14. The right of the Chinese to buy land in Cambodia was taken away from them by the colonial government in 1924. For details see Willmott. Under French rule, the Chinese were barred from exploiting mines and rubber plantation. 15. For details on Chinese taxation, see 華僑志: 越南, 華僑志編纂委員會[編] [Hua qiao zhi: Yuenan, Hua qiao zhi bian zuan wei yuan hui bian.] 16. According to Métin, the impossibility to make up the large tax revenues paid by the Chinese from other sources was one of the reasons why the colonial government did not want to pursue the option of turning the Chinese into “natives.” 17. Lit de camp is a piece of Vietnamese furniture that serves both as a bed and a place to take one’s meals. 18. For a discussion of the Chinese immigrants’ marriages with local women, see Tsai and Dubreuil. 19. Both the circular of the prosecutor and Doumer’s letter are available at the colonial archival center, Centre des Archives d’Outremer, in Aix-en-Provence, carton GGI 7770.

Notes to pp. 200–211 20. For a discussion of the work of the Société française d’émigration des femmes, see my “French Women and the Empire.” 21. For a detailed discussion of the fates of the métis in Cambodia, see Gregor Muller, Chapter 5. 22. Literally “Minh-huong” means “Minh village.” The word “Minh” alludes to the group’s ancestors who lived under the Ming dynasty and fled to Vietnam in the seventeeth century, preferring exile to living under the “foreign” yoke of the Manchu. The term was subsequently used to refer to all descendants of Chinese and Vietnamese parents. For a discussion of the history of the term, see Woodside. 23. For a discussion of the condition of the Minh-huongs, see Dubreuil, Tsai, and Marsot, “Notice sur la situation des Chinois en Indochine,” “De la condition des Minh-huong,” . 24. For details on the Sino-Cambodian elite, see Willmott, and Muller. 25. Quoted in Pégard 240. 26. The concept of habitus is taken from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, see in particular The Logic of Practice. For an interesting application of the concept of habitus in a colonial context, see E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies. 27. For a description of the Hanoi theater house, see Eugène Brieux, in particular 37–8. For an excellent documentation on colonial architecture in Vietnam, see Arnauld Le Brusq’s beautifully illustrated book, Vietnam à travers l’architecture coloniale. 28. For details on the social life of Hanoi and Haiphong, see Claude Bourrin. 29. Yet the effort did not always achieve the desired result in particular in the eyes of some of the metropolitan visitors, who tended to scoff at the colonials’ pretentiousness. See for example Auguste François. 30. The French colonial civil servants received double the pay of their metropolitan counterparts and were entitled to six months of paid leave for every three-year term of service as well as other kinds of benefits. The theme of financial ruin brought on by the need to maintain a middle- or even upper-class lifestyle in the colony is frequently found in Indochinese colonial novels. For a discussion of the subject, see my “Portrait of the Young Woman as a Coloniale.” 31. For detailed discussions of Chinese cultural activities in Cambodia and Vietnam, see Willmott 1970 and Tsai. For Chinese sources, see Zhou Shenggao and 華僑志: 越南 [Hua qiao zhi: Yuenan]. 32. These figures are taken from Feng and Poncins. 33. For discussions of these ethnic groups in Indochina, see Pierre Brocheux, Michael Vann, Gerald Hickey, Sons of the Mountains and Kingdom in the Morning Mist, and Oscar Salemink. Chapter 12

1. Relevant recent works that focus on the White Australia Policy and its ramifications for Australia’s contemporary socio-political context include those of John Fitzgerald, James Jupp, and Laksiri Jayasuriya et al. 2. The biggest exception to this is the asylum offered to mainland Chinese students in 1989 by then Prime Minster Bob Hawke in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square riots. 3. See Ien Ang 2001, Tseen Khoo 2003, Chapter 1.

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Notes to pp. 211–229 4. The “Blainey Debate” arose from comments made by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey that criticized the numbers of (Southeast) Asian migrants arriving in Australia. His argument was that these groups would erode Australia’s social cohesion and the migrants would take “Australian jobs.” These comments inflamed considerations about the desirability of Asians as immigrants and resulted in many public discussions. For a range of resources pertaining to this debate, search the Making Multicultural Australia site (http://multiculturalaustralia.edu. au). 5. See Tseen Khoo, Jen Tsen Kwok, and Chek Ling, “Chinese Voices”; also see Chek Ling’s work. 6. A study that will hopefully rectify this is Jen Tsen Kwok’s pending doctoral thesis (University of Queensland), titled “Chinese Australian Political Cultures and Subcultures in Multicultural Australia.” The dissertation focuses in particular on Chinese Australian politicians and political candidates. 7. Bjelke-Petersen was state premier for nineteen years (1968–87) and notorious for his corrupt political tactics (as exposed by the [Tony] Fitzgerald Inquiry into his government). Hanson and her One Nation Party rose to power in the mid-1990s on a platform of highly controversial anti-Aboriginal and anti-Asian rhetoric, and policies such as “abolishing multiculturalism” (One Nation Federal Policy document [accessed February 24, 2007]: http://www.onenation.com. au/Policy%20document.htm). Considered a minor party that espoused extremist policies, it ceased to be a federal party in 2005. 8. ABS, 4102.0 — Australian Social Trends, 2004 9. For example, see Kay J. Anderson 1991 and 1990. 10. See Raymond Evans 2004 and 1998. 11. This term was first coined by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey (see Blainey, “Drawing up a Balance Sheet of Our History”) and has since been embraced by conservative politicians and commentators alike when opposing “political correctness” and alternative histories. 12. The Queensland Chinese Forum is an association of local Chinese community groups in Brisbane. Being one of the longest surviving ethnic organizations in Queensland, it has a political profile with Queensland governments (state and local) and its fair share of leadership and managerial controversies. Chapter 13

1. The survey was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council for the project “British Chinese Online Identities,” (RES–000–22–1642). I acknowledge their support. I am extremely indebted to my co-researcher on the survey, Dr. Miri Song of the University of Kent at Canterbury, for securing the funding and working on the project. 2. F ro m 1 9 9 9 u n t i l J u l y 2 0 0 7 , t h e s i t e w a s a c c e s s i b l e v i a h t t p : / / w w w. britishbornchinese.org.uk and was known as the “British Born Chinese” site. The reason for the change to “British Chinese Online” was partly due to accessibility issues concerning the original domain name, but also resulted from a recognition that many young Chinese people in Britain had been born elsewhere, yet regarded themselves as British Chinese.

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277

Index

abjection, 33, 170, 175, 177–188, 255n4 Alley, Rewi, 99 America. See United States American Book Award, 142 American Dream, 20, 33, 125–137, 142 American Friends of the Chinese People in New York, 70 American Studies, 175 Anand, Mulk Raj, 99, 173, 143n1 Untouchable, 173 Anderson, Benedict, 28, 184 “imagined communities”, 28, 241 Anderson, Kay, 213, 214 Androutsopoulos, Jannis, 230 Ang, Ien, 32, 33, 34 “Beyond Transnational Nationalism”, 26, 31 On Not Speaking Chinese, 24, 30, 107 “To Be or Not to Be Chinese”, 106 “Together-In-Difference”, 23 Annam, 192, 194, 198, 201, 255n3 Appadurai, Arjun, 5, 24, 28 Modernity at Large, 5, 28 Apter, Emily, Translation Zone, 26 Asia, 63 Atherton, Queensland, 217 Auden, W. H., 96–97 Australasia, 19, 175 Australia, 20, 31, 175–177, 180–184, 187–188, 209–224 authenticity, xi–xii, 7, 12, 14, 16, 31, 33, 110, 155–156, 163–164, 170, 180, 214–216, 221, 233, 236, 241, 251n4, 251n1

Autumn’s Tale, An (Qiu Tian De Tong Hua), 113, 114, 117–119 Babel, 36–37 Bacon, Francis (1st Viscount St Alban), 49 Ba Jin, “Dog”, 77 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 29 Balcom, John, 40 Balkan, 4 Banque de l’Indochine, 193 Barney, Darin, 225 bebo (website), 234 Beijing, 9, 57, 233, 241 Benjamin, Walter, 35, 102 “The Task of the Translator”, 35–39, 129 Bennett, Tony, 212 Berman, Sandra, 34 Bert, Paul, Paul Bert au Tonkin, 199 Bethune, Norman, 66, 75 Bhabha, Homi, 25, 35, 142 “DissemiNation”, 28–32 The Location of Culture, 124, 129, 136 Bible, 153 Bisson, T. A., 74. See also China Today Bjelke-Petersen, Joh, 212, 258n7 Blainey, Geoffrey, 258n4 “Blainey Debate”, 211, 222 Blinda, Patricia, 131–132 Blunden, Edmund, 18, 90 Borges, Jorge Luis, x Boudet, Paul, 193, 195–196 Bourdieu, Pierre, 86, 185–186, 202

280

Index Distinction, 205 The Field of Cultural Production, 86 habitus, 202, 205, 257n26 Bradford, 213 Brieux, Eugène, 203, 206 Britain, 4, 45–49, 53–55, 61, 99, 226–242 British-born Chinese (BBC), 20, 38, 226, 225–242 British Chinese Online website, 228–242 British Council, 87 British Empire, 18, 49, 94 British Foreign Office, 56 Brouwer, Lenie, 225 Browder, Earl Russell, 76 Bruce, James (8th Earl of Elgin), 46 Buck, Pearl S., 162–163 The Good Earth, 164 Buckingham Palace, 53 Bulosan, Carlos, 70, 156 America Is in the Heart, 156 Bureau of National History, 59 Cairns, Queensland, 217 Cambodia, 192, 200, 201, 203, 207, 255n3, 256n14 Cambridge, University of, 86 Canton, 72, 87, 102, 170, 175 Cantonese, 89, 105, 109–118, 192, 203, 230 Cantonese Opera, 204 Canton International Red Cross Service Corps, 87 capitalism, 7–9, 12–13, 19, 27, 67, 85, 106–107, 110, 113, 115, 149 Castells, Manuel, 225 Cavanagh, Allison, 226 Central Plains syndrome, 107, 109 Chailley, Joseph, 199 Chailley-Bert (secretary-general of the Union coloniale française), 200 Chan, Fruit, Public Toilet, 183–184, 186 Chang, Carsun, 14–17 Chatterjee, Partha, 192 Cheah, Pheng, 24, 243n4 Chiang Kai-shek, 17, 167 Chi Ch’ao-ting, 74. See also China Today Chin, Frank, 127 China

mainland (as geographical entity), x, 8, 9, 10, 13–14, 16–17, 21, 66, 87 –89, 91, 99, 105–111, 113–116, 139, 167, 174, 178, 189, 210, 214, 226, 232 People’s Republic of (PRC), 32, 89, 92–93, 99, 178, 214 Republic of (ROC), 11, 54, 63, 64, 68–70, 72, 87, 88, 91, 94, 150, 167, 196 China Democratic Socialist Party (Taiwan), 17. See also Rebirth China Forum, 63, 65, 69–74, 76. See also Isaacs, Harold China Journal of Arts and Sciences, The, 76 China Today, 65, 70, 74–76. See also American Friends of the Chinese People in New York Chinatown, 75, 139, 209, 228 in Brisbane, Queensland, 20, 34, 209–224 in London, 239–241 in New York, 114, 117, 156, 170, 215 in San Francisco, 131–133 in Sydney, 215 Chinese Australian Historical Association, 220 Chinese Bureau of the American Communist Party, 74 Chinese Leftist Writers’ League, 65, 71, 74 Chinese New Year, 203, 216, 218 Chivas-Baron, Clotilde, La Femme française aux colonies, 197 Cholon, 204 Chow, Rey, 7, 30, 173–174 “Foreword”, 18 “Introduction: On Chineseness”, 114 Primitive Passions, 35 Protestant Ethnic, 223 Writing Diaspora, 7, 23, 31, 64 Christianity, 51, 140, 147–148, 151–154, 163, 166–168 Christiansen, Flemming, Chinatown, Europe, 213 Chu, Louis, Eat a Bowl of Tea, 139, 155–156, 169–170 Chun, Allen, 106, 119 Cixi, Empress Dowager, 58 Clark, Ken, 231

Index Clavell, James Noble House, 90 Taipan, 90 Clifford, James, 24, 118 “Diasporas”, 25 “Traveling Cultures”, 24 Coates, Austin, 18 Cochinchina, 194, 199–200, 255n3 Cold War, x, 14, 17–18, 33, 85–103, 127, 157, 161, 167 Colindale (North West London), 240 Collins, E. G., 75 colonialism, 7, 68, 90, 100, 191 British, 86, 91, 93, 98, 99, 144 French, 20, 38, 191–207 Commonwealth Poetry Prize, 141 Communism in America, 66, 70, 76, 86 in China, 14, 16–17, 19, 66, 70–71, 76, 79, 86, 88, 99, 102, 106, 108–109, 133, 196 Communist International, 65 Comrades: Almost a Love Story (Tian Mimi), 105, 113–114 Confucius, 11, 98, 243n8 Confucianism, x, 8, 9, 10–19, 27, 49, 85 Confucius Institutes, 60, 247n13 New Confucianism (in 1950s Hong Kong), 13–19, 85 Conrad, Joseph, 142 Corsica, 207 cosmopolitanism, ix, 9, 23–27, 41, 96, 107, 149, 209, 214, 224 Craik, Jennifer, 218 Cuba, 178 Cullen, Jim, 125–126 “Cultural China”, 8, 12, 174. See also Tu Wei-ming Cultural Revolution, 60 Curthoys, Ann, 211 Darra (Brisbane), 216, 221 Da Shan, 66–67 Dawe, W. Carlton, Yellow and White, 90 Deleuze, Gilles, 145 Anti-Oedipus, 154 A Thousand Plateaus, 145 de Man, Paul, 129 Democratic Criticism, 17

Denning, Michael, 66 Derrida, Jacques, 30, 37, 186–187 Given Time, 186 deterritorialization, 4, 9, 142, 148–149 diaspora, 3–21, 40–41, 154 African, 5, 66 Afro-Caribbean, 4 Chinese, 5–21, 23–26, 30–3, 85, 105–107, 114, 118–119, 139–142, 148, 173–175, 178–179, 189, 203, 205, 221, 225, 227, 233 (French) “imperial diaspora”, 191 Indian, 23, 26 Dim Sum (website), 229–242 Dingwaney, Anuradha, 35 Dirlik, Arif, 13–15 “Confucius in the Borderlands”, 13–14 Doumer, Paul, 195, 200 Dragon Boat Festival, 56, 203 Drinkwater, Stephen, 231 Dubreuil, R., 194, 196, 198 Duras, Marguerite, The Lover, 197 Eastern Europe, 4, 69 Eastern Horizon, 91–92, 99–100 Eastern Publishing House, (Shanghai), 76 East Liberty (Pennsylvania), 149 Eaton, Winnifred. See Watanna, Onoto Edwards, Brent, 66 Ee Tiang Hong, 99 Eitel, E. J., Europe in China, 90 Electra complex, 145 Elgin, Lord. See Bruce, James (8th Earl of Elgin) Eliot, T. S., 94, 142 “embedded citizenship”, 9–10. See also Ong, Aihwa; “flexible citizenship” England. See Britain Ericksen, Thomas, 225 exile, 13–19, 28, 85, 89, 98, 105, 109, 142, 149, 163, 166 Fang Yanfen, 204 Fanon, Frantz, 145, 191 Black Skin, White Masks, 145, 197 Far Eastern Magazine, 76 fascism, 16 anti-fascism, 75, 149n14

281

282

Index Feng Feng, Three Decades in Saigon, 196 Feng Keng, 71 First Opium War, 46, 51 “flexible citizenship”, 9–10, 107, 149 See also Ong, Aihwa; “embedded citizenship” Fortitude Valley. See Queensland (Australia): Chinese Museum of Foucault, Michel, x, 37, 154 Les mots et les choses, x France, 54, 58, 101–102, 198–200, 206 François, Auguste, 204 French Concession (Shanghai), 71 Freud, Anna, 94 Freud, Sigmund, 123, 140 on dreams, 129 on hysteria, 188 the uncanny, 29 Frodsham, J. D., 59 Frow, John, 185–186 Fu, Poshek, 107 Full Moon in New York (Ren Zai Niuye), 113–117, 119 Gallieni, General, 202 Gallipoli, 182 Gaonkar, Dilip, 64 geography, 8, 10, 13, 14, 64, 99, 107, 115, 116, 125–126, 157, 167, 177, 184, 225, 227–229, 239–241 Gia-Long (Vietnamese emperor), 192 Gibbs, Donald, A Bibliography of Studies and Translations, 63 Gilroy, Paul, 4–5 The Black Atlantic, 4, 25 “Multiculture”, 234 There Ain’t No Black, 4 Gladstone, William, 47 globalization, 3, 15, 23, 27, 31, 34, 38, 40, 46, 66, 140, 209 Goh, Robbie, Asian Diasporas, 26, 40 Google Earth (website), 235, 241 Granich, Grace, and Manny Granich, 76 Gras, Edmond, 204 Great Britain. See Britain “Greater China”, 8 Greatest Civil War on Earth, The (Nan Bei He), 107–108, 110–113 Greatest Wedding on Earth, The (Nan Bei Yi Jia Qin), 107, 110–113

Green, E. P., 75 Guadalupe, 207 Guangdong Province, 47, 87, 178 Guangxu Emperor, 57–59 Guattari, Félix Anti-Oedipus, 154 A Thousand Plateaus, 145 Guo Moruo, 71 Guo Songtao, 32, 38, 45–61 habitus, 87, 96, 98, 202, 203, 205, 257n26 Hainan, Hainanese, 192, 203 Haiphong, 198 Hakka, 192, 203, 230 Halfway Down (Ban Xialiu Shehui), 107, 109–110, 113 Hall, Stuart, 4–5, 31 “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, 4, 24, 232 “Ethnicity”, 123 Hanlin Academy (Peking), 53 Hanoi, 193, 198, 202, 203 Hanson, Pauline, 212, 222. See also “One Nation Party” Han Suyin, 99 Hantu Maligang, 187 Harrap, George G., 67 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. See Rowling, J. K. Harvey, David, 27 Hebei Province, 72 Heilman, Robert B., 126 Herberton (Queensland), 217 Hocquard, Dr., 193–195, 198 Hokkien, 143, 192, 203 Holden, Philip, 25–26, 28, 40 Hollywood, 144 home, xii, 6, 9, 14, 15, 19, 23, 25, 29, 33, 39, 40, 47, 81, 85, 89, 100, 106–108, 116, 126, 128, 130–131, 133–134, 140, 142, 173–174, 191, 200, 225, 233, 236–237, 241 “homeland”. See home Hong Kong, 6–8, 10–19, 32–33, 38, 47, 85–103, 105–119, 139, 149, 174–175, 178, 186, 196, 204, 210, 211, 228, 230, 233, 235–238, 241 colonial, 10–19, 33, 47, 85–87, 91, 103, 105–119, 228 cultural production in 1950s, 85–103

Index Hong Kong cinema, 105–119 Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, 87 postcolonial, 103 Housman, A. E., 68 Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki, Farewell to Manzanar, 158, 159, 170 Huang Jici, 89 huaren (website), 8, 9, 20, 34, 227 Hughes, Langston, 75 Hugo, Victor, Les Misérables, 188 Hunan Province, 46, 53 Huxley, T. H., 50 Ethics and Evolution, 54, 56, 57 Hu Yeping, 71 Hwang, David Henry, 155–156 hybridity, 4, 5, 8, 9, 24, 31–32, 113, 119, 124, 139, 141–144, 153 hybridization. See hybridity ideology, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 19, 32, 60, 65, 68, 79, 80, 86, 89–92, 98, 100, 103, 113, 124, 126–128, 136, 139, 141, 144, 147–150, 152, 157, 161, 168 Ignacio, Emily, 225, 236 immigration, 23, 114, 123, 125, 127, 128, 139, 150, 158, 160, 162, 175, 184, 187, 198, 200, 202, 209, 210, 211, 217, 218, 228, 231, 236 Immigration Reform Act (US, 1965), 184 Immigration Restriction Act (Australia, 1901), 210, 217 imperialism, 7, 15, 17, 61, 67, 73, 75, 79, 91, 93, 96, 99, 102, 144, 168, 191, 192, 206 India, 23, 26, 144, 147, 158–159, 207 Indochina, 20, 34, 38, 191–207 Indonesia, 31, 139–140, 147–150, 152 Innisfail (Queensland), 217 internationalism, 11, 13, 32–33, 63–81, 85–103, 250n16 International Settlement (Shanghai), 78 International Society for Medical Service in South China, 87 Ip, David, 212, 223–224 Isaacs, Harold, 38, 70, 72–73 Re-Encounters in China, 73. See also China Forum Isherwood, Christopher, 96 Ishigaki, Eitaro, 75

Jacobs, Carol, 124 Jaffe, Philip J., 74. See also China Today Jakarta, 149 Jakobson, Roman, 129 James, Henry, 142 Jameson, Fredric, 70 Japan, 157, 162, 165, 157, 231, 236 Japanese American writing, 20, 33, 38, 155–171, 254n10 Jefferson, Thomas, 164 Jehol, 46 Jen, Gish, 33 Typical American, 123–137 Johnson, Barbara, 35, 38 Joleaud-Barral, J. de Saint-Maurice, 198 Joyce, James, 142 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 94 Kaizo, 78, 80 Karlsson, Lena, 232, 236 Keith, Michael, 209–210 Khmer, 192–193 Kim, Elaine, 128 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 127, 155, 159–160, 169, 187 China Men, 187 The Woman Warrior, 159–160, 171 Kipling, Rudyard, 192 Korea, 88 Korean War, 93, 24n17, 250n12 Kristeva, Julia, 177, 179–185 Kuah-Pearce, Khun Eng, 227, 241 Ku Hung Ming, 52–53 Kulperger, Shelley, 213. See also Widarsito, Sinta Kuomintang (KMT), 16–17, 88–89, 244nn13–14, 250n5. See also Chiang Kai-shek Kwok, Jen Tsen, 219 Lacan, Jacques, 129, 182 Laguerre, Michel, 213 Lai, Him Mark, 75 Lake District, 239 Lam, Tri, 203 The Chronicle of an Overseas Chinese Family, 199 language bilingualism, 71–74, 112, 117, 231

283

284

Index English, 11, 14, 32, 38, 47, 49, 51, 53, 62–81, 86–87, 89–99, 101, 115, 118, 143–144, 150, 162– 164, 176, 230, 232, 234, 236 Japanese, 64, 69, 78, 80 Putonghua, xii, 64, 89, 105, 108–109, 111–113, 115–116, 230 Russian, 64 See also Canton: Cantonese Laos, 192, 255n3 La Réunion, 207 Lau, Evelyn, Runaway, 180 Lazaroo, Simone, The World Waiting to Be Made, 187–188 Lee, Anthony W., Picturing Chinatown, 213 Lee, C. Y., The Flower Drum Song, 155–156, 253n2 Lee, Li-Young, 33 Book of My Nights, 147 The City in Which I Love You, 147 Rose, 147 The Winged Seed, 33, 139–140, 147–154 Lee, Rachel C., 134, 226 Leeds, University of, 99 Lee Kuan Yew, 8 Lefevere, André, 38–39 Legge, James, 49–50 Leong, Leonie, 220–223 Leong, Russell, Asian American Sexualities, 139 Lerrigo, Marion Olive, 162. See also Matsumoto, Toru Lewis, Wyndham, 94 Li, David Leiwei, Imagining the Nation, 184–185 Li, Joaquin, 178–180, 189 Liang Qichao, 54 Life and Letters Today, 63 Li Hongzhang, 48, 50, 53, 54, 59 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, 33, 128, 130–132, 252n4 Among the White Moonfaces, 33, 139–147 Lim Boon Keng, 10–13, 19, 92 Lin, Jan, 215 Ling, Jingqi, 128 Lin Yutang, 33, 162–169 Moment in Peking, 168, 169 My Country and My People, 162, 166

Liu, Lydia, 25, 28, 39 Liu Pengju, 99. See also Eastern Horizon Liu Xihong, 51, 53 Livingstone, Ken, 240 Locke, John, 185 London, 45–61, 63, 87, 92–94, 101, 228, 229, 233–234, 238–241 Los Angeles, 175 Low, Peter, 220–223 Lowe, Lisa, 128, 139 Lowe, Pardee, 75 Father and Glorious Descendant, 170 Lu, Sheldon, 114 Lunar New Year. See Chinese New Year Lu Xun, 10–13, 19, 38, 63, 65, 69–80, 91, 92 “I Want to Fool People”, 78 “Sino-Soviet Relations”, 72–73 “Written in Deep Night”, 78 Macau, 149 Mainland China. See China: mainland Mak, Anna-Lisa, 215 Malacca, 142 Malaya, 100, 143–145 government of, 100 Malaysia, 139–143, 174, 211 Mallapragada, Madhavi, 236 Manchester, 213 Manchuria, 77, 162 Manchu rulers, 97, 257n22 Manicheanism, 191–193, 200, 206–207 “Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture, A”. See “Manifesto to the World on Chinese Culture, A” “Manifesto to the World on Chinese Culture, A”, 14–19, 85 Martinique, 207 Mao Dun, 32, 65, 68, 71, 74, 80 Mao Zedong, 57, 65 Ma Shizeng, 204 Matsumoto, Toru, 33, 162–169 A Brother Is a Stranger, 162–168 The Seven Stars, 168, 169 Maugham, William Somerset, The Painted Veil, 90 McCarthyism, 127 McDonald’s, 189 Melbourne, 212

Index Métin, Albert, 194 métis. See miscegenation Miami, 178 Mid-Autumn Festival, 109, 203, 216 migration. See immigration mimicry, 124, 128, 130, 132–133, 136 Ming dynasty, 67 Minh-huongs, 200–202 Minh-Mang (Vietnamese emperor), 201 miscegenation, 199–202 Mitra, Ananda, 225 Mok, Jeannie, 220–223 Montesquieu, Baron de (Charles-Louis de Secondat), The Spirit of the Laws, 55 Moon Festival. See Mid-Autumn Festival Mou Zongsan, 14, 17 Mozi, 51 multiculturalism, 24, 60, 67–69, 127–128, 153, 181–182, 191, 210–214, 220, 223, 225, 240 Murphy, James, 66 MySpace, 234 Nairn, Tom, 4 Nakamura, Lisa, 226, 230 Nanjing, Treaty of, 46 Nelson, Cary, 66 Netherlands, The, 31 New Evening Post (Xinwanbao), 99 New Masses, 65, 71 Newton, Isaac, 55 New York, 33, 38, 63, 70, 74–75, 95, 105, 11–118, 156, 166, 170, 215 Ng, Lillian, Silver Sister, 175–178, 181–182, 184, 188–189 Ng, Maria, 26, 28, 40 Ng Ho, 109 Ngg wa Thiong’o, 93 Nunes, Mark, 226 Okada, John, No-No Boy, 156, 167, 170 Olympic Games, 21, 233 One Inch Punch (website), 235 “One Nation Party”, 211, 222, 258n7 Ong, Aihwa, 7–10, 12, 17, 20, 25, 27–31, 33, 40, 107 “Chinese Modernities” 8, 13, 28 “Cyberpublics”, 10, 226, 227, 233 Flexible Citizenship, 9, 24, 27, 40 “Flexible Citizenship”, 24, 31, 149

Ungrounded Empires (with Donald M. Nonini), 7, 225 See also “embedded citizenship”; “flexible citizenship” open-door policy, 46 Orientalism, x, 9, 31, 61, 90, 155–156, 158, 162, 170, 171, 173, 176, 178, 184, 188, 189, 214, 236 Overseas Chinese Network (website), 238 Owen, Diana, 240 Oxford, University of, 49 Pacific Rim, 161 Pan, Lynn, 225 Parham, Angel, 225 Paris, 86, 94, 102, 203 Parker, David, 225, 226, 229, 230, 238 Parliament, British, 48, 240 Patton, Cindy, 140 Pearl Harbour, 158, 166 Pell, Mike, 75 People’s Tribune, 63 Peranakans, 140, 142–143. See also Straits-born Chinese Perara, Suvendrini, 211 Petitjean-Roget, Captain, 195 Poetry, 93 Polo, Marco, x, 101 Poncins, Gontran de, 204–205 Pondichéry, 207 Popular Front, 66 postcolonialism, 7, 33, 142, 149, 226 as theory, 25–26, 28–29, 41, 100, 141, 145, 191 Poster, Mark, 227, 241 Pound, Ezra, 69, 93–94, 142 “In a Station of the Metro”, 69 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 64 Pratt, Marie Louise, Imperial Eyes, 26 PRC. See China, People’s Republic of Public Culture, 64 Pugliese, Joseph, 211 Putnam, Robert, 237, 238 Qing dynasty, 11, 32, 46–47, 54, 56–57, 196 Qing-Ming, 203 Queensland (Australia), 209–224 Chinese Museum of, 209, 218–223 Qu Yuan, 56

285

286

Index Rabinowitz, Paula, 66 race, 4, 25, 41, 66, 136, 142, 147, 185, 192, 200, 202, 203, 205, 210, 237 racism, 114, 132, 143, 147, 211, 218, 227, 231, 241 Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, 129 Rebirth, 17 Robbins, Bruce, 24 Robequain, Charles, 206 ROC. See China, Republic of Rodker, John, 93–94 Ro Shi, 71 Rowling, J. K., 235 Royal Naval College, Greenwich, 54–56 Said, Edward, 15 Saigon, 195, 202–204 Sambuc, Henri, 201 Sánchez-Eppler, Benigno, 140 San Francisco, 75, 131–133 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 35, 123, 129 Seattle, 149, 170 Second Opium War, 46, 246n2 self-orientalizing, 9, 236 Senggelinqin, General, 46 Seyhan, Azade, 30 Shang dynasty, 50 Shanghai, 32, 57, 63, 66–68, 70–78, 87, 95, 130, 134, 238, 241 as “Hollywood of the East”, 108 Shen Bao, 67 Shi, Shu-mei, 68, 90 Shi, Yu, 226 Shikaji, 80 Short Story Monthly, The, 73 Siapera, Eugenia, 225 Sichuan, University of, 99 Simmel, George, 236–237, 240 Singapore, 8, 13, 47, 139, 141, 145, 149, 174, 175, 180, 188, 211 Sino-British Club, 87, 89 Sino-Japanese friendship, 79–80 War, 56, 106, 160, 162, 165 Smedley, Agnes, 38, 65, 71 Snow, Edgar, 32, 38, 66–68, 76 Living China, 67 Red Star over China, 66 Société françaises d’émigration des femmes, La, 200, 202

Sone, Monica, Nisei Daughter, 170 Song, Miri, 226, 238 Song dynasty, 52 Southampton, 45 Southeast Asia, 75, 175, 191, 205, 211, 222 South Korea, 8 Spurr, David, 179 Stalin, Joseph, 65, 99 Stallybrass, Peter, 188 stereotype, 111–112, 117, 157, 159, 228, 234 Storace, Patricia, 130, 133 Straits-born Chinese. See Peranakans Sturken, Marita, 222 Sturrock, John, 37, 39, 40 Su, Karen, 127 Sukarno (first president of Indonesia), 149 Sunnybank (Brisbane), 213, 216, 221, 223 Sunshine, 235 Sun Yat-sen, 65 Sun Yat-sen, Madame (Soong Qingling), 76, 87 Sydney, 175, 177, 183, 212, 215 Sze Ming-ting, 72 Taiwan, 8, 13, 16, 17, 89, 115–116, 139, 210, 211 Ta Kung Pao, 99 Tan, Amy, 127, 155 Tanabe, Fumio, 75 Tang dynasty, 69, 102 Tang Junyi, 14, 17 Tan Kah Kee, 11 Tan See-kam, 108, 109 Taoism, 164 Tay, William, 88, 91 Teo, Hsu-ming, 180–183, 190 Teo, Stephen, 108 Teochiu, 192, 199, 203, 204 Teoh, Leong, 220–223 Terminal Island, 158 Tiananmen Square incident, 5 Tien Chun (Xiao Jun), 77 T’ien Hsia, 63, 70, 76 Times, The, 47, 50, 60–61 Tonkin, 194, 198–199 tourism, 173–174, 176, 186, 189, 209, 213, 215–216, 218, 223, 236

Index translation, 7, 33, 34–40, 41, 55–57, 63–81, 85, 88, 91, 94, 100, 124, 128–129 transnationalism, ix, 7–9, 23–41, 63–67, 73–76, 78–81, 107, 128, 140, 149, 174–175, 225, 227 Trotsky, Leon, 65 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 126 Turner, Victor, 227 Tu Wei-ming, 9, 10, 12, 13, 174 The Living Tree, 9, 25 Uchiyama, 80 United States, x, 17, 19, 27, 33, 67, 74, 75, 76, 88, 139, 142, 148, 149, 150, 155, 156, 161, 162, 163, 167, 178, 184, 231 Urry, John, 213 Venuti, Lawrence, 34–35 “Translation as Cultural Politics”, 39 “The Translator’s Invisibility”, 34–35 The Translator’s Invisibility, 34–35 Vermeren, Henri, 193 Vietnam, 20, 182, 192–194, 199, 201–204, 207 Voice of China, 69, 70, 76–80 Wang, Ling-chi, 167 Wang Chi-chen, 76 Wang Gungwu, 10, 12 “Among Non-Chinese”, 24, 25 “Lu Xun”, 10, 12 Watanna, Onoto [i.e. Winnifred Eaton], Miss Numé of Japan, 156 Watson, James L., 189 Wei Djao, 178 White, Allon, 188 “White Australia Policy”. See Immigration Restriction Act “White Man’s Burden”, 191, 192, 206 Widarsito, Sinta, 213. See also Kulperger, Shelley Williams, Raymond, 16, 20, 124 Marxism and Literature, 16, 124 Wong, Jade Snow, 33, 155 Fifth Chinese Daughter, 123–137, 170 Wong, Loong, 226 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, 126, 226 Wong, Shawn, 26, 40, 127

Wong, Shelley, 128 Wong Man, 85–103 Between Two Worlds, 94–98 “Intimate Travel Notes”, 99–102 Poems from China, 91–94 Wong Phui Nam, 99 World War II, 88, 161–163, 165, 168, 233 Wu, Mark, 235 Xanga, 234 Xia dynasty, 50 Xiamen (Amoy), 10, 12 Xiamen, University of, 11 Xue Juexian, 204 Xu Fuguan, 14, 17 Yan’an, 66 Yan Fu, 32, 38, 50–57 Yang, Guobin, 226, 227 Yellow Emperor, 150, 153 yellow peril, 157, 165 Ye Shengtao, 71 Yin Fu, 71, 74 Young, Robert, 31 YouTube (website), 234 Yu, Henry, 175 Yuan Ming Yuan, 46 Yuan Shih-k’ai, 150 Yu Dafu, 32, 68, 71 Yuelu Academy, 46 Zappala, Gianni, 212 Zeng Jize (Marquis Tseng), 51, 58 Zhang, Benzi, 173 Zhang Junmai. See Chang, Carsun Zhang Tianyi, 74 Zhang Zhidong, x, 32, 50, 59 Zhang Zimu, Yinghai lun (On Foreign Nations), 50–51 Zhao Xifeng, Stories of Hong Kong, 90 Zhao Zifan, 109 Zhejian Province, 46 Zhou dynasty, 50 Zhu Xi, 46 Zongli yamen (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), 47

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