The semblance of identity: aesthetic mediation in Asian American literature 9780804783705, 9780804778701

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page xi)
Introduction: The Post-Identity Condition (page 1)
1. The Strange Smell of Truth: Ethnicity, Translation, and Realism in the Cold War Writings of Eileen Chang (page 23)
2. The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism (page 48)
3. Sound and the Subject in The Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey (page 73)
4. Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in A Gesture Life (page 98)
5. Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison (page 121)
Conclusion: The Difference Asian America Makes (page 145)
Notes (page 155)
Works Cited (page 173)
Index (page 187)

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The Semblance of Identity

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ASIAN AMERICA A series edited by Gordon H. Chang The increasing size and diversity of the Asian American population, its growing significance in American society and culture, and the expanded appreciation, both popular and scholarly, of the importance of Asian Americans in the country’s present and past—all these developments have converged to stimulate wide interest in scholarly work on topics related to the Asian American experience. The general recognition of the pivotal role that race and ethnicity have played in American life, and in relations between the United States and other countries, has also fostered the heightened attention. Although Asian Americans were a subject of serious inquiry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were subsequently ignored by the mainstream scholarly community for several decades. In recent years, however, this neglect has ended, with an increasing number of writers examining a good many aspects of Asian American life and culture. Moreover, many students of American society are recognizing that the study of issues related to Asian America speak to, and may be essential for, many current discussions on the part of the informed public and various scholarly communities. The Stanford series on Asian America seeks to address these interests. The series will include works from the humanities and social sciences, including history, anthropology, political science, American studies, law, literary criticism, sociology, and interdisciplinary and policy studies. A full list of titles in the Asian America series can be found online at www.sup.org/asianamerica.

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The Semblance of Identity AESTHETIC MEDIATION IN ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Christopher Lee

SETANE ORD UNTY BRS TEY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

(c) 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved.

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

Published with the assistance of the Edgar M. Kahn Memorial Fund. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lee, Christopher (Christopher Ming), author. The semblance of identity : aesthetic mediation in Asian American literature / Christopher Lee. pages cm.—(Asian America) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-7870-1 (cloth) 1. American literature—Asian American authors—History and

criticism. 2. American literature—zoth century—History and criticism. 3. Asian Americans in literature. 4. Ethnicity in literature. 5. Literature—Aesthetics. I. Title. II. Series: Asian America. PS153.A84L437 2012

810.9'895073—dc23 2011036782 Typeset by Westchester Book Composition in Adobe Garamond, 11/14

(c) 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved.

for my parents, Peter M. and Esther Y. Lee and my grandmother, Po Han Lee

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Contents

Acknowledgments xi Introduction: The Post-Identity Condition I 1. ‘The Strange Smell of Truth: Ethnicity, Translation, and Realism in the Cold War

Writings of Eileen Chang 23

2. The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism 48 3. Sound and the Subject in 7he Woman Warrior

and Tripmaster Monkey 7a

in A Gesture Life 98

4. Form Giving and the Remains of Identity

5. Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 121 Conclusion: The Difference Asian America Makes 145

Notes 155 Works Cited 173 Index 187

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Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been an extended exercise in receiving the generosity of teachers, mentors, colleagues, and friends. My greatest debt is to Rey

Chow, who has been a model of intellectual rigor, ethical commitment, and good humor; her challenging and generous questions sowed the seeds of this project. Daniel Kim taught me the tools of scholarship—and how to tie a half-Windsor properly. At Brown University, Madhu Dubey, Olakunle George, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Bob Lee, Josefina Saldanha, Rose Subotnik, and Leonard Tennenhouse were formative teachers and mentors. For their

camaraderie through many winters in Providence, I thank Manu Chander, Jim Gatewood, Yogita Goyal, Karen Inouye, Jake Leland, Cheryl Locke, Asha Nadkarni, Zak Sitter, and Gena Zuroski. Work on this book began in earnest during a year spent at the University of Illinois, Urbana—Champaign. I would like to thank Kent Ono, then director of the Asian American Studies program, and the staff, especially Mary Ellerbe and Pia Sengsavanh, for providing a precious environment in which to think and write. For their warm welcome and generous engagement, I am grateful to Poshek Fu, Susan Koshy, Esther Kim Lee, Martin Manalansan, Junaid Rana, Michael Rothberg, and Gary Xu. My fondest memories of Chambana involve long conversations and delicious meals with Mike Masatsugu and Fiona Ngo, as well as Yutian Wong, Bruce Manning, Erin O’Brien, and Wiebke Ipsen, whose absence continues to be felt. A fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada provided valuable writing time before I returned to teaching. XI

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xii Acknowledgments The Department of English at the University of British Columbia welcomed a former student back as a colleague. As department Heads, Gernot Wieland, Dennis Danielson, and Stephen Guy-Bray have been models of integrity. My life at UBC is greatly enriched by Miranda Burgess, Jennifer Chun, Glenn Deer, Alex Dick, Margery Fee, Adam Frank, Renisa Mawani,

Laura Moss, and Lorraine Weir. I am grateful to Sneja Gunew and Tim Cheek for steadfastly supporting junior faculty. I am fortunate to count myself a colleague of the incomparable Larissa Lai, and Mary Chapman’s open door and wisdom have saved me on many occasions. I thank Gu Xiong for generously providing his artwork for the cover of this book. Henry Yu has been an exemplary mentor, colleague, and friend; I have lost track of how I have benefited from his generosity. My students provided many occasions to test my ideas and learn from theirs. Outside of UBC, the wit and common sense of Christine Kim make academic life in Vancouver that much better.

I respectfully thank Russell Leong and Donald Goellnicht for crucial encouragement during the early stages of this project. Audiences at Cornell University, National Taiwan Normal University, and the Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies and the Centre for Chinese Studies at UBC provided valuable feedback. For commenting on drafts or generously sharing

from their own work, I thank Tim Bewes, Iyko Day, Weihsin Gui, Rob Ho, Hsiu-chuan Lee, Te-hsing Shan, and reviewers at the Journal of Asian American Studies and Modern Fiction Studies. My work is sustained by ongoing conversations with Guy Beauregard, Yu-fang Cho, Iyko Day, Paul Lai,

Lisa Mar, Tania Roy, Stephen Sohn, and Andy Chih-ming Wang. Words cannot express my gratitude to Asha Nadkarni, who, since our first seminar in graduate school, has been my most enabling interlocutor and reader; every page of this book is better because of her (all faults are mine of course). As my research assistants, Maia Joseph and Szu Shen graciously tolerated my

haphazard record keeping and last-minute requests. I acknowledge the funding support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Brown University Graduate School, and the Faculty of Arts at UBC. I am grateful to Stacy Wagner, my editor at Stanford University Press, for patiently shepherding this book to completion. I thank Gordon Chang for his support and Jessica Walsh, John Feneron, John Donohue, and Karen Fisher for their stellar efforts in preparing this manuscript for publi-

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Acknowledgments xiii cation. The rigorous feedback, criticism, and encouragement of the anonymous reviewers greatly improved this manuscript. An early version of Chapter I was published as “Rethinking Realisms through the Writings of Eileen Chang,” Amerasia Journal 32.3 (2006): 59-77. A version of Chapter 4 and portions of the Introduction were published as “Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in A Gesture Life,’ Journal of Asian American Studies 14.1 (2011): 95-116. Copyright © 2011 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Portions of the Introduction and Conclusion first appeared in “Asian American Literature and the Resistances of Theory,” Modern Fiction Studies 56.1 (2010): 19-39. Copyright © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Without the encouragement of Dorothy Fujita-Rony, Imogene Lim, and the late Edgar Wickberg, I would not have gone to graduate school. Countless meals with Hayne Wai over the years have been indispensable for my well-being. Across different time zones, Wei Ying Wong continues to gently humor my obsessions, while closer to home the friendships of Ray Chin, Rob Ho, Tracy Tang, Steve Moss, and Emmanuel Ndabarushimana make life far more meaningful than a mere book. Michelle Tan got me through the final stretch. Finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my family. My sister, Janice Lee, and Ben Steinberg know better than to take me seriously. My parents, Peter and Esther Lee, have lived with this book for as long as I have and I could not have finished it without their love, support, and prayers. When I reflect on the unlikely paths that led me to study

literature, I trace their beginning to my grandmother, Po Han Lee, who taught me classical Chinese poetry when I was a toddler. Her love has made

me who I am and it is to her, as well as to my parents, that this book is dedicated.

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The Semblance of Identity

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Introduction The Post-Identity Condition

Asian American Studies traces its origins to radical social movements that

emerged in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. Invented by scholar-activist Yuji Ichioka at the University of California, Berkeley in 1968, “Asian America” provided a sense of political and cultural identity for Asians in the United States by appealing to shared histories and experiences of ra-

cialization.' Although Asian America has undergone tremendous growth since its inception and currently includes a wide spectrum of academic, cultural, political, community, and economic formations, its relevance, coherence, and political efficacy have been extensively questioned. These challenges have undoubtedly been prompted by demographic consider-

ations, especially in light of changes in immigration policy. As longestablished Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino American communities experienced renewed growth in the wake of the 1965 Immigration Act, the emergence

of newer communities, from Southeast Asian refugees to well-educated professionals from South Asia, greatly expanded the diversity of Asian America.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the fledging field of Asian American Studies repeatedly contended with this ever-increasing internal diversity. Considerable efforts have been directed toward reconfiguring Asian America into a more pluralistic rubric that can be inclusive of, and responsive to, undernoticed groups and constituencies. These efforts, along with those of feminist and queer scholars, have interrogated the constituting assumptions of the field. But as Susan Koshy incisively points out, a continuing I

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2 Introduction investment in the referential capacity of Asian America has had the effect of deferring its decisive emergence to an unspecified future in which “everyone has been included [and] the representational truth of the rubric will be made manifest” (“Fiction” 480). What remains to be theorized is how this referential logic gets attached to and, as I will argue below, derives from an

identitarian category that was founded as much on political commitment as demographic realities. While demographic shifts continue to shape debates about Asian American culture and politics, the focus of this book is the theoretical logic of this category, a topic that necessitates a return to the fiercely contested notion of identity. A rich and multifaceted concept that permeates practically all aspects of

contemporary life, identity is used in so many discourses that it often becomes slippery and vague. As the students in an Asian American literature class I taught several years ago observed, identity can refer to the predetermined categories through which we make sense of our social status (gender and race, for example) as well as the unique traits and characteristics that define every individual (as in “my own identity”). Linda Martin Alcoff clarifies this distinction by defining “identity” as “how we are socially located in public, what is on our identification papers, how we must identify ourselves on Census and application forms and the everyday interpolations of social interaction” (92). By contrast, “subjectivity” denotes “who we understand ourselves to be, how we experience being ourselves, and the range of reflec-

tive and other activities that can be included under the rubric of our ‘agency ” (93; emphasis in original). Although this study does not follow Alcoff’s precise delineation, it adopts a similar framework by treating identity as a means to conceptualize the relationship between an individual and the historical, cultural, and social conditions that situate his or her life circumstances. The construction and

circulation of identities is inseparable from the distribution of economic and social resources, from questions of power and domination that are sedimented in the very labels and categories that we use. For this reason, Asian American Studies has been engaged from its inception with identity politics, a concern rooted in its activist origins. Although identity politics has become synonymous for many with the struggles of minority and marginalized groups for recognition and equality, it is necessary at the outset to understand it in a more general sense, as a pervasive dimension of modern social thought and practice that anchors the political to the formation and

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Introduction 3 promotion of, and/or opposition to, identitarian categories and structures. Alcoff contends that identity politics involves “choosing one’s identity as a member of one or more groups as a political point of departure,” as the starting point for establishing communities and collectivities (147). Identity politics is inescapable for societies in which categories of race, ethnicity, gender, and so on determine the privileges of some and the domination of others. In contemporary North America, identity politics has been widely criticized for imposing reductive scripts on individuals and for being mired in counterproductive, and often oppressive, debates over authenticity. As many critics have charged, rigid understandings of identity are often essentialist, marked, Diana Fuss writes, by an insistent “belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties that define the ‘whatness’ of a given identity” (xi). Kandice Chuh extends this line of critique when she argues that identity is a teleological narrative as used in a politics of identity, one that posits a common origin and looks toward a common destiny. It is in that sense assimilative, as difference must be elided to foreground resemblance. Another way to understand that elision is to recognize it as constituting the amnesia necessary to sustain a sense of stable identity. (/magine 33)

Given its anti-racist commitments, Asian American Studies has productively deployed the critique of essentialism in order to expose the pernicious logic of long-standing stereotypes and other racializing discourses.? What

is important for the present discussion, however, is how Asian American identity, which was intended to be an oppositional alternative to such stereotypes, has itself been accused of having essentialist tendencies even by those who are otherwise sympathetic to its political commitments. The conundrum of identity politics has arguably been the most intensely debated topic in the field. This book is indebted to, and builds on, this extensive body of scholarship and criticism in order to consider how the critique of identity politics has reconfigured the parameters of Asian American Studies. Less an argument for or against identity and identity politics, its aim is to explore the consequences of the “post-identity” turn. My investigation proceeds by tracing the persistence of a theoretical figure that I call the “idealized critical subject,” which operates throughout Asian American literary culture

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A Introduction and cultural criticism as a means of providing coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. I reframe this figure in relation to the aesthetic in order to specify its cognitive structure, which comes to the forefront as it is textualized into literary narrative. The chapters that follow

develop these points in relation to texts from different moments in Asian American literary history, which emerges in this study as an ongoing engagement with the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation.

The Post-Identity Turn

For over two decades, debates about identity in Asian American cultural criticism have been generally informed by what Rey Chow, in a slightly different context, calls the “difference revolution,” the “permanent unsettling

of the stability of referential meaning, what had been presumed to be anchored in the perfect fit between the signifier and the signified” (Protestant Ethnic 128). In light of this revolution, “difference rather than sameness now becomes the key to a radicalized way of thinking about identity . . . so that (the experience of) dislocation per se, as it were, often becomes valorized and idealized—as what is different, mobile, contingent, indeterminable, and so on” (134). These efforts have thoroughly affected Asian American Studies’

understanding of itself as an intellectual and political project. In their introduction to Asian American Studies: A Reader, Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Min Song write, The first general claim we can make about Asian American Studies . . . is that it has difficulty defining what its object of study is. Even if we try to split up the notion of Asian American into smaller subgroups, the problem persists... . The question remains, however: do these differences invalidate a field of study whose object is admittedly imaginary and constructed? Another way to put this question is: does Asian American Studies foreground, in its difficulty defining an object of study, the imaginary and constructed nature of most, if not all, identities? (xiv)

To a certain extent, these questions are meant to be rhetorical: the answer to the first, as the context makes clear, is no, and as for the second, its quasiuniversal claim about “most, if not all, identities” does not directly address

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Introduction 5 the specific predicament of Asian American Studies, which has never de-

nied the constructed nature of its founding terms. But Wu and Song’s characterization of the field is undoubtedly correct, for not only has it become impossible to speak of Asian America as a coherent entity, but the very critique of identity politics has been widely embraced as valuable and necessary.

These developments have reinforced a narrative in which the essentialist foundations of Asian American Studies unravel under the pressure of subsequent critiques. As Daryl J. Maeda points out, this understanding oversimplifies the history of Asian American culture and activism. Examining debates about literature that unfolded in conjunction with the Asian American movement, he draws our attention to a 1975 conference of writers organized by the Combined Asian American Resources Project that was criticized by the San Francisco—based organization Wei Min She for focusing myopically on “‘self-expression’ to promote ‘good vibes’ about being Asian American” and being “hungup on identity” (qtd. in Maeda 151).4 As this anecdote shows, the idea of Asian American literature was controversial from the start precisely because its foundational understanding of identity was being contested by different groups struggling to define what was still an incipient formation. As Asian American literary studies became institutionalized in the years that followed, debates over canon formation functioned as an extension of, and occasionally proxy for, broader questions about identity politics. In the 1980s, scholars mobilized Asian American literature in order to articulate a set of shared historical experiences that could be reflected by this body of texts. In her groundbreaking 1982 study, Elaine H. Kim focuses on “published creative writings in English by Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino descent” but immediately problematizes this framework as incomplete (Asian American Literature xi). Kim recognizes that Asian America bears a homological similarity to racialized terms such as “Oriental” but insists on its value for coordinating community building and struggles for social change. This emphasis on anti-racism enables her to avoid essentialist claims about Asian American culture while remaining invested in Asian American literature as such. Sau-ling Wong develops this approach in her 1993 definition of Asian American literature as “an emergent and evolving textual coalition, whose interests it is the business of a professional coalition of Asian American critics to promote” (Reading 9). Conceiving

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6 Introduction Asian American literature in parallel with a pan-ethnic coalition in the process of being consolidated in society at large, Wong emphasizes the ability of critics to “play a role in building their community” because “the very

process of creating a coalition feeds back into history, to further realize what has hitherto been tentative and unstable” (9). In retrospect, Wong's account turned out to be one of the last major attempts to align literary criticism with Asian American identity (understood as a nonessentialist formation based on a pan-ethnic concept of Asian America as a politically motivated coalition). The theoretical orientation of the field underwent a significant shift in the 1990s by embarking on what we might call a post-identity turn. First published in 1991, Lisa Lowe’s influential essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and Multiplicity: Asian American Differences’ makes a compelling case for replacing “notions of ‘identity’ with multiplicity and shifting the emphasis from cultural ‘essence’ to material hybridity” (75). Embracing Stuart Hall’s conception of identity as position rather than essence, she emphasizes the need to rethink “racialized ethnic identity in terms of differences of national origin, class, gender, and sexuality rather than presuming similarities and making the erasure of particularity the basis of identity” (83). Lowe focuses on the formation of coalitions with non—Asian American groups rather than the coalitional nature of Asian America itself. Asian American “identity” functions as a position from which to build “crucial alliances—with other groups of color, class-based struggles, feminist coalitions, and sexuality-based efforts—in the ongoing work of transforming hegemony” (83). Kandice Chuh’s /magine Otherwise goes further by attacking the referential assumptions that underscore identity politics. Chuh argues that attempts to “adjust,” “pluralize,” or “expand” the meaning of Asian America “cannot but end in a dead end, where one either is or is not found to be a ‘real’ Asian American, whether a particular representation is or is not found to be ‘authentic’ ” (21). In order to retain its analytical and critical capabilities, she calls for Asian American Studies to reinvent itself into a “subjectless discourse” (9) consisting of “collaborative antagonisms” (28) that keep “contingency, irresolution, and nonequivalence in the foreground” (8). Delineating the limitations of referentiality, she reframes Asian America as a critical position as opposed to an empirical identity, as a means of catalyzing an ongoing process of social critique:

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Introduction 7 “Asian American” is/names racism and resistance, citizenship and its denial, subjectivity and subjection—at once the becoming and undoing— and, as such, is a designation for the (im)possibility of justice, where “justice” refers to a state as yet unexperienced and unrepresentable . . . an endless project of searching out the knowledge and material apparatuses that extinguish some (Other) life ways and that hoard economic and social opportunities only for some. (8)

The striking openness of Chuh’s and Lowe’s projects attests to the critical energy that has been generated by the post-identity turn. But as Colleen Lye observes, such accounts have had the effect of conserving Asian America as a discursive vehicle for political and intellectual contestation so that what begin as ardent critiques of Asian American identity ultimately legitimize and expand the field (“Racial Form”).’ This irony stems in part from Asian American Studies’ status as an academic formation whose legitimacy depends heavily on its activist roots. Viet Thanh Nguyen argues that the field is characterized by a pervasive idealism that privileges radical resistance as its normative standard, thereby neglecting the fact that “as Asian America has witnessed the growth of its power in the past thirty years due to a rising population and increased political organization, it has also witnessed the growth of a demographically diverse population that is also ideologically diverse due to its wide range of origins and points of entry into American society” (9). Instead of engaging with this diversity, critics have resorted to

a rigid dichotomy between authentic resistance on the one hand and accommodation and complicity on the other, a division that ignores the diverse strategies through which Asian Americans negotiate their racialization. Unlike attempts to deny the referential capacity of Asian America, Nguyen challenges Asian American Studies to contend with the material consequences of its own founding terms. As Iyko Day adds, “there are reallife referents of the term ‘Asian American, which include its hard-won role as a state-recognized minority category for civil rights monitoring and its more negative existence in U.S. society as an undifferentiated ‘foreign’ population subject to racial hostilities” (73). How, then, can we understand Asian America as simultaneously mate-

rial and discursive, and attend to its referential limits while remaining cognizant of what Day calls its “real-life referents”? How can we grasp the ways in which Asian American identity functions simultaneously, albeit

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8 Introduction uneasily, as a demographic category as well as a critical position? How does this predicament illuminate the epistemological stakes of Asian American Studies vis-a-vis its vexed relationship with identity politics? These questions are fundamental to this book’s discussion of post-identity, a term that I have thus far been using to describe the field in the wake of the critique of identity politics starting in the 1990s. ‘The rest of this book, however, moves

away from using post-identity as a periodizing concept because, as I discussed earlier, such a usage tends to solidify an inaccurate historical narrative about the unfolding of Asian American Studies. Instead, what needs to be grasped are the ways in which articulations of Asian American identity have long had to contend with its discursive instability. By the same token, we need to account for how fragments and echoes of identitarian thinking persist in anti-identity discourses. The articulation and unraveling of identity, in other words, is a dialectical process that unfolds unevenly throughout Asian American history, culture, and politics. Accordingly, I use postidentity to denote a theoretical/discursive process that operates in a range of texts concerned with the historical, social, material, and symbolic dimensions of what David Palumbo-Liu calls the Asian/American racial frontier.°

In conceptualizing post-identity, I find it useful to draw an analogy with Jean-Francois Lyotard’s well-known definition of post-modernism. The post-modern, he argues, does not chronologically follow the modern. Rather, it is a dissenting mode of representation that is always present in, and even precedes, the modern. Instead of conceiving the post-modern in temporal terms, he describes it as an alternative to the modern belief in the possibility of representation; by refusing this investment, post-modernism marks the rupture of the modern from within. In a similar manner, we can conceive identities as providing a form—a grammar as it were—for making sense of and representing the relationship between the subject and the social. Post-identity marks the breakdown of this grammar and unfolds as an

inherent and integral dimension of identitarian thinking. Understanding post-identity in this manner allows us to account for why, despite frequent declarations about the constructedness and/or incoherence of identities, aspects of identitarian thinking continue to persist as affective investments, means of knowledge production, and modes of ethico-political engagement and imagination. A limited focus on the failure of signification and repre-

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Introduction 9 sentation, regardless of whether the point is to celebrate difference or to decry such critiques as paralyzing, can only provide an incomplete account of identity’s complex operations.

The Idealized Critical Subject of Asian American Studies

In order to undertake a sustained examination of identity’s conflicted forms, this study pivots around a discursive figure that I call the idealized critical subject, which operates across a range of literary and critical texts concerned with identity. In the following discussion, I treat the idealized critical subject as a composite figure that embodies a set of claims about identity, subjectivity, and oppositional social/political movements. It justifies these movements’ claim to offer a thorough critique of modernity from the perspective of those who have been marginalized and victimized. The idealized critical subject is characterized precisely by its ability to integrate the production of critical knowledge with an effective political praxis. To explore the contours of this subject and the labor it performs, I turn here to an exemplary theoretical text in which what we might call identitarian thinking is explicitly linked to revolutionary praxis. In History and Class Consciousness, one of the founding texts in Western Marxism, Georg Lukacs

asserts that in bourgeois thought, the structural exploitation of the proletariat is rendered natural and unchangeable. ‘This erasure of social relations results in the bourgeoisie’s inability to grasp the underlying reasons for its economic and social hegemony, a fatally disempowering condition that he famously calls reification. The antidote to reification lies in the emergence of an alternative mode of class consciousness on the part of the proletariat. The worker, he argues, is affected in every respect by a system that “cuts him off from his labour-power, forcing him to sell it on the market as a commodity, belonging to him” (165-166). These daily experiences produce a very different relationship to capitalist society for, unlike the bourgeoisie, work-

ers are able to “see society from the centre, as a coherent whole” and the result of this insight is knowledge of the “concrete totality [of social relations] of the historical world” (145). Most crucially, this knowledge is a form

of praxis that contributes to the “total, structural transformation” of capitalist societies (175).

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IO Introduction Lukacs is concerned with the status of the proletariat as a collective formation to which he attributes the ability to grasp the fundamental nature of social relations under capitalism in their totality. This knowledge is available to the proletariat by virtue of their structural role within the capitalist mode of

production as well as their daily experience of that positionality. Their oppressed status guarantees that this knowledge is objectively valid, applicable across all sectors of society. Lukacs aligns the discovery of this knowledge with revolutionary praxis, the process through which the proletariat becomes transformed into a collective agent, the protagonist as it were of a narrative of revo-

lutionary emancipation.’ Insofar as Lukacs remains deeply invested in the subject as the basis for knowledge and action, his account of class consciousness has been the target of extensive criticism due to its humanist assumptions.® Before turning to some of these problems, I want to first show how his account of the proletariat as an epistemological-political agent offers an illuminating prototype for recent articulations of the Asian American subject.

This claim may seem counterintuitive in light of the fact that scholars have sought to redefine Asian American Studies as a critical project that, in Jodi Kim’s words, is neither “a celebration of Asian American assimilation or resistance nor a foray into what has been pejoratively perceived as the strident and unsophisticated identity politics of the ‘minority’ subject,” but rather an “unsettling hermeneutic that provides a crucial diagnosis of what could be called the identity politics . . . of the U.S. nation” (10; emphasis in original). Yet it is precisely in the course of privileging critique and its ability to reveal the objective conditions of hegemony that an Asian American subject emerges who is defined by its oppositional relationship to U.S. soci-

ety rather than cultural, ethnic, or racial identity. This critical subject appears at a crucial moment in Lowe’s /mmigrant Acts in the form of the Asian immigrant, understood as a dissenting subject who plays a potentially transformative role in U.S. national culture: The Asian immigrant—at odds with the cultural, racial, and linguistic forms of the nation—emerges in a site that defers and displaces the temporality of assimilation. This distance from national culture constitutes Asian American culture as an alternative formation that produces cultural expressions materially and aesthetically at odds with the resolution of the citizen in the nation .. . an alternative site where the palimpsest of lost memories is reinvented, histories are fractured and retraced, and the unlike varieties of silence emerge into articulacy. (6)

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Introduction U The cultural forms produced by and through this figure powerfully reveal the history and structures of racialization, the very history that forms the ground from which the Asian immigrant emerges dialectically as an embodied “[agent] of political change, cultural expression, and social trans-

formation’ (9). In a manner that recalls the main arguments of History and Class Consciousness, the critical Asian American subject is distinguished by its ability to reveal suppressed or neglected histories and experiences of domination, knowledge that in turn becomes the basis for political contestation. This understanding of Asian American subjectivity departs substantively from approaches that emphasize cultural/ethnic/racial identity, but in doing so, it repeats certain difficulties that can also be seen in Lukacs’s account of class consciousness. Insofar as the proletariat/critical Asian American subject are theoretically derived from an analysis of capitalism and racism respectively (in Asian American Studies, these two aspects are in any case often intertwined), they cannot be considered synonymous with actually existing demographic referents. Just as Lukacs’s proletariat is not necessarily reflective of actual workers, the Asian American critical subject does not, to recall Nguyen’s point about political idealism, represent Asian Americans as a demographic group. To be clear, I do not mean to dismiss it as a political fantasy, false consciousness, or something to be grudgingly accepted in the name of strategic essentialism.’ Instead, I take its idealized character

as an important insight into the intellectual and political foundations of Asian American Studies. The idealized critical subject is enormously useful, even indispensable, for conceiving and articulating a politically committed

knowledge project because it functions as a flexible trope, a position that gets occupied by a range of subjects including fictional characters, writers, artists, activists, students, critics, and intellectuals. Although I present the idealized critical subject in this introduction as a more or less coherent figure in order to highlight its theoretical logic, the chapters that follow take a more nuanced approach that elucidates the gaps and discontinuities that inevitably arise in its literary manifestations. For his part, Lukacs is well aware that class consciousness is an abstraction that does not reflect the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of real workers. It lacks, in other words, a stable empirical referent. To explain this apparent shortcoming, he introduces his much-debated notion of “imputed” consciousness:

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12 Introduction By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were ade to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society. . . . Now class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions “imputed” [zugerechnet] to a particular typical position in the process of production. ‘This consciousness is, therefore, neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class. And yet the historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last resort by this consciousness and not the thought of the individual. (51; emphasis in original)

In this famous passage, Lukacs reveals his theoretical procedure when he claims that class consciousness is an “inference” that can be derived from his understanding of the “whole of society.” It consists of the “rational” reactions

that can be attributed to those who occupy a certain class position and, in this sense, is both individual and collective. What enables him to make an argument for the existence of class consciousness, in other words, is a model of social relations that foregrounds class-based interactions and conflicts. Moving from the macro to the micro, as it were, class consciousness is far more compelling when seen as a logical necessity rather than empirical reality.

Imputed consciousness remains a fiercely debated aspect of Lukacs’s work. As Martin Jay observes, Lukacs found it necessary to “theorize ahead of the empirical consciousness of the proletariat” and imagine a de-reified world in which “the gap between empirical and imputed class consciousness would narrow and finally vanish” so that “objective possibility would become subjective actuality” (112). Lukacs justifies these presuppositions by invoking a teleological historicism that culminates in the emergence of the prole-

tariat as a class in itself.’° As we will see, the idealized critical subject is temporally bound, although it often exists in tension with the teleological temporalities used to conceive its existence. If we set aside the charges that Lukacs was mired in bourgeois thinking (that is, his idealism indicates his own failure to overcome reification) or that he was trying to justify an authoritarian party apparatus, History and Class Consciousness is most instruc-

tive when it reveals how theorizing the relationship between knowledge and subjectivity takes place through an idealized critical subject. What this text illuminates is the predicament of speaking from within an oppressed

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Introduction 3 group in order to articulate the conditions of possibility for its emergence as an agent of social transformation."!

In taking up this challenge, albeit not without shortcomings, Lukacs foreshadows other twentieth-century emancipatory movements that claim access to objective and truthful social knowledge as the basis for their

political projects.’ Writing about anti-colonial liberationist thought, Caroline S. Hau observes, “Political struggles, therefore, implicitly commit themselves to the idea of the epistemic reliability of intellectual praxis, to the possibility of obtaining accurate and reliable accounts of the world (or of a particular society) that can help to demystify existing institutions and

their systems of oppression” (134; emphasis in original). The idealized critical subject plays an indispensable role by authorizing such knowledge claims, rooting them in structural and everyday conditions of oppression. But just as Lukacs’s text unwittingly demonstrates the limitations of its own project, articulations of the idealized critical subject are often incomplete, even in works that vehemently embrace identity politics. The textual vicissitudes of the idealized critical subject constitute an archive of post-

identity as the rupture of identitarian thought from within, at the very scenes of its articulation.

The Aesthetics of Identity (Or, Why Read Realism?)

Insofar as this study is primarily concerned with articulations of identity and subjectivity in literary texts, it develops an account of the idealized critical subject as an aesthetic figure whose conditions of articulation are intricately related to the representational protocols and procedures of fiction. My use of the aesthetic is not meant to function as a casual synonym for the literary in the sense that one speaks of the aesthetics of race, for example, in a given text. Instead, the aesthetic denotes a mode of cognition that exceeds the parameters of rational knowledge and/or political agency. The aesthetic illuminates the internal logic of the idealized critical subject as well as the conditions under which it is manifested in literature. Aesthetics, writes Marc Redfield, “forms part... of modern philosophy’s effort to ground itself in the subject and its perceptions” by positing a counterpoint to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason as the guide for ethical and moral behavior (Politics 10-11). In The Critique of Judgment,

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14 Introduction Kant defines aesthetic judgment (what he calls the faculty of taste) as the ability to freely endow universally apprehensible meaning to sensory perceptions without recourse to preexisting rules. At stake in this classic formulation is a subject for whom the ability to exercise taste indicates the possibility of freedom and autonomy. This subject is, furthermore, a prototype for society at large: Kant famously describes taste as a “sensus communis aestheticus’ (172, n.1, §40; emphasis in original) as “the faculty of judging of

that which makes universally communicable, without the mediation of a concept, our feeling in a given representation” (173, $40; emphasis in original).'? The supposedly universal character of taste is undermined, however, by the assertion that taste is also the result of education and refinement, a claim that sets its development in a social context as well as a temporal pro-

gression that authorizes the division of humanity according to levels of taste so that its universality is not an empirical descriptor, but a normative telos. This last point underscores the importance of aesthetic education as well as its seemingly inextricable implication in class-, race-, and gender-based

prejudices." In Kant’s view, taste can only be common—apprehensible by and avail-

able to all—if its object is not subject to the contingent particulars of empirical sensation and experience.” For this reason, the proper object of aesthetic judgment is form, which belongs to the realm of imagination rather than sensation, a point that becomes especially important as he turns to art (Redfield, Phantom 13). There, form uneasily denotes the boundaries of the artwork and marks the cut that separates art from the world at large. It becomes, Redfield notes, “a figure for difference and for the (necessary, but uncertain) phenomenalization of difference. The frame must in some fashion be perceived if the object is to be judged aesthetically; yet as a principle of articulation, the (im)pure cut of the frame slips away from perception and toward the realm of inscription” (Politics 17).'° In this sense, form provides an index to the subject’s ability to perceive the distinction between art and real life, a task, as we will see, that becomes even more complex when the artworks in question make a strong claim to socio-historical accuracy.

Despite these uncertainties, for Kant and the tradition he inaugurates, the ability to cognitively interact with form defines the free subject. Taking this highly contested claim as a starting point, this study pursues a reading practice that is attentive to form’s vicissitudes as a means of tracking the unstable status of the idealized critical subject. If this subject is defined by

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Introduction 15 its ability to engage critically with realities of oppression, articulations of this subject must continually account for its cognitive relationship to the external world; a consideration of form reveals with more precision exactly how this engagement takes place. Form thus reveals the operations of the subject as well as how it is rooted in social particulars. By stressing the cog-

nitive implications of form, we can draw a distinction between reading practices that are attentive to matters of form and formalism as an ideological stance on literary value that eschews the importance of history and/or politics. The former, explains Fredric Jameson, is a “hermeneutic concept” that “emphasizes the operation of interpretation itself, as it moves in time

from outer to inner form as from one moment to another in a dialectical process. Thus the critic is recalled to his own procedures, as a form unfolding in time but also reflecting his own concrete social and historical situation” (Marxism and Form 4ot).

Fiction, with its concern for the details of everyday life and the ways through which we make sense of the world, is “a privileged microcosm” in which to pursue this kind of inquiry (Marxism and Form xi). Accordingly, this book focuses on prose texts that render explicit the problem of mimetic representation. I read texts that, although stylistically varied, foreground the claim that they are portraying social, historical, and personal circumstances that are continuous with real times, places, and conditions. In other words, this study is concerned with realism, but instead of just focusing on

the stylistic traditions and protocols of realist fiction, I use the term in a more flexible manner that reflects Jameson’s definition of realism as a “cog-

nitive as well as aesthetic” concept that “presupposes a form of aesthetic experience which yet lays claim to a binding relationship to the real itself, that is to say, to those realms of knowledge and praxis which had traditionally been differentiated from the realm of the aesthetic, with its disinterested judgements and its constitution as sheer appearance” (“Reflections’ 198).

If Kant and his followers sought to construct a philosophical system that maintains distinctions among knowledge, praxis, and aesthetics, realism suggests the possibility of overcoming those divisions, a promise that motivated Lukacs to embrace it as part of his ongoing attempt to overcome the

limitations of modern thought. Yet in ways that Lukacs did not entirely recognize (I will come back to this point shortly), considerations of realism are inevitably bound up with the question of mediation. Jameson writes:

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16 Introduction How do we pass. . . from one level of social life to another, from the psychological to the social, indeed, from the social to the economic? What is the relationship of ideology, not to mention the work of art itself, to the more fundamental social and historical reality of groups in conflict, and how must the latter be understood if we are able to see cultural objects as social acts, at once disguised and transparent? (Marxism and Form xiv—xv) Mediation operates in the “disguised and transparent” ways in which “cultural objects” including literature claim to establish a “binding relationship to the real itself”; trying to figure out exactly how this does (or does not) happen requires a consideration of the literary text as a socially embedded object.

Taking up this question, this book pivots from Lukacs to the writings of Theodor Adorno. My turn to Adorno resurrects his (in)famous postwar “debate” with Lukacs, which pitted the former’s defense of the modernist avant-garde against the latter’s insistence on realism. In his essay “Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukacs’ Realism in Our Time” (1958), Adorno atgues that Lukacs erroneously conflates art and reality, thereby erasing the distinction between aesthetic representation and knowledge while ignoring the role of mediation.'” Lukacs, he writes, “follows|s] the tradition of classical philosophy [and] rightly conceives art as a form of knowledge. . . . [I]n doing so he becomes trapped in the same mere immediacy that he shortsightedly accuses avant-garde production of: the immediacy of the established fact” (227). Art, Adorno insists, offers an alternative to “established fact’ due to its embattled relationship with society: Art exists within reality, has its function in it, and is also inherently mediated with reality in many ways. But nevertheless, as art, by its very concept it stands in an antithetical relationship to the status quo. Philosophy reflected this in the term “aesthetic semblance.” .. . [T]he difference between empirical existence and art concerns the intrinsic structure of the latter... . [V]is 4 vis what merely exists, art itself—where it does not betray its own nature by merely duplicating it—has to become essence, essence and image. Only thereby is the aesthetic constituted; only thereby and not by gazing at mere immediacy, does art become knowledge. (224)

Art must thoroughly inhabit this marginal role in order to critically reveal the underlying conditions—reification, the rise of instrumental reason, the elevation of rationality, and so on—that contribute to its marginalization in the first place.

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Introduction 17 As the previous passage demonstrates, Adorno’s account of the artwork

hinges on aesthetic semblance, a term he uses to describe the kinds of knowledge that artworks offer by virtue of their appearance and illusory coherence. Semblance (the English translation for the German word Schein) inheres in the artwork’s apparent distance from the world (i.e., the illusion that the artwork exists and acts in its own world).'!® While this distance is

ultimately untenable, it sustains the internal coherence and autonomy of the artwork: Since the work of art does not have something immediately real as its subject matter, it never says, as knowledge usually does: “this is so” [“es ist so”]. Instead, it says, “this is how it is” [“so ist es”]. Its logicity is not that of a statement with subject and predicate but that of an immanent coherence: only in and through that coherence, through the relationship in which it places its elements, does it take a stance. (232)

This “immanent coherence” of the artwork is the source of its power, but this appearance is precarious because it stems from its marginalization." Art cannot escape being a product of society and history, but by exposing these conditions, it becomes a source of critical dissent. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno asks, “How can making bring into appearance what is not the result of making; how can what according to its own concept is not true neverthe-

less be true? ... Central to aesthetics therefore is the redemption of semblance; and the emphatic right of art, the legitimation of its truth, depends on this redemption” (107). The redemption of semblance requires the critic to unravel the coherence of the artwork in order to dissolve the congealing

of content and form, a process that does not just reassert the primacy of the social, but also shows how the formal conditions of the artwork render an indictment of the same. This book seeks to show how, in the context of Asian American literature, such reading practices can illuminate the theoretical structures of race and identity.

Asian American Literature and/as History

The lure of realism lies in its promise of access to the realities of the world, prerequisite knowledge for socially transformative action. Lukacs asserts that realism offers a means to overcome the effects of reification by

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18 Introduction “penetratling] the laws governing objective reality and to uncover the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible network of relationships that go to make up society” (“Realism in the Balance” 38). A remarkably similar claim can be seen in foundational statements of Asian American literary culture. In the introduction to the landmark anthology Aizieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (Chin et al. 1974), for example, the editors promote a canon of texts that, they claim, portray Asian Americans ina historically and socially accurate manner as alternatives to the racist and Orientalist misrepresentations proffered by mainstream U.S. culture. The

editors champion authors such as John Okada and Louis Chu as literary forefathers endowed with the necessary insight to truthfully depict life in Asian America, whose writings demonstrate that “the vitality of literature stems from its ability to codify and legitimize common experience in the terms of that experience and to celebrate life as it is lived” (22). The problem with such claims, in and of themselves, is that they posit a seamless relationship between socio-historical knowledge and literary representation. By contrast, this book treats the aesthetic as the terrain in which these relationships are constantly re-negotiated by attending to how form reveals the mediated relationships among knowledge, representation, and subjectivity.

This approach runs somewhat counter to the grain of Asian American literary and cultural criticism as it has coalesced into a field. In almost every notable study published from its inception in the 1970s to the early 1990s,

critics explicitly rejected formalism in favor of reading practices directly engaged with the history and struggles of Asian Americans. One gets a sense of this choice in Elaine H. Kim’s well-known decision to “emphasize how the literature elucidates the social history of Asians in the United States” in her groundbreaking study of the topic (Asian American Literature xv). Kim’s statement has usually been read as a deferral of formalist inquiry in favor of socio-historical analysis, but it may be more accurate to say that her study adopted an implicit theory of literary form modeled on the temporal contours of Asian American social history, understood as a chronological narrative that charts shared experiences of racism across Asian sub-

eroups.~” This narrative serves as the interpretive ground for reading, as well as the basis for asserting an Asian American literary tradition as such. Concurrent with the critique of identity politics in the 1990s, scholars took a renewed interest in matters of literary form, especially in regard to narrative fiction, which was frequently theorized as a technology of subject

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Introduction 19 formation that imposes identities through developmental narratives that prescribe assimilation into the U.S. nation as the solution to cultural and racial difference.*! Studies of the bildungsroman, the genre that received the most sustained attention, often emphasized how Asian American writers expose its ideological biases by rewriting its generic conventions in ways that register suppressed histories of racialization. Instead of merely juxtaposing an external historical narrative on literary texts, these studies sought to account for the effects of form within texts themselves while preserving the critical agency of the Asian American writer/critic. In the process, how-

ever, narrative as such tended to be understood in terms of static conventions and well-defined prototypes, even when challenged by dissenting iterations, rather than as evolving and dynamic engagements with the problematics of representation. Moreover, conceptions of subjectivity and agency were restrictively conceived in oppositional terms. More recently, scholars have revisited the fraught relationship between

aesthetics and politics by calling for renewed attention to the nuances of literary representation. These studies reconsider what critics have repeatedly

noted is the dominance of historicist and sociological reading practices, which has resulted in the preponderance of thematic criticism.** In her introduction to the anthology Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, Sue-[m Lee advocates “the complementary possibility of a historically and materially engaged analysis that a/so recognizes the aesthetic as

a rich critical variable” (1; emphasis in original). Furthermore, Josephine Park observes that aesthetics and politics have mutually constituted Asian American literature: “a resistant mode creates the field; an account of differing formal strategies expands it. . . . [A]esthetics is ‘privileged as develop-

mental end point, but politics has never gone away and a resistant mode seems only more pressing at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (128). By insisting that politics and aesthetics cannot be seen as mutually exclusive, the recent emphasis on literary form registers, as Colleen Lye observes, a protest against “the political instrumentalization of the literary text” (“Racial Form” 94), a call to rethink the very concepts through which we define Asian American literature: “literary criticism’s significant contribution to

Asian American studies may lie in its ability to theorize the historicity of

the Asian American subject, to ask, What is its historical status? ... What are its determinate conditions of existence, the varieties of its social effects, the range of its political interests?” (95-96).

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20 Introduction Animated by similar questions, this book examines how figures of identity anchor or undermine the epistemological and political claims of narra-

tive fiction. The first chapter considers the Cold War writings of Eileen Chang. One of the most celebrated figures in modern Chinese literature, she has been largely neglected in Asian American Studies even though she lived in the United States for four decades. I consider how her bilingual writings and translation practices unsettle the identity-based expectations that conditioned her entry in the U.S. literary market, as well as how she engages with theoretical and aesthetic issues that would later figure prominently in Asian American literary culture. The next two chapters examine the operations of post-identity in some foundational Asian American texts. Chapter

2 focuses on cultural nationalism; I examine literary criticism by Bruce Iwasaki, a critic who was active in the Asian American movement, and writings by Frank Chin, the most prominent of the Aizieeeee! editors. I focus

on how their claims about the agency of the author coexist uneasily with the temporal protocols of political discourse and literary representation. In Chapter 3, I turn to works by Maxine Hong Kingston, arguably the most canonical Asian American writer, and examine how she deploys music and sound tropes to imagine forms of community free from the debilitating limits of identity politics. The last two chapters investigate formations of identity in novels that foreground transnational experiences. In Chapter 4, I consider how the realist claims that underscore Chang-rae Lee’s novel A Gesture Life depend on a sublimated investment in identity politics even though the text deconstructs identitarian categories. In the final chapter, I return to Adorno’s notion of semblance to theorize the role of comparison in Asian American literary studies. Turning to Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, | suggest that the novel’s depiction of shame as the effect/affect of aesthetic representation reveals the ethical challenges of literary representation in a global context. As this overview suggests, the organization of this book is basically chronological, and by adopting this “form” I seem to be repeating the common practice of anchoring cultural criticism to narratives of social history. Am I not therefore perpetuating the subordination of aesthetics to social history? To address this potential objection, let me clarify that the goal of this book is not to offer a developmental narrative of Asian American literary history, but to examine how the emphasis on historicity in Asian American literary and cultural criticism is itself tied to its investment in the ideal-

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Introduction 2I ized critical subject.*? This book considers how this investment gets articulated

at different historical moments, including some that predate the invention of Asian America, an approach that seeks to illuminate a genealogical continuity between the diverse authors and texts I examine. In doing so, this study returns repeatedly to questions of historicism, temporality, and the condition of being situated in time. Even though literary history and social history cannot be conflated, they are both structured by what Dipesh Chakrabarty identifies as the central assumptions of modern historical consciousness: “in order to understand the nature of anything in this world we must see it as an historically developing entity that

is, first, as an individual and unique whole—as some kind of unity at least in potentia—and, second, as something that develops over time” (23). To highlight the historicity of Asian America is not to embrace a rigid tele-

ology (although the idealized critical subject is often implicated in such inclinations), but rather to acknowledge the tremendous power that the concept of history holds in Asian American Studies. Given the activist origins of the field, one of its main purposes, as Gordon Chang writes, has been “to reclaim a minority voice, to uncover the ‘buried past,’ to recover collective, lived experience” (90).74 Even though post-identity Asian Americanists may hesitate to embrace ideas such as voice and experience, the field remains primarily concerned with historical knowledge and social critique. Tracing the assumptions that underscore this orientation brings us back to

the idealized critical subject for whom history is not only an object of knowledge but also the temporal terrain in which agency is actualized through struggles for freedom. This study, in other words, is concerned with the epistemological conditions in which history becomes the primary basis of social and cultural critique. Denise Ferreira da Silva has recently argued that the modern subject, defined as rational, autonomous, and universal, emerged out of a scientific racial framework that attributed universality to the white/European male subject. This subject subsequently became spatialized along the colonial division between the West and its Others and was elevated into universality through a logic that simultaneously justified the subjugation and extermination of racial Others. Silva insists that these assumptions are built into historicist conceptions of globality, which attribute modernity to the West while essentializing its Others as perpetual latecomers. I will return to these

points in Chapter 4, but I bring them up here to signal the dangerously

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a2 Introduction racialized intersection between historicism and subjectivity, which, according to Silva, also shadows deeply held beliefs in the emancipation of the oppressed as the historical telos of anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles. In light of these legacies, she calls on anti-racist thinkers to reject these attachments and imagine instead a politics not centered on what I have been calling the idealized critical subject.” This book does not claim to fulfill this ambitious project, but it is never-

theless animated by the realization that the idealized critical subject is a compromised, albeit powerful, figure for Asian American Studies. Foregrounding this problematic, this book is undoubtedly a post-identity project, but, by the same token, it remains embedded in the identitarian assumptions it seeks to critique. Its goal, then, is to contend with the ubiquity and staying power of these assumptions and investments by focusing on the complexities of literary representation. To that end, I have titled this book The Semblance of Identity in order to foreground the following problem: What makes Asian American identity so compelling and alluring when we have never been under the impression that it is anything but constructed and, perhaps, illusory?

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ONE

The Strange Smell of Truth Ethnicity, Translation, and Realism in the Cold War Writings of Eileen Chang

This chapter traces a prehistory of the Asian American idealized critical subject by examining the transnational Cold War career of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920-1995), whose fame as a modern Chinese writer is matched by her almost complete neglect in Asian American Studies.’ Even though Chang lived in the United States for more than half of her life and wrote extensively in English, she cuts an unlikely figure in a study of Asian American literature because she is primarily known as a Chinese-language author whose works were almost entirely concerned with Chinese topics. Politically speaking, she contributed to the exercise of American power in the Asia Pacific and was opposed to communism throughout her life. My goal is to show how Chang’s career, despite its rather different trajectory, was characterized by an engagement with some of the central themes that would later preoccupy Asian American literary culture. By reading Chang through the framework of Asian American literary studies, this chapter is motivated by a desire to rethink the assumptions of a field built on the study of English-language writers who inhabit racialized Asian bodies in the United States. These parameters have been accompanied by a set of political criteria based on distinctions such as assimilation versus resistance and complicity with imperialism versus anti-imperialism, terms that reflect how Asian American culture and politics were conceived as a decisive break from the liberal consensus of the 1950s and 1960s. As Viet Nguyen has forcefully argued, these terms institute a rigid political idealism that forecloses more nuanced investigations into how Asians in the 23

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24 The Strange Smell of Truth United States deployed “flexible strategies” to negotiate the “greater freedom and greater repression” of the Cold War period (66).

Scholars have been somewhat uneven in taking up this challenge: authors who were widely dismissed by cultural nationalists, such as Jade Snow Wong and C. Y. Lee, have received renewed attention in recent years, while others such as Betty Lee Sung and Virginia Lee continue to languish in obscurity.” It is perhaps not surprising that Asian Americanists have had almost nothing to say about Eileen Chang, whose life and career seem even more remote to the concerns of the field. One of the most important writers

in modern Chinese literature, Chang was born and raised in Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan and Westernized city during the early twentieth century. Schooled in Chinese literary traditions, she studied English literature at the University of Hong Kong until the outbreak of World War II forced her to curtail her studies and return to Japanese-occupied Shanghai. There, her essays and fiction became instantly popular, but she quickly fell into obscurity after Japan’s defeat in 1945. She remained in Shanghai through the ensuing civil war and the communist victory in 1949, but returned to Hong Kong in 1952, where she worked as a freelance writer and translator for the United States Information Service (USIS). She eventually obtained a visa under the auspices of the 1953 Refugee Relief Act and immigrated to the United States in 1955, where she continued to write until her death in 1995. Always an intensely private person, Chang became notoriously reclusive in her later years, which only heightened her allure. By the time she died in Los Angeles, she had become one of the most iconic figures in modern Chinese culture.° In the late 1950s, Chang’s earlier works were republished in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Asa result, she gained a loyal and devoted following (her writings would not become available again on the mainland until the 1980s, which led to another round of Zhang-re, or “Chang craze”). Chang also wrote a substantial body of essays, translations, and fiction in English and had long wanted to achieve literary fame in the West, although she never succeeded in that regard during her lifetime.* Next to a monumental English translation of late-Qing author Han Banging’s novel Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, her English texts include three novels that were written in both English and Chinese: The Rice-Sprout Song (1954), Naked Earth (1956), and The Rouge of the North (1967). The first two are anti-communist novels while the third is an expansion and rewriting of “The Golden Cangue,” a

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The Strange Smell of Truth 5 famous story from her early Shanghai period. Only The Rice-Sprout Song was published in the United States (the other two were published in Hong Kong and Britain, respectively); because it played an important role in launching her American career, I focus on this novel in this chapter. In light of Chang’s personal history as a trans-Pacific migrant, we might place her among Sinophone writers from the same period who spent much of their lives in the United States, such as Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung, Nieh Hualing, and Yu Lihua. While these figures are usually taken up in Area Studies, I situate Chang’s life and works in Asian American literary history in order to highlight how the exercise of U.S. power during the Cold War contributed to the formation of transnational multilingual reading publics on both sides of the Pacific. This chapter focuses on how her treatment of ethnicity mobilizes discursive figures that foreshadow the idealized critical subject of Asian American culture in unexpected ways, even though Chang deploys them to very different ends. By taking a comparative approach, this chapter traces how she foregrounds the epistemological implications of literary realism in a cross-cultural context. Chang’s solution is to embrace an ethnicized authorial position that reinforces her foreignness vis-a-vis the United States, even while her iconoclastic literary practices end up destabilizing the very categories she inhabits.

Exilic Encounters

When she first arrived in the United States, Chang was known to only a handful of readers. In November 1955, while staying in New York, she visited one of the most accomplished figures in modern Chinese thought. Hu Shi (1891-1962) first came to prominence due to his association with the May Fourth movement.’ He later served as ambassador to the United States, a delegate at the founding of the United Nations, a member of the National Assembly, and chancellor of Peking University. A supporter of the Nationalist government defeated in 1949, Hu lived in self-imposed exile in the United States from 1949 to 1958, when he moved to Taiwan and became head of the Academia Sinica, a post he held until his death. In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said suggests that exile is the metaphorical (and all too often actual) condition of the modern intellectual, whose life is characterized by “movement, constantly being unsettled, and

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26 The Strange Smell of Truth unsettling others.” “You cannot,” he writes, “go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation” (53). Exiles occupy

a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and halfdetachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another. Being skilled at survival becomes the main imperative, with the danger of getting too comfortable and secure constituting a threat that is constantly to be guarded against. (49) The lives of exiles such as Hu and Chang were marked by a sense of cultural anxiety that was prompted not only by their new surroundings, but also by their understanding of communism as a destructive force bent on dismantling all aspects of Chinese culture and society. As a result, notes Rey Chow,

“émigrés who [could] no longer claim proprietorship of Chinese culture through residency in China henceforth inhabit[ed] the melancholy position of an ethnic group that, as its identity [was] being ‘authenticated’ abroad, [was] simultaneously relegated to the existence of ethnographic specimens under the Western gaze” (“Introduction” 15). In a Chinese essay published in 1968 titled “Yi Hu Shizhi” (Remember-

ing Hu Shi), Chang describes him fondly as a warm-hearted gentleman whose impeccable manners seemed oddly out of place. Hu lived in a Man-

hattan concrete building that looked “entirely like a Hong Kong-style apartment, a realization that made Chang feel “a bit absent-minded, as if [she were] still in Hong Kong” (146).° Amid this “intertwining of time and space” (shikong jiaodie) (147), memories of her previous encounters with his writings erupt in her mind. Once the leading thinker of his generation,

Hu, it seemed, had fallen behind the march of history. The ideas that he had once championed at the vanguard of modernization were being denounced in mainland China and in danger of fading into obscurity elsewhere. Chang reflects, I repeatedly find that when foreigners misunderstand modern China, it is because they do not know the impact of the May Fourth movement. . . . I feel that when youths from present and past generations, as well as those on the Mainland, oppose Hu Shi, they already do not know what they are opposing. I think as long as there exists what the psychologist Jung called the memory of a people [minzu huiyi], experiences like the May Fourth

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The Strange Smell of Truth 27 movement will not be forgotten. No matter how long it’s buried, it will continue to be the background of thinking. Jung was as notable as Freud. | cannot help but recall what Freud discovered: that Moses was killed by the Israelites. After the incident, they forbade themselves from mentioning it, but continued to believe in him. (148)

In this suggestive passage, Chang invokes Jung’s notion of collective unconscious to assert Hu's historical significance. Unlike conventional accounts of modern Chinese history, she depicts the May Fourth movement not as a rebellion against tradition but as an integral part of it, and claims a crucial role for exiles such as herself in its defense and preservation. Turning to Freud, she elevates the metaphorically slain figure of Hu Shi into the Moses of modern China and argues that the hostility being directed toward him indicates his importance to a lingering, albeit embattled, collective cultural memory. The point, of course, is not to take Chang’s version of modern Chinese history or, for that matter, her understanding of psychoanalysis as accurate or authoritative. Rather, what interests me is how her sense of ethnic identity acquires divergent meanings in various quotidian situations. Chang recounts a touching scene in which Hu, visiting her spartan living quarters at the Salvation Army, obsessively compliments their surroundings, a sign, she writes, of the “refined self-control [Aanyang] of us Chinese” (150). She also recalls another conversation at his home during which the topic of the mainland came up. After Hu suddenly exclaimed, “It’s purely a military conquest!” Chang “paused and did not answer.” In her essay, she inserts this aside: “since the 1930s, I have felt the pressure of the leftists in my reading. Even though I instinctually felt repulsed and, as with most trends, I am a perpetual outsider, I know that their influence was not confined to the 1930s as in the West. At my silence, Mr. Hu’s face immediately sank, and he changed the topic” (148). The awkward silence between the two—a sign of ingrained gender and age protocols as well as the gravity of their conversation topic—registers the extent to which political events in the recent past continued to preoccupy their lives and thoughts. In this passage, Chang turns the melancholic experience of exile into a position from which to write authentically and authoritatively about Chinese culture and society. Circumscribed by the geopolitics of the Cold War, her seemingly natural invocation of Chinese identity indicates its protean character even as it remained foundational to her authorial persona.

(c) 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved.

28 The Strange Smell of Truth Propaganda in a Cross-Cultural Frame Chang's career depended on anti-communist cultural institutions established during the early years of the Cold War. “After China entered the [Korean] war in 1951,” writes Robert G. Lee, “the United States made every

effort to isolate communist China, economically and diplomatically, and embarked on a military policy of confrontation aimed at ‘containing’ the expansion of Chinese influence throughout Asia and the Third World” (152). Founded in 1953, the USIS played a key role in this strategy of containment.’ USIS offices around the world engaged in activities such as arranging cultural and educational exchanges, setting up reading rooms, and operating programs such as People-to-People and the Voice of America. USIS officials actively cultivated and supported local writers and artists and used their works to literally spread stories about communism. The Chinese versions of The Rice-Sprout Song and Naked Earth first appeared in serialized form in the USIS-sponsored magazine Jinri Shijie (The World Today),

which was widely distributed in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as diasporic Chinese communities in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.® The World

Today Press, which published /inri Shijie, also published the Chineselanguage version of The Rice-Sprout Song’ Chang dedicated the English version to Richard McCarthy, who was the director of the USIS in Hong Kong during the early 1950s and was later active in the burgeoning modernist literary scene in Taiwan. Years later, McCarthy recalled, “The USIS was a government agency that supported U.S. foreign policy, one aspect of which was to resolutely curb the spread of Mao Zedong Thought in Asia. One of the methods to achieve this goal was to truthfully report on conditions on the Mainland” (Kao 244). What McCarthy considered truthful reporting would, for most readers today, likely be called propaganda. Chang’s novels were part of a large body of Chinese-language anti-communist literature that circulated during the 1950s, particularly in Nationalist-controlled Taiwan. These officially sanctioned texts portrayed the horrors of communism in order to garner support for efforts to retake the mainland, and dominated the literary scene at a time of severe censorship (Chang’s writings, which were deemed apolitical, were not censored, which made them even more influential in Cold War Taiwan).'? Anti-communist literature is largely dismissed today as a relic of a repressive past and for this reason, readers and critics have tended

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The Strange Smell of Truth 29 to downplay or ignore Chang’s contributions as anomalies necessitated by economic need. Such assessments reiterate a binary opposition between propaganda and authentic literature uncontaminated by political expediency, thereby obscuring the cultural significance of the former. Broadly speaking, propaganda refers to any communication designed to influence and direct ways of thinking and acting; to cite a somewhat technical definition, “Propaganda is the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist” (Jowett and O’Donnell 4). In the West, propaganda originally referred to the missionary work of the Catholic Church, but by the twentieth century, it had become associated with the use of media technologies to shape public opinion and consolidate the power of the state. Widely associated with totalitarian regimes in Hitler's Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or Mao’s China, propaganda became antithetical to intellectual and aesthetic freedom in liberal democratic societies, where it still conjures images of heavy-handed, even farcical, assertions of political dogma, as well as a propensity for deception and manipulation. In Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, Mark Wollaeger departs from this view by describing propaganda as a modern strategy for making sense of and representing a rapidly changing world in which the objectivity of knowledge could no longer be taken for granted. Wollaeger traces how Anglo-American modernist writers adopted its methods and objectives. Both propaganda and modernism, he notes, were invested in “highly prized epistemic values” such as “information and knowledge; truth and facts; certainty and objectivity” (Stanley Cunningham, qtd. in

Wollaeger 11), and both “provided mechanisms for coping with information flows that had begun to outstrip the processing capacity of the mind” (xiii). Understood in this sense, propaganda offers a window into the definition of objective and reliable information. In the case of Chang, her reliability was closely tied to her ethnic identity, first as an exiled Chinese writer addressing Sinophone audiences and then later as an immigrant in the United States. In the United States, The Rice-Sprout Song was presented as an (auto)ethnographic text to readers who wanted otherwise unobtainable information about the mainland in the form of an emotionally accessible narrative.'' Its attraction depended heavily on the assumption that Chang was a native informant whose displacement from the mainland enabled her

(c) 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved.

30 The Strange Smell of Truth to reveal the conditions that she left behind (whether she actually witnessed any of the settings and situations portrayed in the novel is a subject of extensive debate among Chang scholars). In short, Chang occupied a subject position in which epistemological privilege was indexed to cultural otherness. But even though she benefited from these assumptions, she was no-

ticeably ambivalent about this role and repeatedly explored how acts of narration and translation unsettle the distinction between China and the West, the very terms of her ethnicization. In this context, what makes The Rice-Sprout Song unique is its cross-cultural status, acquired through acts of translation: it is a novel that has lived, as it were, different lives in different languages as it circulated among different publics. As a work of propaganda, the novel’s objective is to provide believable information about life under communism in the form of a fictional narra-

tive that communicates clear political positions. Even a cursory survey of The Rice-Sprout Song’s American reviews indicates that Chang’s (subtitled) “Novel of Modern China” captivated her readers by appearing to offer valuable and rare information. For many readers, the reliability of the novel was directly related to her personal history. Reviewers repeatedly referred to her “escape” in order to emphasize her firsthand experience of communism. For example, Takashi Oka wrote in the Christian Science Monitor: “|Chang] lived

in China for three years after the Communists came to power, and has directly experienced many of the things of which she writes.”'* Oka does not seem to be aware of the novel’s propaganda origins nor the fact that Chang spent very little time in the countryside. Although not all reviews focused

directly on the link between identity and knowledge, they frequently lauded the novel’s historical accuracy. A reviewer in the Yale Review declared that The Rice-Sprout Song was “a good story that gives every evidence of being shrewd and honest reporting” (Pickrel 639) while another consid-

ered it “perhaps the most authentic novel so far of life under the Chinese Communists” (“Slavery and Hate” 18). Preston Schoyer wrote in Saturday Review: “Miss Chang gives the scene and the people the honest feel, the very smell of China; both are brilliantly alive. The book has another dimension; it opens a clearer window on life in Red China and the essential character of the new regime than could half a dozen scholarly works on the subject” (18).

While reviewers emphasized the novel’s cultural otherness, they also praised its supposedly universal attributes, its ability to generate empathetic

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The Strange Smell of Truth 31 responses that transcend cultural boundaries. Chang’s reviewers reproduced the terms under which representations of Asia proliferated in middlebrow culture during the Cold War (The Rice-Sprout Song was reviewed in a number of leading middlebrow publications such as Time magazine). Christina Klein argues that this body of texts was deeply rooted in the principle of education. The purveyors of middlebrow culture promised their audience that if they read certain books and listened to certain radio shows, they could learn to understand the ideas and aesthetic forms that defined middle-class and international respectability. Unlike formal education, however, this self-education need not be painful or time-consuming, but could be combined with entertainment in ways that made learning pleasurable. (64)

The Rice-Sprout Song can be read as part of a long tradition of American writing about Asia that has often featured sensational exposés of cruelty and suffering. But unlike many of the writers in this tradition, such as Pearl S. Buck or James Michener, Chang is clearly a member of the culture that she is writing about. During the 1970s, “cultural translators” such as herself were excoriated by cultural nationalists for exoticizing and misrepresenting Asian cultures in order to satisfy the tastes of white readers. But a closer examination of her writing suggests the need for a more nuanced understanding of how identity informs her works. Combining the roles of au-

thor and translator, Chang articulated a phantasmatic sense of cultural identity that she kept returning to even as her migrations took her to different surroundings.

Realism as Propaganda The Rice-Sprout Song is set in a village near Shanghai several years after the

communist revolution. Gold Root T’an, the male protagonist, is a decent and hard-working peasant who lives with his daughter, Big Aunt, and Big Uncle. The novel opens with the wedding of his beloved sister, Gold Flower, in a nearby village. After the wedding, his wife, Moon Scent, returns from Shanghai, where she has been working as a domestic laborer. Upon her re-

turn, she is shocked to find that the village is experiencing a severe food shortage. Instead of liberating the peasants, land reform has resulted in

(c) 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved.

32 The Strange Smell of Truth government control over all aspects of daily life. The overworked peasants are forced to hand over their harvests to the state, participate in political meetings and mass rallies, and incorporate revolutionary lingo into daily

speech. The most powerful man in the village is Comrade Wong, the widely feared local party official (despite his usually pleasant demeanor). As starvation becomes an inescapable reality, tensions build up and a crowd of

peasants spontaneously gathers to demand access to the grain storage. A riot breaks out and in the ensuing chaos, Gold Root is wounded by the militia and his daughter is trampled to death. Fleeing with her husband into the nearby hills, Moon Scent sneaks into Gold Flower’s village to beg for sanctuary but is rebuffed by the latter’s mother-in-law, who refuses to place her family in danger by harboring fugitives. Meanwhile, Gold Root drowns himself in a nearby river so as not to further endanger his wife. As peasants involved in the riot are caught and tortured, Moon Scent slips back into her village and sets the grain storage on fire. Her charred corpse is later found in the wreckage but it is unclear whether she killed herself in an act of defance or was chased into the fire by guards. With the rebellion quashed, life continues for the terrified villagers. While The Rice-Sprout Song received glowing reviews in the United States,

it was not a commercial success and fell into obscurity until the University of California Press reprinted it in 1998 with a critical introduction by David Der-wei Wang. Although it did not successfully launch Chang’s career as an English-language writer, 7he Rice-Sprout Song played an important role in reviving her reputation among Chinese readers. Just before immigrating to the United States, she sent a copy of the Chinese version to Hu Shi, who

responded by praising its literary value and complimenting “her verbal subtlety and emotive control, which are a far cry from the ‘tears and blood’ style of propaganda literature, Communist or anti-Communist” (cited in

Wang, “Foreword” xviii). Their correspondence, which Chang later included in “Yi Hu Shizhi,” marked the beginning of their friendship (a facsimile of his handwritten comments was included in some later editions of the novel). In his seminal study A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, published in English in 1961, the influential literary critic C. T. Hsia reintro-

duced Chang to Chinese readers.'? An ardent opponent of communism, Hsia proclaimed that she was “the best and most important writer in Chinese today,” and declared that 7he Rice-Sprout Song was “already to be

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The Strange Smell of Truth 33 placed among the classics of Chinese fiction” (389). Hu and Hsia’s endorse-

ments were instrumental in drawing attention to Chang’s neglected writings, even though The Rice-Sprout Song remains one of her least popular works. David Der-wei Wang suggests that in the eyes of Chinese readers, “Chang seemed to have dropped her familiar subject matter for something more epic. It also raised the eyebrows of those who insisted that great literature must transcend politics” “Foreword” viii). The Rice-Sprout Song has had a rather mixed reception among Sinophone critics. For some critics located outside mainland China, it is a masterpiece

of subtle characterization, crafted writing, and skillful treatment of traditional literary motifs. The prominent Taiwan-based public intellectual Lung Ying-tai has gone as far as to claim that The Rice-Sprout Song should be counted among the best works of Chinese, if not world, literature.!* But the novel also elicits a measure of discomfort because of its overtly political origins. Chuan C. Kao, whose studies of Chang’s fiction include an extensive comparison between the English and Chinese versions, considers it “basically a political narrative” but adds, “If 7he Rice-Sprout Song is really, as many people expect, a timeless work, it must possess an enchantment [wei/i]

that cannot be bound to the political circumstances of a single time or place” (134-135).

By contrast, critics from the mainland, where The Rice-Sprout Song is still not widely available, tend to read the novel as a piece of American propaganda that flagrantly misrepresents life under socialism. In a rhetorically colorful assessment, the veteran critic Yuan Liangjun asserts that its contents originate not in real life, but rather come from “domineering” [ feiyang bahu| foreign officials at the Hong Kong USIS (129). Classifying the novel as “greenback fiction” [/iibei xiaoshuo}, he ridicules its content for contravening the laws of realism: “if 7he Rice-Sprout Song is a romantic rhapsody or a work of fantasy, then it is acceptable to claim that the communist authorities were unpopular or about to collapse, since one cannot interfere with an authors artistic imagination. However, Chang repeatedly declared that The Rice-Sprout Song is a truthful depiction of rural China... even though this is completely not the case” (128). In a more balanced assessment, Chang scholar Song Jiahong applauds her psychological realism but argues that The Rice-Sprout Song is “wholly in accord with the needs of foreign propaganda during the 1950s” (14.4). He further asserts that the author’s

(c) 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved.

34 The Strange Smell of Truth urban background caused her to misunderstand the countryside.” Biographer Yu Qing offers a sympathetic account of her postwar career, but demonstrates disdain for the two propaganda novels: Eileen Chang was born into a declining family of feudal elites and felt an instinctual remoteness from politics; this is entirely understandable. But in order to survive, she couldn’t not write these two pre-determined novels [Rice and Naked]. They are great betrayals of art. Even though they resulted from considerations of livelihood, the price Eileen Chang paid was too heavy. (294)

Critics of different political persuasions have separated Chang’s anticommunist novels from the rest of her works on the grounds that they are awkward anomalies, thereby reinforcing her reputation as a largely apoliti-

cal writer.’ Indeed, Chang usually refused to participate in organized political activities and would later express reservations about writing for the USIS, but she remained heavily invested in The Rice-Sprout Song for the duration of her career and frequently mentioned it in interviews and essays.

After her arrival in the United States, she maintained her anti-communist sympathies and even worked as a researcher on Chinese communist propaganda at the University of California, Berkeley, between 1969 and 1972. Thus while separating politics and aesthetics has provided a means to explain the

shortcomings of her propaganda novels, these texts have been erroneously relegated as isolated exceptions rather than important examples of her lifelong engagement with the politics of realism. Unlike many of her critics, my intention is not to ascertain the degree to which her anti-communist novels are reliable repositories of historical fact; as we will see, Chang repeatedly foregrounds this question, but does so in order to reveal its ambiguity while drawing attention to the mediated nature of her realist practices. Instead of trying to pinpoint her political views, the following discussion considers how her propaganda novels complicate and even frustrate their own political objectives. In these texts, as well as the commentaries she wrote to frame them, Chang demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to the fraught conditions in which she wrote. In the Preface to the original English version of The RiceSprout Song, she tells readers that when she was still living in “Communist Shanghai,” she had come across the confession of a writer who had witnessed and written about a famine and grain riot in 1950 (“Preface” v). In retrospect,

(c) 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved.

The Strange Smell of Truth 35 the writer realized that he should not have repeated this story because it reflected his “blurriness of vision and instability of viewpoint” (v). Chang continues, “The story this man apologized for writing somehow made a deep impression on me, weighing on my mind until it merged with other things I know of. The resulting novel, my first in English, is quite unlike anything else I have ever written” (vi).'’ Chang leaves the meaning of “other things” vague, but as we have seen, many of her readers chose to ignore these nu-

ances in favor of simply attributing the novel’s authenticity to personal EXPerlence,

In her afterword to the Chinese edition, however, Chang offers a somewhat different account of the novel’s origins. She declares that even though “the characters in The Rice-Sprout Song are made up, the events are based on actual sources’ (193). She proceeds to explain that she came across her sources before she moved to Hong Kong, but they turn out to be rather scattered: they include a short story published in 1950 about a rural uprising prompted by famine; various eyewitness accounts of famine during land reform; an isolated newspaper report on famine relief in the northern city of Tianjin; and a propaganda film that featured the burning of a grain storage. Chang does not claim firsthand knowledge of the countryside but emphasizes how living in a society subject to intense censorship resulted in a fragmented understanding of what was happening around her: There were many types of iron curtains inside the iron curtain. It was entirely possible to have a complete blockage of news between the Eastern and Western districts. And many people believed the propaganda statistics in the newspapers. It seemed that whoever was literate felt a strong sense of faith in black characters printed on white paper. The Chinese Communists understood this point and were therefore particularly earnest in eradicating illiteracy. (194)

Chang launches a critique of literacy by suggesting that the authorities co-opted a tool of social empowerment to inculcate obedience among the masses. Meanwhile, her emphasis on censorship reinforces her credentials as someone who was victimized by communism. Elsewhere, Chang continues to complicate and even undermine the reliability of her fiction. In the preface to the Chinese version of Naked Earth, a novel that is more overtly anti-communist in content, she starts off with a rather peculiar passage:

(c) 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved.

36 The Strange Smell of Truth Sometimes I tell other people the outline of a story and they cannot tell its merits. I invariably add the defensive phrase “it’s true” and it seems that the value of the story immediately increases tenfold. In fact, a story’s quality is obviously not related to whether it is true or false. But I love and cherish reality to the point of superstition. I believe anyone’s experience of truth is forever meaningful, forever fresh, and will never become worn out. (3)'®

Chang begins by insisting that her story is factually true, and uses this claim to guarantee its aesthetic value. But the subsequent admission that her story

may, in fact, be less than real if not outright false undermines her initial claims and introduces another, more ambiguous, category, “quality.” By highlighting the tension between literary quality and truthfulness, Chang questions the reliability of aesthetic evaluation and turns realism into a matter of subjective experience.”

In the preface to Naked Earth, Chang declares that the novel is not a work of reportage and cannot present an “overall picture of the Mainland today” (3). Instead, it aims to “recreate as far as possible the atmosphere of the times” in the “hope that when readers read [the book], they can more or less smell a bit of real life” (3). Chang’s reference to smell—along with her description of the “forever fresh” experience of truth—indicate the importance of sensuality to her conception of realism, an emphasis that accounts for her tendency to provide excessive and superfluous details that amplify the realistic effect of her texts even as they defamiliarize what is being de-

picted. These examples indicate the complicated status of “truth” in her propaganda fiction. In Woman and Chinese Modernity, Rey Chow contexutalizes Chang’s earlier literary practices by reading them in relation to a pervasive concern with reality and realism in modern Chinese literature. Chang’s early texts refuse to affirm the humanity of their characters. Instead, “feelings of indifference dominate, giving rise to a nonanthropocentric affective structure that is often expressed through the figures of ruins and desolation” (114). To achieve these effects, Chang includes numerous sensual details in her fiction, which “block the lucid flow of narration by means of an incongruity between the details and what they are supposed to describe” (113).°” Her propaganda novels continue this approach by deploying sensual details to draw attention to the mediated act of writing. In The Rice-Sprout Song, such details seem, at least initially, to reinforce the novel’s factual accuracy. There are numerous references to indoctrination practices instigated by the communist regime. The title of the novel,

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The Strange Smell of Truth 27 for example, is derived from a folk dance used by the communists to express mass enthusiasm for the party. Chang depicts how revolutionary terminology infiltrated daily speech as well as the methods through which the party exercised control over daily life. The English version contains additional details that confirm the novel’s ethnographic mandate. For example, terms such as “cadre” or “new relative” are accompanied or replaced by italicized phonetic transcriptions. At times, the text presumes that its audience is unfamiliar with the basic contours of modern Chinese history. When the novel depicts a fawning Big Aunt, it adds a brief history lesson: “Ai, everything is fine now! .. . . If not for Chairman Mao we would never have this day! We will go on suffering, I don’t know how long, if our comrades in the Kémingtang had not come!” Big Aunt mixed up Kunch’antang, Communists, with Kémingtang, revolutionists, which only meant the early revolutionaries who had overthrown the Manchu dynasty, back when Big Aunt was a young girl. So she persisted in referring to the Communists as Kémingtang and sometimes even as Kuomintang, the Nationalists who had been chased over to Formosa. (ts)

While this passage is meant to satirize Big Aunt’s verbal confusion, its clumsy mixture of transcription, translation, and commentary obscures the author's

intent. This predicament is, naturally, missing from the Chinese version, which omits commonly known background.*' Perhaps even more interesting are the many details that bear no obvious relationship to the novel’s political or ethnographic project. For example, descriptions of toilets and excretion occur with peculiar frequency in opening chapters. The opening paragraph describes a row of “exactly identical privies” that “had a deserted air despite the occasional whiff of faint odor in the wind” (1). Only after this odd opening image does Chang go on to describe the T’an village and introduce the main characters. She returns to scatological themes in the opening pages of the next three chapters. In Chapter 2, Gold Flower’s wedding procession is watched by an old man “sitting on a small stone well topped by two boards, an open-air commode by the wayside” (12). Chapter 3 begins with Gold Root taking his young daughter outside to urinate, when Moon Scent’s unexpected return “made him whirl sharply around so that the child splashed warm urine all over his foot” (27).

In Chapter 4, Moon Scent recalls how she “stepped on the droppings left by a stray dog” (43) while trying to find her house at night.

(c) 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. All rights reserved.

38 The Strange Smell of Truth Such details illustrate Chang’s desire to communicate the “smell of life,” but they also seem oddly irrelevant. The most striking use of sensual details occurs in a memorable chapter that features a moment-by-moment description of a pig slaughter. To set the stage for this grim event, Chang prefaces this chapter with a scene of domestic violence. When the authorities declare that each household must contribute food or money to the families of soldiers, the starving villagers are reluctant to respond. Comrade Wong pressures Gold Root to take the lead and they get into a heated argument, to the great consternation of Moon Scent. As the situation escalates, she inter-

rupts them and hands over some money she had earned in Shanghai but had kept hidden from her husband. After Wong leaves, a humiliated Gold Root retaliates by beating his wife (in the Chinese version, Moon Scent’s mouth is left bleeding). After he storms off, Big Aunt quietly tells her that because Big Uncle has no extra money, he will have to give up his pig instead. By placing the slaughter of the pig immediately after this scene, Chang

seems to draw a parallel between Moon Scent and the ill-fated pig. The slaughter itself, however, turns out to be a grisly spectacle that detracts from the political message of the novel. Not only does Chang describe every gruesome moment in detail, but she does so in a strange and often macabre tone. After Big Uncle slits the pig’s throat, it

went right on calling out with undiminished volume. .. . And the sound never changed—always a flat, expressionless, grating cry, uglier than a horse’s neigh. But it was considered bad luck when the pig screamed too much, so toward the end Big Uncle put out a hand to hold its mouth. After a while it made a low grunt as if saying: No use arguing with these people. And it became silent. (125)

Once cut off, the pig’s head looks “alarmingly human” with its “laughing face, the merry little eyes squeezed into curved slits” and the villagers display “a somewhat grotesque sense of fun” by “[making] the slain pig hold its curly little tail in its mouth with a playful, kittenish air” (127). All this is watched by a crowd of spectators that includes a “cadaverous” old man who looks on while eating a bowl of rice gruel (127). Like the old man, readers are drawn into the scene like voyeurs. But while the peasants are fixated on the pig, the narrative freely shifts our attention among various details. We are told, for example, that Big Uncle wears flaxen bags in order to keep

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The Strange Smell of Truth 39 warm. When the text adds that the bags were of the same yellow shade as a dog, our attention is immediately directed to a nearby dog licking the blood spilling out from the slaughtered pig. These narrative techniques produce a jarring realism that is juxtaposed against a sensational plot. After the slaughter, Big Uncle vows never to own

a pig again, but his wife quickly reminds him that he had said the same thing during the Japanese occupation. The novel then launches into a flashback to that period, to a moment when soldiers from the army of the collaborationist puppet government descended on the village to conscript the young men.** Fearing for the safety of their son, whose English name is awkwardly rendered as Gold Have Got, Big Aunt and Big Uncle conceal him under a pile of hay and hide their pig on a bed by covering it with a blanket. They then place a pair of shoes next to the bed to make the pig look like a

sleeping woman.” Their plans go terribly wrong when the pig begins to move, which draws the soldiers’ attention to the shoes by the bed. Believing that they found a “/ua ku niung [or] flowerlike maid,” they end up stealing the pig (134). Eventually, they also apprehend Gold Have Got, who is never seen again. In an oddly detached tone, the novel emphasizes the cruelty of

the villagers in the aftermath of the abduction as they spread rumors that deserters from the puppet army were punished by having their ears cut off: “People could not help smiling as they passed [the rumor] around. There was something funny in the idea of having one’s ears cut off. But it was not funny to Big Uncle’s family” (139). For their part, the T’an family rarely told others what happened to their son because “it would cast doubts on the chastity of their daughter-in-law. People might have a sneaking suspicion that the soldiers did find her, after all, and that the family were [sic] just saying they never found her, to save face” (139).

From a thematic perspective, this chapter depicts an economy in which pigs and people alike are sacrificed to buy the safety of others, a pattern that is repeated seven years later when another pig is given up to stave off the wrath of those in power. The text exposes the cowardliness of those who acquiesce to and benefit from these exchanges. But Chang’s excessive and alienating literary practices produce a different effect by calling attention to her narrative interventions, making her political message seem forced. In a letter to Hu Shi written in 1955, Chang reveals that she added the pig chapter after finishing the novel to lengthen the manuscript according to the requirements of her American publishers.* The supplementary status of

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4O The Strange Smell of Truth this chapter underscores its ambiguous relationship with the rest of the text. In a manner that evokes her preface to Naked Earth, it mobilizes different modes of realism that clash with one another so as to undermine the assumption that the novel offers what one reviewer calls “honest and shrewd reporting.»

Sentimental Melodrama or Propaganda? By highlighting the limits of realism, Chang draws our attention to a prob-

lem that Lukacs had confronted earlier in his famous essay “Narrate or Describe?” (1936). There, Lukacs criticizes naturalist writers such as Zola and Flaubert for replacing narration with description. For all their technical accomplishments and revolutionary sympathies, he argues, they get fixated on facts and details without discerning the interactive relationships between social structures and the psychologies of individual characters. As a result, they fail to portray the social world as a historically dynamic total-

ity, an insight that Lukacs attributes to other writers such as Balzac and Tolstoy despite their more conservative politics. Naturalism, in this reading, is symptomatic of an epistemological crisis in capitalism characterized by an inability to grasp and represent the underlying structures of modernity; characters are reduced to passive observers, a paralyzing condition in which knowledge and action become severed from each other.

Lukacs’s point is that mimetic modes of writing are disempowering if they do not offer a coherent social critique or articulate an adequate agent of social change. While these arguments come across as problematically prescriptive in his literary criticism, I cite them here in order to diagnose Chang’s treatment of knowledge, subjectivity, and action in The Rice-Sprout Song.” Although the novel is a work of anti-communist propaganda, its use of excessive description and its inclusion of a superfluous scene that cannot easily be integrated into the overall plot strains its overall coherence and diverts the reader’s attention away from the underlying political message. While it might be a stretch to argue that Chang seeks to openly subvert the propaganda novel, I want to suggest that what The Rice-Sprout Song shows are the unruly effects of her realist practices.

When the novel depicts peasants as observers who gather around the dying pig and even obtain a certain perverse pleasure from watching its

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The Strange Smell of Truth AI

death, it recalls Lukacs’s charge that in naturalism, “characters are merely spectators” (116).*° To be sure, Chang insists that those oppressed under communism are not deceived by official propaganda. Even though they are compelled to pay lip service to the party, the peasants’ experience of poverty and starvation endows them with the ability to grasp the nature of their oppression. Chang’s peasant characters possess a degree of epistemological privilege unavailable to party members such as Comrade Wong, who desperately cling to the delusions of socialism. As Preston Schoyer writes in his review, “perhaps [Zhe Rice-Sprout Song's] most

arresting revelation is that the people, the half-fearful, half-resentful peasantry, are less deceived by the massive deception Communism represents than the Communists themselves. The Chinese farmer, after all, measures governments not in terms of glorious futures but of today’s rice bowl” (18).

However, the novel pays far more attention to the psychological dynamics and, more important, the flaws of its characters: Gold Root has a violent temper, Moon Scent is selfish and greedy, Big Aunt is a calculating sycophant, Big Uncle is a spineless coward, and so on. This focus on unseemly character traits stems from Chang’s interest in psychological interiority (the voyeurism of the peasants is thus presented as another character flaw rather than a sign of their passivity). As we saw earlier, the tragic story of Gold

Have Got turns into a drama about rumors and chastity, resulting in an unsatisfactory conclusion that diverts from the story's anti-totalitarian premises. The Rice-Sprout Song refuses to idealize the peasants as moral or political heroes or to depict how their knowledge can be turned into action. Instead, it turns what otherwise might be a heroic narrative of resistance into a sentimental romance that foregrounds psychological realism in ways

that ultimately render the political message of the novel unwieldy and unconvincing. These tensions are especially evident in the final chapters of The RiceSprout Song. After Moon Scent’s pleas for sanctuary are rebuffed, she returns to the hills to find her wounded husband. But when she arrives at the

spot where she had left him, he is nowhere to be found. Afraid that he has been mauled by wolves, she frantically searches for his remains until she suddenly discovers his padded jacket on the bank of a nearby stream. The novel tells us, “In a moment she understood as well as if he had spoken to her’:

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A2 The Strange Smell of Truth His jacket, though old, was still serviceable, so he left it to her. He wanted her to have a fair chance of getting away. He must have known that his wound was more serious than she was willing to admit. He never said anything about it. But now that she thought back, just before she left him under that tree . . . she had felt his fingers close around her ankle with what seemed then to be a childish impulsiveness, and he had held on to her as if he did not want her to go. She realized now that that was his moment of indecision. The feel of his fingers around her ankle was so real and solid, the moment so close at hand and yet forever out of reach, it drove her nearly frantic. (161)

The plot remains somewhat hazy at this point, and we are only told two chapters later that Gold Root had drowned in the river. While the novel implies that his death was an act of altruistic self-sacrifice, it withholds key plot details in order to emphasize Moon Scent’s feelings of devastation. In this manner, Chang turns the scene into a sentimental melodrama and relegates her political message to the background. After this scene, Chang adds several episodes in which Gold Flower and Big Aunt vow to follow traditional mourning practices in order to appease the restless spirits of Good Root and Moon Scent. The novel presents these promises cynically by suggesting that these acts of mourning are merely

meant to salve the guilty conscience of the T’an family. Indeed, these themes appear to be something of an afterthought, and much of this material only appears in the English version. These episodes reinforce Chang’s overall moral pessimism. While Gold Root and Moon Scent seem to be admirable characters, their acts of defiance and sacrifice have questionable political efficacy. In any case, they are rare exceptions in a world in which cowardice and complicity are so deeply engrained as to cast doubt on the possibility of emancipation and social change. Instead, the text concludes with a desolate emotional landscape, an emptiness that, in ways that recall Chang’s earlier fiction, precludes any faith in human agency. When director Sidney Lumet turned The Rice-Sprout Song into a television drama in 1957 for CBS’s program Studio One, he modified the plot substantially, perhaps with an eye to smoothing out its difficulties.*’ In the television version, all pigs were deleted and the story was rewritten to focus on the marital tensions between Gold Root and Moon Scent. Mirroring American anxi-

eties about gender and domesticity during this period, Moon Scent’s selfearned wealth provokes a crisis of masculinity in her husband. Gold Root

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The Strange Smell of Truth 43 refuses to accept her money and pathetically declares that although “the woman is free to leave her husband” in the new China, “[he is] not so free that [he does] not miss [Moon Scent].” During the riot he is quickly shot to death; afterward, Gold Flower reluctantly agrees to take care of his daughter

(who, unlike her fate in the novel, survives) but refuses to give refuge to Moon Scent. The episode ends melodramatically with Moon Scent calling out to the spirit of her husband, begging him to forgive the cowardice of “this whole wide land of China.” The television version flattens out much of the novel's ambiguity by conveying an unambiguously anti-communist message.

But the results are anything but satisfactory. In the opening shot, the title

on the screen tells us that we are watching a story set in “Communist China—1957,° but while updating the setting may have made the program more timely, it obscured the crucial background of land reform. The adaptation also omits any mention of the rice-sprout song, thereby rendering the title meaningless. Add to all this the stilted dialogue, clumsy names, unconvincing sets, ads for sponsor Westinghouse, and close-ups of white actors in yellow face (no Asians appeared in the episode), and it is not dificult to comprehend why, when Chang watched the program with her friends at the McDowell Artists Colony in New Hampshire, she reportedly found it “pitiful.””®

Ethnicity in Transit At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that while Chang’s thematic and political concerns were different from those that would later animate the invention of Asian American literature, she is significant to Asian Amer-

ican literary history because she offers a comparative vantage point from which to consider the range of subject positions available to writers engaged

in depicting Asia for American readerships (I will return to the topic of comparison in Chapter 5). My examination of The Rice-Sprout Song has focused on two figures, the exiled native informant and the oppressed peasant;

both derive a measure of epistemological and moral authority from their subjugated status. In this sense, they might be read as precursors to Asian American identity. My point is not to elide their differences, but rather to sketch out a representational terrain in which they operate, a terrain marked by long-standing histories of Orientalism as well as the specific geopolitics of the Cold War. For her part, Chang emphasizes the failure to integrate

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AA The Strange Smell of Truth

knowledge and action, leading to an abandonment of the political that turns The Rice-Sprout Song into a meditation on the limits of realism and propaganda. To conclude this chapter, I consider one more subject position, that of the translator, and how it informs Chang’s treatment of ethnic identity. For Chang, translation is a form of creative and intellectual labor, a strategy for survival, as well as an existential condition necessitated by the quotidian crossing of linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries. It involves the strengthening and entrenchment of cultural differences even as such distinctions become destabilized. In Translation and Subjectivity, Naoki Sakai argues that the assumed unity of languages, and the societies and cultures they underscore, emerges and unravels in the process of translation, which constitutes a zone of indeterminacy in which “every utterance can fail to communicate because heterogeneity is inherent in any medium, linguistic or otherwise” (8). As distinctions such as addresser versus addressee break down,

the translator embodies the “oscillation or indeterminacy of personality in translation’: Translation introduces a disjunctive instability into the putatively personal relations among the agents of speech, writing, listening, and reading. In respect to personal relationality as well as to the addresser/addressee structure, the translator must be internally split and multiple, and devoid of a stable positionality. At best, she can be a subject in transit, first because the translator cannot be an “individual” in the sense of individuum in order to perform translation, and second because she is a singular that marks an elusive point of discontinuity in the social, whereas translation is the practice of creating continuity at that singular point of discontinuity. Translation is an instance of continuity in discontinuity and a poietic social practice that institutes a relation at the site of incommensurability. (13; emphasis in original)

As a subject that inheres in the gap between addresser and addressee, the translator is “devoid of a stable positionality” even as she remains singular. In Chang’s writings, the interplay between singularity and indeterminacy is turned inward as she engages in self-translation, whether in the immediate sense of having to translate her fiction from Chinese to English and vice versa, or in the broader sense of translating her own culture for a Western readership. These acts often take place in contexts in which the distinction between China and the West is taken for granted. But while Chang never imagines

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The Strange Smell of Truth AS herself as anything but Chinese—she does not think of herself as American

or Chinese American—her excessive interest in the instabilities of this category highlights its discontinuity despite the semblance of singularity. Using Sakai’s terms, we might say that Chang articulates ethnic subjectivity in transit; if being a Chinese exile in the United States during the early Cold War period enmeshed her in restrictive assumptions about ethnicity, her writing reveals the slippages and inconsistencies of her identity, and the psychic and emotional consequences of inhabiting such uncertainties on a daily basis. In a posthumously published Chinese essay titled “Yi jiu ba ba zhi —?”

(“1988 to —?”), Chang recalls an episode in which she finds the words “Wee and Dee, 1988—?” written in English on a bus shelter bench in Southern California (67). She proceeds to imagine these words as the inscriptions of a working-class Chinese immigrant waiting for the bus, a situation, she adds, that indicates his lower socio-economic status. Her reflections soon get caught up in a flurry of transliteration and translation (I have translated the following passage rather literally to convey her train of thought): (Wei and Di, 1988 to — ?) [Chang transliterates the English words into two Chinese phonetic equivalents]; there is an English girl’s name, Dee, but this “Di” and this “Wei” or “Wei” [Chang uses two homonym characters] when put together should be the surnames of Chinese people. . . . The Mandarin transliteration of “Wei” or “Wei” is a bit different than [what is written] here, so it must be an Overseas Chinese. The names of Overseas Chinese are often spelt uniquely according to Fujian or Cantonese dialects. Di might be Dai [a more common surname], Wei or Wei might be another common surname. It’s entirely impossible to figure out. (67)

Caught up in a moment of ethnic recognition that might well just be misrecognition, Chang conveys the discrepancy between the written sign—all the more ephemeral since the grafhti was written with chalk—and its sound. She goes on to concoct a rather amusing explanation for what she sees: Eastern people [dongfang ren] are rather reserved . . . I have never seen writing like this from Eastern people, especially Chinese. Perhaps he got impatient waiting for the bus . . . plus he was afraid of being late for work, and the more he fretted the longer it seemed. After a while, all he could feel was the pressure of time; he couldn't see or hear anything and was in such low spirits that he was going crazy. He was so bored that he took

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46 The Strange Smell of Truth from his pocket the chalk he had taken from below the blackboard of his English class and exposed what was on his heart: “Wei and Dai, 1988 to — ?” [Chang writes this in Chinese] (68)

Chang’s interest in the grafhti turns into a matter of ethnic identification, an emotional attachment that, one cannot help but speculate, is fuelled by her own, albeit chosen, isolation. Although the premise of the story as a whole seems somewhat shaky, it conveys a phantasmatic but deeply held sense of ethnic identity that erupts at unexpected moments. I would like to draw an unlikely parallel between Chang’s treatment of “Chineseness” and a classic trope in Asian American literary criticism. In the preface to Aiiieeeee!, the editors accuse immigrant Chinese writers of being native informants and cultural translators who are complicit in Orientalism (Chin et al.). In response, they turn the title of John Okada’s novel of Japanese American internment, No-No Boy, into a metaphor for Asian American identity by resignifying its double negative into a rejection of both America and Asia. Unlike the editors’ desire to turn these negations into a positive identity, Chang suggests another understanding of “no-no,” one that unsettles the coherence of both American and Chinese identities even while retaining them in name and thereby seeming to reinforce their stability. Her treatment of ethnic identity in transit exposes the fraught nature of ethnic categories while using language that reiterates them. In Asian American literary history, this kind of nuanced positionality was foreclosed with the rigid split between Asia and America insisted on by cultural nationalism. As Josephine Park has insightfully observed, cultural nationalist critics strenuously rejected the Orientalist tradition in American writing in order to base their newfound identity on a politics of anti-racism, which required an embrace of America over Asia. But traces of that tradition continue to inform Asian American literature and produce a crisis of representation when it comes to depicting Asia, a problem that cultural nationalism tried to contain by excluding those with different aesthetic and political commitments from their countercanon.*? Reading Eileen Chang as an Asian American writer alerts us to a different set of strategies used to por-

tray Asia for a Cold War American readership, and the role of identity in accounting for access to this knowledge and the ability to represent such information. Recalling the well-known equation of translation with betrayal, cultural nationalism’s proscription against translation marks Chang

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The Strange Smell of Truth AT

as a traitor to the kinds of politics that would eventually define Asian American writing. But if her uncanny ability to turn the condition of being on the wrong side of history into a source of creativity endeared her to legions of devoted Chinese-language readers, then recovering her as an Asian American writer might at the very least interrogate how the terms “Asian” and “American” can come together and the necessary acts of translation that make this pairing possible.

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TWO

The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

If the Asian American movement remains the originary event of Asian American Studies, then it is not surprising that critics and scholars who seek to interrogate identity politics have frequently focused on cultural nationalism. According to Lane Hirabayashi and Marilyn Alquizola, Cultural nationalism entails an “ethnic nationalist ideology” . . . which highlights “unique” cultural traits based on language, history, and values. Ethnic specificity is thus the hallmark of cultural nationalism requiring the militant promotion of a unique ethnic identity (note the singular form here), as well as the prioritization of cultural preservation and “community control” —especially economic and political control over neighborhoods or communities which were ideally, territorially based. (358)

Although the political objectives of cultural nationalism continue to inform Asian American Studies, critics have repeatedly exposed the nativism,

misogyny, and homophobia embedded in its constructions of identity. The power of Lisa Lowe’s landmark essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, and

Multiplicity” lies in its equation of cultural nationalism with the racist ideologies it ostensibly opposes. Lowe writes, “The essentializing of Asian

American identity [in cultural nationalism] reproduces oppositions that subsume other nondominant groups in the same way that Asians and other groups are marginalized by the dominant culture” (71; emphasis added).

48

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism AQ

But as Jingi Ling has argued, the critique of identity politics, while valuable in and of itself, has inadvertently turned cultural nationalism into an ahistorical abstraction by homogenizing the debates that it encompassed (25-28). To a large degree, this reductive approach indicates the continuing influence of Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974),

widely understood as the exemplary text of cultural nationalism. There, the editors—Frank Chin, Lawson Inada, Jeffery Paul Chan, and Shawn Wong—forcefully assert an authentic Asian American identity distinct from

both American and Asian cultures. Their polemics enshrined an oppositional subject who is male, heterosexual, and working class, a subject embodied by writers such as Carlos Bulosan, John Okada, Louis Chu, and Toshio Mori, whom they elevated along with others into a literary countercanon. In a revisionist account of this project, Mark Chiang contends that Asian American literature emerged as a formation distinct from mainstream writing by relying on its oppositional politics to generate sufficient cultural capital to sustain itself. In doing so, it placed the autonomy and integrity of the literary at risk by subjecting it to the demands of politics. The editors, however, were ultimately concerned with maintaining aesthetic autonomy, which required them to maintain an uneasy distance from politics without falling into an apolitical aestheticism. Literature, in other words, was a vehicle for political contestation as well as a potentially fatal barrier to these commitments.

This chapter explores the fraught status of literature by tracing cultural nationalist engagements with time and temporality. Insofar as cultural nationalist critics and writers were invested in the mimetic capabilities of literature and the possibility of realism, they repeatedly sought to align textual content with the historical terrain in which praxis is actualized. Realism, in other words, demands a close connection between the temporality of the text and the time of history. Furthermore, cultural nationalism posited an idealized critical subject for whom the history and realities of racism are accessible as knowledge. Time, in other words, is a condition that this subject must grasp and the condition in which he or she acts. ‘The promise of the Asian American subject lies in his or her ability to imagine and actualize a future free from racism, a time when Asian Americans will no longer be an oppressed minority. By taking up the topic of time, this chapter tries to explain why literature turned out to be such a vexed concept for cultural

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50 The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

nationalism. I turn first to a less-known critic, Bruce Iwasaki, who was closely identified with the Asian American movement before considering how Frank Chin’s obsession with the failure of identity is rooted in his engagement with the temporal protocols of literature.

“Literature and Experience Become the Same Thing”

Around the time that the Aiiieeeee! editors were assembling what would become the dominant version of cultural nationalism, activist-critic Bruce Iwasaki published essays on literature in two field-defining multidisciplinary anthologies, Roots: An Asian American Reader (1972) and Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (1976). Despite the importance of these texts to the nascent field of Asian American Studies, his essays have received relatively little attention from critics, an oversight that might be explained by their rather rigid approach to politics and literature.’ I revisit them here to outline what was theoretically and politically at stake in the cultural nationalist literary project. The first essay, “Response and Change for the Asian in America: A Survey of Asian American Literature,” offers a broad survey of twentieth-century Asian American writing and argues that their “self-reflexivity” indicates how “the social experience of Asians is closely tied to the subject [and] form of the literature” (89). For Iwasaki, literary form and cultural identity are both conditioned by racism: Once again the central concerns of Asian American literature—conflicts of adjustment, isolation, alienation due to racism, i.e., Asian identity— encapsulate, and even determine the form (sometimes even the presence) of the work itself. That is, the different responses to the Asian experience are not only reflected in the subject of this literature, but also in the manner this literary response is undertaken and explored. (93)

Asian American identity and literature are both “defined in relation to the majority culture, whether it is in opposition to, or in agreement with it” (93). But because these relations have been marred by racism, “Asian American literature, whose theme is ‘identity’ has as yet no identity by itself; Asian American literature, a response to racism, has its form greatly dictated by the racism in the society. No exit” (93). In light of the still unformed

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism 5I

nature of Asian American identity and culture, Iwasaki is skeptical about their viability in the present and defers their actualization to the future, thereby placing his cultural politics in a teleological timeframe. Iwasaki does not entirely foreclose the aesthetic dimension of literature. When he discusses works by Diana Chang and Wing Tek Lum, for example, he lauds their formal accomplishments as well as their ability to produce “beautiful art” (95). But he also contends that they write “safe” poetry that “does not confront change” or challenge “oppressive social-literary experience” (95).7 These claims support his underlying claim that the only way to overcome the racist shadow of Anglo-American literary culture is through “closer involvement with the very roots of the Asian experience (both subject and mode of the literature)” (98). Only then can the “merging of political action and literature” be achieved: Literature and literary criticism then, instead of numbing the reader of his capacity to struggle realistically with social problems, can unleash the creative force and human potential that make qualitative social change possible. Thus, revolutionary political action and the expression of universal experience in, say, poetry become as one. Literature and change no longer describe each other—they become the same thing. (98; emphasis in original)

Like Asian American identity, the integration of literature and praxis occurs in a future to be attained through activism. Their merging would spell the end of literature as an autonomous entity, a point that foregrounds the separation between literature and politics in the present moment. These themes return in Iwasaki’s introduction to the literature section of Counterpoint (hereafter referred to as “Introduction”). There, he begins by asserting that white critics have practiced an insidious form of racism by dismissing Asian American writing as inferior on the grounds that it does not measure up to the standards of great literature. Seeking to establish a critical framework for his investigation, he continues: “Asian American literature represents, I think, the suds, the above surface manifestation of the churning psycho-cultural frictions and social-political conflicts which Asian communities take part in, in the process of becoming Asian America” (452). Iwasaki then turns his attention to the role of the author: The writer views the Situation from the historical perspective of the moment. He or she makes propositions about this condition, and mustering

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52 The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism up all the honest insight available, strives to make them useful, valid, interesting, and maybe even pretty. The writer’s definition of the scope, causes and consequences of our hour’s follies, prospects, terrors and charms influences the extent to which the reader is engaged with this outlook. . .. Thus I impose upon the writer an active duty to know his or her time—which duty implies social choices one can simply not evade. The critic’s duty is the same. (453)

Here, the author is invested with the ability to “know his or her time”; he or she is bound by a sense of duty to the political demands of the present moment in its full historical meaning.° As the subject of this temporal awareness, the writer turns this knowledge into a literature appropriate for his or her community. Works of litera-

ture, Iwasaki writes, “are mediated by the artist and the artist’s courage and understanding of the experiences of his or her people. The artist unifies these experiences to and through symbols seized for that purpose. This is the development of a sensibility” “Introduction” 463). The emergence of the Asian American writer therefore stands in for the emergence of Asian American identity more generally, a claim that illustrates Kandice Chuh’s observation that “identity is a teleological narrative as used in a politics of identity, one that posits a common origin and looks toward a common destiny” (/magine Otherwise 33). For Iwasaki, this destiny involves the decisive abolition of the gap between literary expression and lived experience: “For those of us concerned about the relevance of litera-

ture, in this particular journey into the self, literature is no mimesis, no formalized representation of experience: literature and experience become the same thing” (“Introduction” 457). Even mimesis remains problematic because it assumes, and even formalizes, the gap between text and context; when “literature and experience become the same thing,” this distinction would no longer be relevant. To state the same logic differently, the persistence of representation as a problem is itself an indication that the political desires of cultural nationalism remain unrealized at the present moment. Despite this seemingly dogmatic stance, Iwasaki remains intrigued by the idiosyncrasies of literary representation. This concern is especially tell-

ing when we recall that the introduction appears in an anthology that largely consists of historical and sociological materials. Iwasaki writes,

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism 53 Literature adds a nonquantifiable way of feeling about Asian America. It supplements what the scholarly studies in the rest of this book can provide. On the other hand, maybe it’s the opposite: Anybody can see that you learn more about identity from Lawson Inada than [sociologist] Harry Kitano. Hmmmm. ‘Then again, maybe there’s no comparison. . . . Literature, in its expression of the subtleties of human relationships, may simply hold the only way to get some things said. (456)

Iwasaki posits a categorical distinction between literature and empirical knowledge—between poetry and sociology as it were—by defining the knowledge offered by literature as “unquantifiable” because it appeals to “feelings” rather than facts. Literature cannot be reduced to politics, but this claim can only be reconciled with his overall desire to completely integrate the two by once again deferring that end to a distant future. In the present, the existence of literature as such poses an aesthetic and political conundrum that remains unresolved. Instead of dwelling on this problem, Iwasaki redirects his focus to the figure of the author. In the context of his revolutionary commitments, this emphasis marks something of a departure from his political and intellectual influences. Iwasaki repeatedly cites the writings of Mao Zedong, but inflects

them in a manner that turns out to diverge from Mao’s original texts. We can see this divergence by comparing his essays to “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (1942), Mao’s most influential statement on the

arts.* Delivered at a conference of writers and artists held in the communists wartime base of Yan’an, the “Talks” call for the subordination of the arts to the revolution. For Mao, the primary problem with artists and writers is their ideological stance, which is steeped in bourgeois thinking. Consequently, he insists on the need to adopt the class stance of workers, peasants, and soldiers by becoming intimately familiar with their language, lifestyles, and thinking through a “long and even painful process of tempering” (208): China’s revolutionary writers and artists . . . must for a long time unreservedly and whole-heartedly go among the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers, go into the heat of the struggle, go to the only source, the broadest and richest source, in order to observe, experience, study and analyse all the different kinds of people, all the classes, all the masses, all the vivid patterns of life and struggle, all the raw materials of literature and art. (216—217)

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54 The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

Yet Mao also recognizes the specificity of art when he points out that “while both [life and art] are beautiful, life as reflected in works of literature and art can and ought to be a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, more typical, nearer the ideal, and therefore more universal than actual everyday life.” Because of these characteristics, writers and artists play a key role in “awaken|ing] the masses, fir[ing] them with enthusiasm

and impel[ling] them to unite and struggle to transform their environment’ (217). The goal of the “Talks” is to promote “the unity of politics and art, the unity of content and form, the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form” (225). Iwasaki, as we have

seen, shares these objectives and advocates closer involvement with the roots of Asian American experience, but he pays little attention to the class privilege of writers. Instead, he focuses by and large on those he considers to be successful writers, who already possess intimate knowledge of their communities and successfully convey this information through literature. In the introduction, he praises John Okada for his “wondrous capturing of Nisei speech,” and when discussing Carlos Bulosan, he applies Mao’s state-

ment from the Little Red Book that “the primary task for writers and artists is ‘to understand people and know them well’” and declares, “Bulosan knew from inside” (459). In short, Iwasaki identifies examples of politically enlightened writers and elevates them into models for Asian American literature, thereby turning Mao’s prescriptive program into a normative description of the Asian American writer. In the end, the elevation of the Asian American writer into an ideal political subject produces an unwieldy argu-

ment that claims the existence of model authors while arguing that Asian American literature has yet to emerge in its own right; in other words, Iwasaki asserts the existence of an Asian American literary tradition while deferring Asian American literature to an emancipated future that has yet to arrive.

Literature functions here as a means to conceptualize the present and future prospects of Asian American identity. Iwasaki conceives this identity as wholly separate from mainstream American culture and locates its emergence in a global anti-colonial struggle that represents the progress of world history, thereby borrowing a teleological historicism that can also be easily found in writings by figures such as Mao Zedong and Frantz Fanon. In this

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism 55 spirit, “Introduction” concludes with the following: “To codify and assimilate a people’s experience from a people’s symbols is to shape a sensibility. The aggregate of commonly rooted—and routed—sensibilities in print make a literary tradition; we are just beginning to discover ours. I say we need this tradition. Not for its own sake, but for the sake of our history and our future” (463). Embracing an understanding of time as a continuous stream that integrates past, present, and future, Iwasaki understands the present as a decisive moment in which racism and imperialism can be overcome

through revolutionary praxis. The problem with this temporal framework, however, is that it ultimately grants no role for literature unless it can be subsumed under the demands of identity politics. Moments in which the status of literature comes to the forefront are telling precisely because they sideline his train of thought. Literature, it seems, gets in the way of literary criticism by exceeding the temporal and political bounds of historicism. Iwasaki’s treatment of time stands as a marked contrast to the tendency in contemporary literary and cultural studies to locate minority cultures in alternative temporalities that unsettle teleological modes of historicism. This arguably dominant understanding of time might explain why his essays are rarely read in contemporary Asian American literary studies while Prank Chin, whose writings demonstrate a more nuanced and conflicted understanding of temporality, continues to elicit widespread fascination. Nevertheless, Iwasaki’s literary criticism illuminates the theoretical difhculties that stem from cultural nationalism’s attempts to imagine a political role for literature, a task that also preoccupies Chin’s writings. The rest of this chapter develops this comparison by considering how Chin’s treatment of literary form reveals the fraught temporality of cultural nationalist politics.

Truncated Futures and Temporal Palimpsests

Chin’s writings display an obsession with the literary that frequently unsettles his political commitments, relegating them to an idiom of failure. His angst-ridden desire for literary achievement ends up fragmenting the temporal frameworks he deploys precisely because his identity politics

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56 The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

unravels in the terrain of the text. In his widely anthologized short story “Railroad Standard Time,” the relationship between identity and time is rendered explicitly antagonistic. First published in 1978 and later included in the collection The Chinaman Pacific & Frisco R.R. Co. (1988), “Railroad” is a distillation and compilation of themes and motifs that recur frequently in Chin’s early fiction, drama, and criticism. The text consists of a series of

vignettes from the life of an unnamed Chinese American male narrator interspersed with commentaries on Asian American cultural politics. The story begins when the narrator is a teenager. After his maternal grandmother’s funeral, his mother gives him a railroad watch once owned by her father. The narrator wears it as an adult while working various jobs, during his wedding, and during the subsequent dissolution of his family when his white wife leaves him and takes their children with her. As the story comes to a close, he is driving back to Oakland Chinatown to attend his mother’s funeral.

Chin depicts time as an unsettling force, the root cause of the narrator’s inability to secure a future in a racialized society while struggling to recover a usable Chinese American past. Chin’s engagement with time is informed by his vehement insistence on patrilineal reproduction, the continuation of a family line through male heirs. In many of his works, patrilineal reproduction is the primary mechanism through which the future is imagined and enacted. As critics have repeatedly noted, this investment is based on misogynist and homophobic prejudices,’ but patrilineal reproduction is also a complex figure, a “symbolic matrix,” Mark Chiang suggests, through which “to express ideas of authorship” in the context of “establishing and defining the Asian American literary field” (1so). The fact that many of Chin’s early works depict the failure and/or impossibility of patrilineal reproduction is directly related to his pervasive anxiety about the uncertain prospects of Asian American literature. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman argues that modern politics is based on “reproductive futurism,’ a fantasy in which reproduction is taken to be the only, and therefore the incontrovertible, means of guaranteeing a better, or indeed any, future. Reproductive futurism preserves “the absolute privilege of heteronormativity” (3) in the form of a politics invested in the “substantialization of identity, which is always oppositionally defined, and, by extension, of history as a linear narrative

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism 7 (the poor man’s teleology) in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself{— as itself—through time” (4; emphasis in original).° Edelman theorizes reproductive futurism as a problem of narrative, which consists “of form as such, of an order, an organization, that assures the stability of our identities as subjects” (7). The promise of politics is a future in which “the subject's alienation would vanish into the seamlessness of identity,’ a promise that is

most prominently communicated through the figure of the child and the futurity it connotes (8). Against this reproductive logic, Edelman forcefully asserts a queer politics, or more precisely a queering of politics, that refuses “politics as the governing fantasy of realizing, in an always indefinite future, Imaginary identities foreclosed by our constitutive subjection to the signifier” (17). In its place, he recovers the repetitive character of the death drive as “resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure” (3). While it may seem odd to associate the overtly homophobic Frank Chin with a queer politics, the fact that “Railroad” and other writings from this period repeatedly depict the failure of patrilineal reproduction suggests the presence of a queer subtext despite his intentions.’ Chin explicitly blames the failure of patrilineal descent on racism and, more specifically, the feminization of Asian American men that has ruined normative familial reproduction. In the introduction to AiZiieeeee!, the editors assert that a “constant

theme in Asian American literature... is the failure of Asian American manhood to express itself in its simplest form: fathers and sons” (35). By contrast, white authors and characters can access intergenerational narratives in which the son rebels “against the accepted past” and “[strikes] out for the future, to dare the unknown” (36). This oedipal structure is unavailable to Asian American men who, lacking a coherent past, cannot imagine the future as anything but a relentlessly futile search for identity. The problem, then, is not that the future is unknowable per se but rather that it is already known as the inescapable repetition of the racist past/present. This sense of time as endless repetition without any possibility of interruption, and therefore a possibly different future, lies at the heart of Chin’s existential angst. In “Railroad,” this predicament is indicated by the absence of strong male figures in the narrator's family. His “mother and aunts said nothing about the men of the family except they were weak” (5) and the text emphasizes this point by telling us that his narrator's father “was

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58 The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

captured in total paralysis from a vertebra in the neck on down” (4). His father’s physical disability is closely associated with cultural marginalization. For Sau-ling Wong, Chin's paralyzed parental figures “appear to exist in a static twilight zone of living death” in which Chinatown possesses a “timeless (and culpable) immobility” as “an unalterable given of Chinese American existence from which the young must struggle to break free” (Reading 147; emphasis in original). The most dramatic example of patrilineal failure occurs with the breakup of the narrator’s own family. When his

wife leaves him “like some blonde white goddess going home from the jungle with her leather patches and briar pipe sweetheart writer and [the] kids,” he remains “still and expressionless as some good Chink” (3). Her departure is coded in terms of racial injury; deeply humiliated, the narrator resolves to “stop being polite and worrying about being obnoxious to people walking out of my house with my things, taking my kids away” (3). Chin’s depiction of children as material possessions underscores the importance of property in his conception of reproductive futurity, an understanding of inheritance as the means through which property participates in circuits of reproduction. The most important heirloom in “Railroad” is, of course, the watch that had once belonged to the narrator’s grandfather. As A. Robert Lee observes, the watch is “the perfect mnemonic device, a sort of memory stimulus, for both the grandfather who worked the railroad

and the grandmother who passes it on to the narrator. ... There is a rich working on the clock as not only time in general but the railroad, space, the ghosts of past family mealtime gatherings—a composite scene” (Chin, “Interview ). But while such associations endow the watch with personal meaning, its status as a timekeeping device introduces a rather different sense of temporality into the text. As the story unfolds, the watch emerges as a figure for the narrator’s vexed relationship with time. When he first receives the watch, the narrator is transfixed by its physical appearance. The text gives the following detailed description of his new possession: “The big railroad watch, Elgin. Nineteen-jewel movement. American made. Lever set. Stem wound. Glass facecover. Railroad standard all the way (1). A few paragraphs later, we are given more details: “A two-driver, high stepping locomotive ahead of a coal tender and baggage car, on double track between two semaphores showing a stop signal was engraved on the back” (2). The watch soon becomes a ubiquitous part of the narrator’s daily life:

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism 59 [ wore it braking on the Southern Pacific, though it was two jewels short of new railroad standard and an outlaw watch that could get me fired. I kept it on me, arrived at my day-oft-courthouse wedding to its time, wore it as a railroad relic/family heirloom/grin-bringing affectation when I was writing background news in Seattle, reporting from the shadows of race riots, grabbing snaps for the 11:00 P.M., timing today’s happening with a nineteenth-century escapement. (2)

The watch, it seems, does exactly what a good watch should do—it unobtrusively and reliably marks the regular and constant passage of time and enables the narrator to coordinate his life accordingly. But even though the watch marks the passing of, and eventually stands in for, linear time as such, “Railroad” includes multiple temporalities that stem from different memories and histories. In the passage above, Chin evokes the idealized time of marriage (happily ever after) and the compact regularity of the news cycle, as well as the much longer time frames evoked by relics and heirlooms. At the beginning of “Railroad,” the narrator notices how the watch “ticked on the kitchen table between stacks of dirty dishes and cold food” (2). Against the impermanence of decaying food—and the impermanence of human life signified by his grandmother's funeral—the watch possesses an uncanny stasis that reinforces its association with the constant flow of time. In a similar moment of tension, the narrator recalls how

he “was wearing [the watch] on [his] twenty-seventh birthday, the Saturday [he] came home to see [his] son asleep in the back of a strange station wagon, and [daughter] Sarah inside, waving, shouting through an open window, ‘Goodbye Daddy, over and over” (2). While the watch marks the unrelenting passage of time and therefore promises a future in an abstract sense, it also highlights the inability of the narrator to actively shape the contents of that future. The narrator also treats the watch as a sentimental object that materializes his familial connection with his maternal grandfather. Aside from the watch he has few tangible connections to his grandfather, and his mother refuses to even disclose his name. In the absence of more information, the narrator can only assume that his grandfather was “a good man’ who was “tough, had a few laughs and ran off with his pockets full of engraved watches.” However, he finally confesses, “I never knew him,

not his name, nor anything about him,” and had no other trace of him “except a photograph of him as a young man with something of my mother’s face in his face, and a watch chain across his vest” (5). With the collapse of

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GO The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

the narrator's own family, the watch’s future as an heirloom is thrown into doubt: “I kept [the] watch in good repair and told everyone it would pass to my son someday, until the day the boy was gone. Then I kept it like something of his he’d loved and had left behind, saving it for him maybe, to give to him when he was a man. But I haven’ felt that in a long time” (5). Once a reminder of a future that could be achieved through patrilineal reproduction, the watch turns into a melancholic sign of his dashed hopes. By repeatedly juxtaposing its unstoppable movement with the narrator’s

frustrated desires for the future, Chin depicts the relationship between identity and time as fundamentally antagonistic: what the narrator lacks is precisely a sense of identity that would locate him securely in relation to the past and the future. In making this claim, “Railroad” relies on basic assumptions about time as an independent and determining dimension of our worldly existence that operates outside our control. But the text also draws attention to the historicity of what is supposedly ahistorical time. When the narrator describes his reporting job as “timing today’s happening with a nineteenth-century escapement,’ he not only describes the antiquated character of the watch, but also alludes to its original context, which in turn sheds light on how notions of time and practices of timekeeping are themselves historically contingent. The emergence of abstract linear time was a crucial factor in the economic and cultural transformations that gave rise to modernity. Reinhart Koselleck argues that modern notions of time were defined by their separation from nature-bound, traditional rhythms of time. Day and night seemed to become more alike, just as tracks made it possible for railroads to run at night. This corresponded to the introduction of night work in the large companies of the [nineteenth] century so as to increase production. . . . We are dealing with a long-term process of increasing acts of abstraction designed to remove humans from what was naturally pregiven to them. (104)

Koselleck’s invocation of train tracks is hardly accidental, for the building and expansion of railways in the nineteenth century provided the impetus for standardizing timekeeping practices. In the United States, the expansive geographical area covered by railroads required the establishment of time zones to ensure safety and punctuality (local timekeeping practices

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism GI

had depended on the position of the sun as observed in each locale). In 1883, Standard Railway Time, which divided the continental United States into four time zones, was adopted. Not only were the railways indispensable for the economic and political development of the U.S. nation-state, but they also gave rise to a temporal schema that further enabled the nation to be imagined and experienced as a singular body spread over a large space. The gradual adoption of Greenwich Mean Time as the global standard, a development rooted in the British Empire’s historical domination of maritime transport, further enforced the centrality of timekeeping in maintaining the modern global system.® As for the operation of railways themselves, the need for accuracy and punctuality led to carefully regulated timekeeping practices. As technological improvements made it possible to measure and display units of temporal duration with far superior precision and regularity than before, clocks and watches “initiated a reshaping of everyday life through quantified, uniform units of time, which pervaded and causally affected social organization and economic production. .. . [P]hysical instruments of measurement have increasingly contributed to divesting the course of everyday life of its natural

preconditions, a process that has been interpreted as both a relief and a burden” (Koselleck 104). In the United States, railroad watches were governed by extensive rules that specified every aspect of their function and appearance. When the narrator of “Railroad” describes his watch, he conveys its authenticity by specifying its details and features (ironically, his grandfather’s watch was “two jewels short” and therefore an “outlaw watch”).

Chin rejects the universality of time by reminding readers that the exploitation of racialized labor was instrumental for standardizing time in the first place. Between 1863 and 1869, some 10,000 laborers of Chinese descent

were employed in the construction of the first transcontinental railroad (Chan 30-32). Assigned to build some of the most difficult stretches of the railway, they were frequently exposed to dangerous conditions and many died due to uncontrolled explosions, snow slides, and other causes. They received lower wages than white workers and organized movements for higher pay and better work conditions were generally unsuccessful. When the last

spike was hammered in at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869, the photograph taken to commemorate the occasion contained no Chinese faces, a striking reminder of their exclusion from the life of the nation. As Jingi

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62 The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism Ling observes, “The maintenance of such falsified historical discourses . . . depends both on an effacement in American culture of the early contributions of Chinese immigrant workers to the construction of America’s railroads and on contemporary Asian Americans’ refusal to acknowledge the mental and physical strengths associated with such an endeavor as necessary virtues of their immigrant forbears” (83). But instead of just proposing a counter-history that recenters the role of Chinese/Asian Americans, “Railroad Standard Time” attends to the psychic damage that stems from having to inhabit temporalities in which one is racially marked and marginalized. The racialized narrator fails to achieve a relationship with time that would enable him to integrate his life into the time of his watch and the national body it evokes. This failure underscores the incoherence of “Railroad Standard Time,” by which I do not mean that it makes no sense, but rather that it literally fails to cohere as a biographical narrative through the integration of its narrative elements. It is this failure that renders “Railroad Standard Time” a profoundly ironic text, and irony, Lee Edelman reminds us via Paul de Man, is the “queerest of rhetorical devices” (23), one that dissolves the coherence of

narrative and “severs the continuity essential to the very logic of making sense” (24). Irony inheres in the very title of the story, for the word “Standard” connotes a socio-cultural normativity that Chin earnestly desires but can never achieve. The text evokes the developmental hopes, as well as mechanical stasis, represented by the railroad, the standardization of time that formed a national body that excluded the racialized bodies who built it.

The Deathly Chinese American Novel Even as the narrator of “Railroad” finds himself unable to imagine a satisfactory future, he remains trapped in other temporal frameworks that constrict his life. These time frames are often linked to Orientalist stereotypes and ideologies of assimilation. In the introduction to Aiiieeeee!, the editors assert, “the destruction of an organic sense of identity, the complete psychological subjugation of the Asian American, the people of Chinese and Japanese ancestry stand out as white racism’s only success” (10). The “success” of white racism depends on inculcating stereotypes of Asians as submissive and nonthreatening, which become perniciously self-perpetuating

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism 63 as they are internalized: “The subject minority is conditioned to reciprocate by becoming the stereotype, live it, talk it, believe it” (11). The result is a pervasive “self-contempt” that “is euphemized as being successful assimilation, adaptation and acculturation” (12). In temporal terms, assimilation falsely promises a future in which Asian Americans can fully participate in U.S. culture and society even while it eviscerates their cultural integrity.’ For this reason, the editors are especially scornful of authors whom they accuse of buying into and reproducing this ideology. Their critique of assimilation in literature foreshadows more recent accounts of the novel as a technology of subject formation; Lisa Lowe, for example, argues that literary realism depends on “a fetishized concept of development, and the narration of a single unified subject” (mmigrant Acts 107). Throughout his writings from the 1970s and early 1980s, Chin articulates an obsessive and conflicted relationship with the novel. While he is accutely aware of the history of Orientalist misrepresentation in American fiction, he nevertheless elevates the novel into a primary indicator of cultural achievement.!° In “Railroad Standard Time,” Chin reiterates some of the themes developed in the introduction to Aiiieeeee!:; much of Chinese American literature consists of autobiographies; autobiography is a “Christian” genre foreign to Asian American sensibilities; and autobiography exoticizes Chinese American culture in order to make it palatable for white readers. The narrator tells us that he “hated after reading Father and Glorious Descendant, Fifth Chinese Daughter, The House that Tai Ming Built. Books scribbled up by a sad legion of snobby autobiographical Chinatown saps all on their

own. Christians who never heard of each other, hardworking people who sweat out the same Chinatown book, the same cunning “Confucius says’ joke,

just like me” (3). Chin feminizes what he derisively calls the “Chinatown book” by alluding to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s notorious description of scribbling women ruining the literary public sphere." In contrast to the authentic authors promoted in Aizieeeee!, Chin’s fictional protagonists fail to arrive at effective writing practices. The narrator of “Railroad” is unable to escape from the conventions of the Chinatown book; he is “just like” the writers he condemns and even as he launches a diatribe against the Chinatown book, he admits, “I hate my novel about a Chinatown mother like mine dying now that Ma’s dead. But I'll keep it” (3). Later on, he describes his novel as “part cookbook, memories of Mother in the kitchen slicing meat paper-thin with a cleaver. Mumbo jumbo about

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64 The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism spices and steaming. The secret of Chinatown rice. . . . The thousand-yearold living Chinese meat makes dinner a safari into the unknown, a blood

ritual. Food pornography” (3). One of Chin’s most memorable phrases, “food pornography” is explained by Sau-ling Wong as “making a living by exploiting the ‘exotic’ aspects of one’s ethnic foodways. In cultural terms it translates to reifying perceived cultural differences and exaggerating one’s otherness in order to gain a foothold in a white-dominated social system” (Reading 55). Food pornography exemplifies the ways in which Asian Americans have internalized their own stereotypes. For Chin, it encapsulates the

trapped condition of writing within a racialized discourse that seems to foreclose any alternatives: “We always come to fake art and write the Chinatown book like bugs come to fly in the light. I hate my book now that ma's dead, but I'll keep it. I know she’s not the woman I wrote up like my

mother, and dead, in a book that was like everybody else’s Chinatown book” (3).

In this last sentence, the word “dead” produces a striking caesura that makes death a descriptor for the narrator’s mother as well as his novel about

her life. In ways that recall Edelman’s emphasis on the death drive as the foundation of a queer politics, death signifies temporal stasis, the crumbling of the narrator's investment in reproductive futurity. A result of the accumulated legacies of racism, death is the very condition of Asian America and for this reason, the Chinatown book encapsulates the existential crisis faced by the narrator. But the most intriguing aspect of the text is the fact that he remains pathologically attached to his failed novel (he says “T’ll keep it” three times when describing his novel). Unable to escape the genre in the same way that Asian Americans cannot escape their own stereotypes, the narrator cannot stop repeating and performing acts that perpetuate a deathly temporality. This predicament can be seen in other works by Chin from this period. In his earlier play The Year of the Dragon (1974), the middle-aged protagonist, failed novelist Fred Eng, is the eldest son of a San Francisco Chinatown patriarch who has pushed him to drop out of college. Fred works as a local tour guide in his father’s travel business, a job that requires him to pander to the Orientalist tastes of his white clients. While he wants to leave Chinatown, the only member of his family who actually manages to do so is his younger sister Mattie, who lives in Boston with her white husband.

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism 65 Fred’s sense of spatial entrapment is paralleled by the generic constraints of the Chinatown book: I don’t think of myself as a tourist guide all my life. But my own parents wont read a story I write. Then it hit me, “Food’s our only common language... Cookbooks! . . . Chinese Cookbooks! Your recipes and my smut knocked me out, Sis. You invented a new literary form. Food pornogra-

phy...[...] And I got an idea for a book of recipes telling the story of a Chinatown family .. . how to make a toasted cheese sandwich without a sound. (86)

After defining his own writing in terms of food pornography, Fred goes on to suggest that the cookbook has replaced the novel: “I’m going to write the

great Chinese American Cookbook, is what... cuz no one’s gonna read the great Chinese American novel” (83).

Once again, the persistence of the Chinatown book is presented as a paralyzing instance of internalized racism. His inability to obtain recognition as a “serious” writer from other Chinese Americans, who prefer a genre that gravely misrepresents their lives, forces him to fall back to the exoticized ethnography of the cookbook as the only way to narrate “the story of

a Chinatown family.” Instead of being the authentic but misunderstood Asian American writer, Fred turns out to be the epitome of failure. His inability to produce an authentic Chinese American novel reinforces his inability to find a future outside the decaying world of Chinatown. Moreover, the degeneration of Chinatown is directly caused by the breakdown of patrilineal reproduction. Although the play culminates in the sudden death of Fred’s father in the midst of a heated argument, this event, which might otherwise signal the oedipal conflict that the Aizieeeee! editors claim does not exist in Asian American writing, does not allow him to leave Chinatown and pursue a literary career. Instead, it further strangles his creativity and vitality (in the final scene, he is still working as a tour guide). Without other prospects, he becomes a figure for death itself: Chin’s stage directions describe how Fred “puts on a white slightly oversized jacket, and appears to be a shrunken Charlie Chan, an image of death. He becomes the tourist guide” (141). Since the 1980s, Chin has shifted his focus considerably by embracing

a so-called Asian heroic tradition constructed from populist elements in Chinese and Japanese literary culture.'* This shift also marks a concerted

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66 The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism search for a more stable relationship to time. This move is foreshadowed in Aiiieeeee! when the editors discuss Chin’s interest in mythical temporalities that literally make sense of the past by forging a link with the present. They suggest that in Chin's 1971 play The Chickencoop Chinaman, the protagonist is a “comic embodiment of Asian American manhood, rooted neither in Asia nor white America, [who] is forced to invent a past, mythology, and traditions from the antiques and curios of his immediate experience” (36). Unlike the sense of pure invention in Chin’s early works, however, the he-

roic tradition is presented as an already existing body of texts and ideas with deep cultural roots. Chin’s first major work to feature the heroic tradition is his debut novel Donald Duk (1991). There, twelve-year-old Donald is part of a proud Chinese American family that lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Nevertheless, he feels alienated from his cultural heritage, not the least because his history teacher, the aptly named Mr. Meanwright, subjects his students to racist accounts of American history that belittle the contributions of Chinese immigrants. As the novel unfolds, Donald has a series of dreams in which he finds himself among the Chinese laborers who built the first transcontinental railroad. These dreams prompt him to learn about his ancestors and he subsequently discovers that his paternal great-great-grandfather had

worked on the railroad. Chin posits the heroic tradition throughout as a prototype for Chinese American history. In the novel’s climax, Donald is enduring yet another patronizing lec-

ture on American history when he finally summons the courage to confront Mr. Meanwright in front of the whole class: You are «... sir, Mr. Meanwright, not correct about us being passive, noncompetitive. We did the blasting through Summit Tunnel. We worked through two hard winters in the high Sierras. We went on strike for back pay and Chinese foremen for Chinese gangs, and won. We set the world’s record for miles of track layed in one day. We set our last crosstie at Promontory. (151)

Donald’s defiant speech confirms his identification with a vital Chinese American community, a connection that eluded Chin’s earlier protagonists. At the end of his speech, Donald turns to his teacher and declares, “it is badly informed people like you who keep us out of that picture.” This transformation is dramatically reinforced as a projection of the infamous

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism 67

photograph of the last spike at Promontory Point turns into “an old grainy

shot of the Chinese in the Sierra Nevadas.... Everyone in class looks straight into the eyes of a young Chinese boy in the midground, turning toward the camera and smiling. His hat is pushed back off above his forehead. The face is Donald Duk’s” (152).!° Even though Mr. Meanwright is flustered by Donald’s outburst, the text

quickly degenerates into confusion when Kwan Kung, the Chinese god of war and literature, suddenly appears with a Chinese opera troupe and proceeds to demonstrate his prowess with a saber while lighting firecrackers in the school hall. Kwan Kung turns out to be Donald’s father, and the frightened students are finally told that the troupe is giving a free performance to publicize their upcoming show. Although Chin stages a confrontation in which, armed with the truth of history, a racialized subject vanquishes his opponent by correcting the historical record, the scene’s strange blend of fantasy and historical recovery dilutes its political coherence. Donald’s triumph turns into an overbearing didacticism that borders on the absurd. Whereas in Chin’s earlier works, characters are unable to reconcile their political and literary desires, Donald Duk veers toward what Adorno, in his critique of Lukacs, calls “extorted reconciliation,” the heteronomous imposition of politics in ways that compromise the integrity of the text (“Extorted”). In all these instances, what Chin repeatedly (although sometimes inadvertently) reveals is the persistent gap between literature and politics, a gap that continually undermines his literary politics.

A Tale of Two Times

From the juxtaposition of multiple temporalities in “Railroad Standard Time” to Fred Eng’s inability to escape the genres he loathes, to the odd undermining of Donald Duk’s moment of triumph, the writings I have examined in this chapter are characterized by an in-coherence that indicates the persistent incommensurability of Chin’s political and literary projects. These tensions infuse his writings with a libidinal energy that seems to ex-

ceed the bounds of the text, suggesting a deeper struggle with textuality itself. As Daniel Y. Kim observes, Chin’s understanding of Asian American identity rests on a basic contradiction: on the one hand, Chin insists on the existence of a vernacular literary tradition exemplified by writers such as

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68 The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

Louis Chu and John Okada and in light of this tradition, “conceptualizes the minority writer's primary task to be one of mirroring and giving literary shape to the forms of cultural expression that are organic to working-class communities of color” (Writing Manhood 207). On the other hand, “The very thing that would authenticate the literary tradition [Chin] seeks to identify—a distinct Asian American vernacular—is something that he also claims does not exist. Given this seemingly debilitating logical contradiction, the aesthetic Chin promotes seems to be a self-immolating one” (207). In a manner reminiscent of Iwasaki’s attempt to plot the emergence of Asian American identity in temporal terms, Chin’s self-immolating aesthetic indicates the inability of literature to articulate an adequate identity politics. As a result, Asian American identity is either relegated to a mythical past or projected into a desired future, neither of which can be organically connected to the present. This predicament underscores recurring tropes such as death, stasis, and decay, forms of untimeliness that produce the fear, anxiety, anger, aggression, and melancholy that permeate his writing. Earlier, I suggested that unraveling temporalities in “Railroad Standard Time” engender a deep sense of irony. Irony interrupts what is arguably the central aim of cultural nationalist literary thought, namely to align identity politics and literary production in the service of an emancipatory project. Unlike Bruce Iwasaki, who sought to abolish literary autonomy through the merging of literature and experience, Chin seeks to preserve this distinction, as evidenced by his dogged pursuit of the novel. But his ultimate, if unrealized, goal remains the transformation of both so as to render them no longer antagonistic, a goal that demands nothing less than the decisive abolition of racism itself. His literary project remains inextricably tied to a larger political one—and neither seem fulfillable at the present moment. In his lecture “The Concept of Irony,” Paul de Man argues that irony not only interrupts narratives, but must also be understood as the constant possibility of interruption, for “irony is everywhere, at all points the narrative can be interrupted” (179). Irony stems from the play of signification, the ways in which “words have a way of saying things which are not at all what you want them to say” (181); it is “the undoing, the necessary undoing of any theory of narrative. ... Which doesn’t mean that we don’t have to keep working on [narrative], because that’s all we can do, but it will always be

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism 69 interrupted, always be disrupted, always be undone by the ironic dimension which it will necessarily contain” (179). The irony of cultural nationalism lies in the ways in which its discourses, as well as their underlying intentions and commitments, are vulnerable to dissolution once they begin to be actualized in narrative form. The constant possibility of irony accounts for the deep unease generated by the literary, and while this unease can sometimes be temporarily abated by appealing to politics, it persists as a constant and ultimately uncontainable threat. Not only does irony undermine the possibility of literature as a seamless extension of politics. More important, it unsettles the cultural nationalist insistence on identity as the grounds for praxis. In 1991, Aiiieeeee! was reis-

sued by Mentor Press with a new preface titled “Revisiting Aiiieeeee!” There, the editors reflect on the relationship between their earlier efforts and their more recent embrace of the Asian heroic tradition. One of the central themes in “Revisiting” is the status of history in Asian American culture. The editors bemoan what they consider a lack of interest in history, in the “works and papers from old Asian American times.” “Yellow history,’ they write, “is the still the yellow mystery. ... What, we wonder, has excited this hysterical shutdown of the instinct for history in yellows and blacked out the sense of history in Asian America?” (xxv). The word “instinct” suggests that history is not just a matter of facts and information, but a fundamental component of the Asian American psyche, what enables the Asian American subject to grasp the truth of his or her racialized status.'4

The editors go on to locate the Asian American subject in a temporal schism engendered by the onset of modernity. They argue that in pre-modern times, understandings of China (which serves as synecdoche for Asia as a

whole) were based on stereotypes created by Europeans to maintain the superiority of their (Christian) civilization in the face of Asian accomplishments. While these notions persisted into the industrial age, the conditions of racism changed drastically, not the least because Asian labor was now integral to the developing U.S. economy. The editors write, “All immigrant racial and cultural groups became the object of ridicule in modern raceless

industrial society. They were foreign, alien, incompatible with modern rhythms, energies, thought processes” (xxxi). The claim that modern society is raceless seems far fetched, but the key point seems to be that foreignness

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70 The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism became associated with temporal belatedness as minorities were excluded from modern rhythms of time.” The editors go on to argue that modernity ushered in a whole new conception of time: “Industry and consumerism didn’t just order and change the farmer's idea of time flowing year-round with the sun coming up and going down, tying it to a clock and dividing the day into three eight-hour shifts. Time stopped forever. When time stopped, history died” (xxxiii). The replacing of natural time with standardized time turned time into a static entity. Echoing the fear of temporal stasis found in Chin’s early writings, the editors associate the death of history with the impossibility of freedom: modern time is, in the most apocalyptic sense, timeless. Under such conditions, the only history still available was “industrial, produced by advertising and Hollywood. A sense of history that had no respect for the integrity of history. Rather, history was the stuff of advertising rhetoric, as it is today” (xxxi—xxxiii). The end of time is therefore more precisely char-

acterized by the proliferation of prosthetic temporalities proffered by the culture industry. The most insidious form of pseudo-temporality is assimilation, which “preach[es] the inevitability of cultural and racial extinction of American minorities” and forecloses the future through the absorption of difference into the national body (xxxiv). These provocative claims underscore the editors’ attempt to articulate an alternative understanding of temporality based on the Asian heroic tradition.

They argue that the Western understanding of time is derived from two sources: Judeo-Christian tradition, in which time oscillates between fall and redemption, and ancient Greek tragedy, in which “the destiny the individual cannot escape bespeaks the ultimate powerlessness of the individual before the gods” (xxxvi). These two traditions share a fatalistic understanding of time in which the future is predetermined and therefore inimical to subjective freedom, which can be possible only if the future remains open. By contrast, Asian conceptions of time assume a “universe of total free will” in which “the only law that counts is the promise one gives” (xxxvi). The concept of promise is key here; as Hannah Arendt suggests, promises offer “islands of certainty” that mitigate the “basic unreliability of men who never can guarantee today who they will be tomorrow,” while retaining this basic unreliability as “the price human beings pay for freedom” (244). In Asian time, the editors contend, history comes into being when an individual interacts with others through an ethics of “loyalty, betrayal, and revenge” (xxxv).

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The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism vA “The yellow,” they argue, “asserts loyalty to history and the history of promises and alliances” (xxxv).

The Asian heroic tradition offers a concept of time that appears to support a free subject: “Honor and history, not territory, define the Chinese individual. In this universe, history is as immutable, indestructible, and

continuous as destiny and fate are to the Greeks and the Christians” (xxxvii—xxxviii). In order to illustrate the distinction between Asian history and Western fate, the editors turn to the fourteenth-century Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the main texts of their heroic tradi-

tion. They argue that the heroes in the novel are bound to each other through “a life-long do-or-die oath to save China. Their word to each other is the binding word, not any a priori or eternal ‘law ” (xxxvi). This reading culminates in the following claim: “[The heroes’] tragedy arises from a conflict of loyalties, from the moment to moment inability to be on time with all the promises one made. The heroes cannot keep all their promises to each other or anybody else. If they cannot keep their word, they cannot but betray” (xxxvii). It is precisely here that history and freedom collide: whereas history has been depicted thus far as the indispensable condition of freedom, history— specifically the “history of promises and alliances’—is also what makes betrayal unavoidable. To put it another way, what limits the free subject is a belated relation to time itself, a relationship manifested as the “moment to moment inability to be on time.” Betrayal is not caused by bad intentions; rather, it is a consequence of existing in a “universe of free will” that turns out to be unfree after all. Time turns history into fate, and the limit of freedom is nothing other than the uncontrollable movement of time as such, an admission that severely undermines the editors’ account of agency. Pulling back from these claims, the editors go on to insist that heroes can forgive betrayal as long as their promissory intentions remain intact, but these qualifications can only partially restore the coherence of “Revisiting Aiiieeeee!” We are left once again with the inability of identity politics to fulfill the cultural nationalist project, for “the [successful erasure of] Asian

American history... means a loss of identity. With the loss of identity comes extinction” (xl). With this declaration, the editors return to the threat of death that shadows their efforts to secure a living future through identity. The theoretical “error” of “Revisiting Aiiieeeee!,” we might say, lies in its underlying cartographic logic: by positing Asia and America as mutually

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ips The Ironic Temporalities of Cultural Nationalism

exclusive categories, the editors inscribe an irreducible cultural difference between East and West in temporal terms. In their desire to differentiate Asian and Western time, what they miss is the movement of time as such. Instead of historicizing time, as Chin does in “Railroad,” they let it sneak

up on them, as it were. And time turns out to be the most ironic thing, unrelentingly corrosive in its undoing of narrative coherence.

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THREE

Sound and the Subject in 7he Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey

Early on in Maxine Hong Kingston’s 7he Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood among Ghosts (1976), the narrator issues the following challenge to her readers: “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (5-6). These words, some of the most recognizable in the Asian American canon, suggest that identities are contingently constructed and constantly in flux. But while Kingston appears to assert the incoherence of Chinese American identity, the very form of her questions reinforces it by presuming and addressing an already existing Chinese American readership. The Woman Warrior is, in many ways, an extended exercise in trying to under-

stand what things are Chinese. If this quest defines the role of the narrator, and by extension Kingston herself, then it also stands as a suggestive allegory for Chinese/Asian American identity, which is constantly changing even as it seems uncannily stable at times. The Woman Warrior is not, of course, only meant for Chinese American readers; insofar as she engages in an imaginative reconstruction of Chinese culture and tradition, Kingston enters Asian American literary history as a native informant of sorts even as she consistently undermines assumptions about cultural authenticity.’ For Frank Chin and other cultural nationalists, her experiments with autoethnography are tantamount to self-exoticization and during the 1980s and 1990s, the infamous “Chin-Kingston” debates 72

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74 Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

crystallized the theoretical stakes of the emerging field of Asian American literary studies.” Lisa Lowe suggests that the dialogue between [cultural] nationalist and feminist concerns animates a debate about identity and difference, or identity and heterogeneity. . . . It is a debate in which Chin and others insist on a fixed masculinist identity, whereas Kingston [and other Asian American feminists], with their representations of female differences and their critiques of sexism in Chinese culture, throw this notion of identity repeatedly into question. (“Heterogeneity’ 76)

Kingston has garnered considerable admiration by setting aside the restrictive identity politics of cultural nationalism in favor of an anti-racist politics that guards against the dangers of essentialism. In the process, she has acquired the reputation of a trailblazing artist who embodies independence and defiance while offering the possibility of healing and reconciliation. Even though Kingston treats writing as a site in which to question notions of identity, she does so by articulating versions of the idealized critical subject. In the texts I examine in this chapter, this figure is closely associated with an autobiographical impulse that operates even in texts that are not explicitly autobiographical. I want to be clear at the outset that [am not claiming that her works, even those labeled as memoirs, are straightforward reflections of her life and experiences, nor do I wish to conflate the

narrative voices in her texts with the historical person of Kingston. Instead, I understand the autobiographical impulse as a textual effect that stems from what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe describes as “the need to tell, to confess, to write oneself” (140). In a similar vein, Paul de Man defines autobiography as an alignment between the two subjects involved in the process of reading in which they determine each other by mutual reflexive substitution. . . . This specular structure is interiorized in a text in which the author declares himself the subject of his own understanding, but this merely makes explicit the wider claim to authorship that takes place whenever a text is stated to be by someone and assumed to be understandable to the extent that this is the case. “Autobiography” 921-922; emphasis in original)

Understood in this sense, the autobiographical impulse does not depend on whether the text in question is actually a faithful rendition of the author’s life—de Man adds, “any book with a readable title-page is, to some extent,

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Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and “Tripmaster Monkey’ qs

autobiographical” (922). It is, instead, a discursive figure in which voices in a text appear to converge with the author. If the autobiographical subject is necessarily an authorial subject, then

her labor consists of engaging with and assembling narrative materials. Kingston's creative use of Chinese culture, family stories, and literary traditions from the United States, China, and elsewhere has been widely recognized as her literary signature. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno defines aesthetic materials as “the sum of all that is available to [the artist], including words, colors, sounds, associations of every sort and every technique ever developed. To this extent, forms too become material” (148). Materials get turned

into artworks through the decisions of the artist, who must attend to the nature of the materials, the conventions and traditions that govern their use, and the overall social conditions in which they circulate. Only through a scrupulous engagement with all these factors can the artist move beyond the objective tendencies of materials to achieve a measure of creative expression. Adorno invests the artist with the critical agency, as well as the obligation, to make such decisions, thereby turning her into a kind of idealized critical subject whose existence—along with art in general—has become embattled if not impossible under late capitalism.

If Adorno’s claims reflect his humanist concern with agency, poststructuralist thinkers such as Lacoue-Labarthe and de Man are unlikely to share this investment. In this vein, Roland Barthes’s famous essay “The Death of the Author” stands out as an especially notable rejection of authorial agency. For Barthes, “it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is... to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’” (143). The author has no independent existence outside the act of writing; “Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely” (146). Ihe author is merely a “scriptor” whose subjectivity is nothing more than an effect of language, a kind of material that might appear in the text but cannot be assumed to precede or cause it. Kingston’s texts oscillate between these two poles and in so doing, offer

an illuminating treatment of Asian American authorship. This chapter traces these movements by focusing on how she deploys musical and sonic materials. | am interested not just in how music gets depicted her writings,

but, more important, how it mediates her engagement with identity. If

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76 Sound and the Subject in “The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

Kingston's sense of agency is closely tied to authorship, music is revealing

because it functions as a counterpart to signifying language; as distinct modes of cognition and expression, music and language offer different understandings of subjectivity and agency. The first part of this chapter revisits the

famous ending of Zhe Woman Warrior, in which a musical fable reveals a conflicted approach to identity politics, and examines the treatment of vocal melody. The second part turns to her novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), in which she explores the possibility of a post-identity politics based on pacifism, a process in which rhythm plays a crucial role. Given its complex relationship to language, music poses certain interpretive difficulties for the literary critic. Unlike language, music does not seem to say anything specific, yet it exerts a powerful effect on listeners. Even though music includes intricate forms and complex materials, it does not “narrate” except in a metaphorical sense. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Attali describes music as “noise given form according to a code (in other words, according to rules of arrangement and succession, in a limited space, a space of sounds) that is theoretically knowable by the listener” (25). The codes of music are ideological insofar as they stem from larger economic and political structures, and ultimately function as means to neutralize the effects of noise: A noise is a resonance that interferes with the audition of a message in the process of emission. A resonance is a set of simultaneous, pure sounds of determined frequency and differing intensity. . . . [NJoise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages. In all cultures, it is associated with the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague. (26-27)

By encoding noise, music simulates “the accepted rules of society” and affirms that “society is possible” (29; emphasis in original). Music is therefore an expression of disciplinary power and control as well as a generative “tool for the creation or consolidation of a community, of a totality. It is what links a power center to its subjects” (6). Its relationship to society is mimetic (music reflects its socio-political conditions) as well as differentiated, which enables it to imagine emerging social configurations.° This chapter draws on these insights in order to examine the politics of sound in Kingston's writing; because I focus on literary texts, I am especially interested in how her engagement with noise and music is mediated

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Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and “Tripmaster Monkey’ ag

through language and narrative. Kingston attends to the materiality of sound and deploys its extra-linguistic meanings to imagine different configurations of identity and community. Writing about Asian America, she invites us not only to read, but to listen.

From Transcription to Translation More than thirty years after its publication, 7he Woman Warrior remains one of the most widely read works in Asian American writing. It is striking that a text so attentive to the physical, psychic, and social costs of racial and

gender discrimination ends on a decidedly optimistic note as the narrator retells the story of Ts’ai Yen, a Chinese poetess and musician who lived during the Eastern Han and Three Kingdoms periods (roughly 175-250 CE).4

The daughter of a prominent official, Ts’ai is captured by the Southern Hsiung-nu (or Huns) and forced to become the wife of a chieftain. She spends a total of twelve years in captivity before being ransomed back to her own people. One of the few women writers in the classical Chinese literary canon, her story is recorded in the poem “Hujia Shibapai” (which Kingston translates as “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”), long

thought to be an autobiographical text. Not only are we meant to read Ts’ai’s captivity as an allegory for the racialized Chinese American subject,

but her status as one of the earliest female writers in Chinese literature resonates, in retrospect, with Kingston’s own place in Asian American literary history. The text encourages us to draw these biographical links by constructing an elaborate frame for its presentation of Ts’ai’s story. The narrator starts by

telling a story about her grandmother’s love of theatre and then wonders whether her grandmother might have seen a play about Ts’ai Yen. The narrator prefaces both stories by telling us, “Here is a story my mother told me,

not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also talk story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine” (106). In light of central role played by the mother-daughter relationship in 7he Woman Warrior, the fact that the daughter/narrator gets the last word suggests that the talk story tradition has been successfully passed from one generation to the next.’ As she does throughout 7he Woman Warrior, Kingston rewrites a well-known tale from Chinese tradition. Sau-ling Wong points out that

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78 Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’ Kingston's retelling omits a crucial scene in the original “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”: Ts’ai Yen’s painful leave-taking from her half-barbarian sons. Though by now attached to her captor and heartsick at the prospect of never seeing her children again, Ts’ai Yen nevertheless chooses Han lands as her real home, negating the twelve years spent in the steppes as a mere unfortunate interlude. Herself a half-barbarian to her China-obsessed parents, the narrator might have found such a detail too close for comfort, and too contrary in spirit to her own undertaking of forming a Chinese-American self. Thus we find a shift in emphasis: the last pages of Zhe Woman Warrior celebrate not return from the remote peripheries to a waiting home, but the creation of a new center through art. “Autobiography” 46)

Wong suggests that the narrator turns to art in order to avoid more disturbing elements in the story of Ts’ai Yen; I would like to take this reading in a slightly different direction to show how the narrator’s quest to form a “Chinese-

American self” through artistic creation proceeds through an identitarian logic that indicates the ambiguities of Kingston’s political project. Ts’ai’s anguish over the loss of her children is replaced by an emphasis on

the value of her reproductive labor for her native culture: the text tells us that she was ransomed back to her own people to remarry “so that her father

would have Han descendants” (209). Kingston crucially departs from the original story by attributing Ts’ai’s mental anguish to her captivity, not to the conditions of her return. Having come from a scholar’s family “famous for [its] library,” Ts’ai finds the militaristic culture of her captors—the text usually refers to them as “barbarians”—alienating and even repulsive. These feelings are finally overcome by way of a spectacular musical event. One night, Ts’ai stumbles upon the sight of hundreds of barbarians playing reed flutes in the desert. Describing the sounds of this fantastic orchestra, the text invokes a series of visual and tactile images: [The barbarians] reached again for a high note, yearning toward a high note, which they found at last and held—an icicle in the desert. The music disturbed Ts’ai Yen; its sharpness and its cold made her ache. It disturbed her so that she could not concentrate on her own thoughts. Night after night the songs filled the desert no matter how many dunes away she walked. She hid in her tent but could not sleep through the sound. (208-209)

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Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and “Tripmaster Monkey’ 79

By depicting the sounds of the flutes as static and unchanging, and endowing them with a visceral materiality, the text recalls Attali’s contention that “noise is a source of pain. Beyond a certain limit, it becomes an im-

material weapon of death. ... Diminished intellectual capacity, accelerated respiration and heartbeat, hypertension, slowed digestion, neurosis, altered diction: these are the consequences of excessive sound in the environment’ (27). The denigration of the “barbarians” is not just a sign of Ts’ai’s prejudices, but an integral aspect of the text’s treatment of cultural difference. Kingston attributes the sound of the flutes not to a flourishing musical culture, but to the practice of attaching reed whistles to flaming arrows. When used in battle, the whistles “terrified enemies by filling the air with death sounds, which Ts‘ai Yen had thought was their only music” (208). The barbarians, by virtue of their militarized way of life, seem incapable of making music,

a claim that tautologically reinforces their barbarity. Not only are their whistles instruments of war, but the very fact that their music originates from objects made of “inedible reeds” indicates the derivative and inhuman character of their music. In this manner, the text establishes a cultural hierarchy based on musical practices, a structure that fully reveals itself as the story comes to a climax: Then, out of Ts’ai Yen’s tent, which was apart from the others, the barbarians heard a woman’s voice singing, as if to her babies, a song so high and clear, it matched the flutes. Ts’ai Yen sang about China and her family there. Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger. Sometimes they thought they could catch barbarian phrases about forever wandering. Her children did not laugh, but eventually sang along when she left her tent to sit by the winter campfire, ringed by barbarians. (209)

Hidden from sight in the domestic space of her tent, Ts’ai’s voice literally takes over the scene. Her song—unmediated by instruments, feminized, and ethnicized as Chinese—represents the opposite of the noise generated by her captors. Insofar as this performance enables her to rejoin the communal campfire, it functions as a vehicle through which to mitigate her feelings of alienation.

Ts’ai Yen’s bold self-expression offers a striking contrast to the opening of The Woman Warrior, in which the narrator's mother issues an injunction

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80 Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

forbidding the sharing of family secrets, a command whose immediate transgression is the text’s condition of possibility. By repeatedly depicting the movement from silence to voice, Kingston articulates the successful emergence of a liberated female Chinese American subject who overcomes of the boundaries that confine her.° Ts’ai’s musical outburst enables her to

become symbolically integrated into her community as what begins as a culturally specific performance quickly overcomes linguistic and cultural boundaries to acquire a kind of universality. It is not surprising that many critics have read the story of Ts’ai Yen as an allegory for the narrator’s triumphant self-actualization as well as a hopeful gesture toward reconciliation. David Leiwei Li, for example, writes, The poet is no longer alienated. .. . Not only is her music in tune with that of the barbarians, but her words are perfectly comprehended: the apparent opposition dissolves when the Chinese and the barbarian reach a truce. In a leap toward universal harmony, the poet is integrated into the “ring” [of barbarians around the campfire] that used to marginalize minority groups. In the round aura of the ring she is no longer an Other but one of us, the center that holds. (“Re-presenting” 194-195)

But if Ts’ai’s song enacts a new form of community, it is notable that the story concludes with her release from captivity and return to her native culture, an ending that resurrects the very barriers that she has apparently transcended (to be sure, the text is following the contours of the original story, but this kind of fidelity is rarely Kingston’s first priority). At the very least, the story leaves her gender identity intact, not to mention the patriarchal conditions in both her native and captive cultures. The fraught status of cultural difference is highlighted by the text’s conclusion: “[Ts’ai] brought her songs back from the savage lands, and one of the three that has been passed down to us is ‘Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe, a song that Chinese sing to their own instruments. It translated well” (209). For many critics, this declaration signifies Ts’ai’s triumph. Her song, suggests Martha Cutter, is a “syncretic product” that combines “the two languages, the two worlds, even the two genders, producing a new entity—a dynamic, regenerative, resistant song” (63; emphasis in original). By contrast, Anne Cheng reframes the ending as an ambivalent scene, in which a lingering “incommensurability/untranslatability” derails the desire for assimilation:

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Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and “Tripmaster Monkey’ SI

This moment of lyrical birth is predicated upon a bloody history of Chinese ethnic warfare and unification, itself a tale of violent national formation based on ethnic domination, annihilation, and trafficking in women. This tale tells us that there is no such a thing as “pure” culture; culture is in fact often borne out of acts of violent translation. Cultural formation, the crystallization of that “Chinese” song, grows out of a turbulent, heterogeneous crossbreeding. (Melancholy 90)

Despite their different conclusions, both Cutter and Cheng emphasize the cultural heterogeneity of Ts’ai’s song. An examination of the role played by sound, however, suggests another possibility: the ending extends and reinforces what has been a Sinocentric narrative all along, a point that is exemplified by the fact that Ts’ai’s song overcomes the noises of her captors.

The ethnocentrism of the text, I want to suggest, stems from its plot structure, which parallels the American captivity narrative in several important respects. A genre that first came to prominence during the colonial period, these narratives usually depict confrontations between Native and settler cultures and describe, in the form of first-person testimony, the abduction of white settler women by native tribes. Many focus on the captive’s loss of ownership of her body and/or labor, her desire to return to her original culture, and her mental, rather than just physical, suffering.’ By emphasizing the heroine’s refusal to assimilate into the culture of her captors through marriage or conversion, the captivity narrative functions as a fable of national as well as individual identity formation. As Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse write, The captivity narrative requires the captive to ward off the threat of another culture by preserving the tie to her mother culture through writing alone... [and] requires that the detached—and thereby individuated— individual be reincorporated into the culture from which she has been separated. ...[H]er return appears to restore that community's original state of wholeness. (210—211)

Elsewhere, Armstrong adds that the fact that the captive’s identity is always

under threat reinforces the normative status of her original community. Turning to a contemporary manifestation of this logic, she argues that feminism replicates the captivity narrative by casting the nuclear family as what imprisons women and from which they must be emancipated. But “to be truly free, a woman must not only leave her home, she must return there

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82 Sound and the Subject in “The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

as well. The same diasporic logic that defines the household as the basic and

necessary cultural unit and compels that household to reproduce itself as such, also decreed that any woman who bears the culture’s values must do so in this way or die” (392). In other words, the emergence of feminism’s emancipated subject does not displace the basic parameters of patriarchy. This is clearly the case in Kingston’s version of the captivity narrative; I would add that her retelling of Ts’ai Yen’s story does not manage, in the last instance, to dismantle the identitarian assumptions it seeks to interrogate. The reason for this failure lies in Kingston’s treatment of the human voice. What separates Ts’ai’s Chinese music from barbarian noise is the former’s basis in the human body as opposed to latter’s dependence on technological

mediation. In other words, the text suggests that Chinese music (and by extension culture) is superior because it is human. However tautological, this claim remains a powerful statement that recapitulates a long-standing debate in Western philosophy about the meaning of the human voice. According to Lydia Goehr, post-Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau embraced vocal melody as a direct reflection of “the passions of the heart”

(104). While Rousseau posited an opposition between the voice and language—he considered the latter corrupted due to its loss of voice— musicians in the nineteenth century tried to restore the voice to music in order to counteract the rise of abstract music. Against the desire to make music autonomous, self-referential, and detached from extra-musical ideas, images, or narratives, composers such as Richard Wagner insisted that only the voice could give an “embodied presence” to music. This elevation of voice

culminated in a powerful account of human freedom: music is expressive because and when human beings are expressive. . . . [T]he content or product of music—the work—is properly autonomous when it draws on the autonomy of the voice that performs it, and for this to happen the relation between product and voice (work and performance) must be preserved. Where and when the relation (or doubleness of content and expression) is severed, the claimed autonomy of the product is a false one. (91; emphasis in original)

As Goehr points out, this argument is deeply ethnocentric and racist; Wagner, for instance, justified his anti-Semitism and denigration of non-German

cultures on the basis of their supposed inability to demonstrate the “human” values of authentic music.

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Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’ 83

Given her anti-racist commitments, there is no doubt that Kingston would find such claims abhorrent. Nevertheless, the story of Ts’ai Yen unwittingly reproduces an ethnocentric understanding of the voice insofar as Ts'ai embodies the humanization of musical performance. This emphasis on her humanity cannot be separated from the denigration of her captors as those who lack this quality. Thus even though her song permits her to integrate into the community of her captors, this new relationship proves to be unsatisfactory for the plot as a whole because it threatens the Chinese identity that it has cultivated all along. The danger is that she will assimilate

into the inhuman, a fate that is only averted by her return to her native community, which not only neutralizes the threat of assimilation, but also secures the integrity of China. The story of Ts’ai Yen, then, is not ultimately about hybridity, but the opposite: the maintenance of ethnic distinctions. Rewriting the original story of Ts’ai Yen into a modern political fable,

Kingston draws on the captivity narrative to articulate an emancipated Asian American subject, a project that is invested in identity politics even while it imagines a community in which cultural and gender differences are transcended. In this sense, 7he Woman Warrior does not offer a full break from cultural nationalism as much as a demonstration of the difficulty of thinking beyond identity politics. Lest my reading seem overly critical, let me add that the overcoming of cultural differences suggested by Ts’ai’s song is indeed powerful if not sustainable. Kingston, I think, is deeply invested in the possibility of an alternative community based on the freedom of aesthetic expression. Even though Ts’ai’s song is inescapably gendered and ethnicized, it somehow exceeds these limitations in the miraculous moment of performance, which promises the end of cultural conflict and the possibility of healing from its violence. What makes this vision untenable, however, is the humanist and ethnocentric logic that sustains the narrative. Before leaving this text, I want to return to the final line, “It translated well.” If we read these words carefully in context, they turn out to be rather puzzling. What, exactly, is being translated here? The text tells us that after Ts’ai’s return, the Chinese sang her songs “to their instruments,” but if she had always been singing in Chinese (recall that the miracle of her song lies in the fact that her captors understand her words even though she is singing in her native language), why would there be a need to translate anything upon her return? The word “translation” is a curious misrepresentation that fails to describe the conversion of her songs from barbarian reed pipes to

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84 Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

Chinese instruments, a process that does not actually involve any movement between languages. Instead, what seems to be occurring is transcription, the re-writing of musical pieces so that they can be played by (a) different instrument(s). The slippage between translation and transcription may seem like an insignificant detail but in light of the text’s treatment of music, Kingston’s move back to language fulfills what Goehr identifies as the long-standing desire to restore to language the redeeming, that is to say humanizing, characteristics of song. This outcome can only be achieved by reinforcing the ethnocentrism that underlies music’s apparent universality.° After all, who gets to keep singing in the end but the Chinese? Ironically, the music of (the historical) Ts’ai Yen has been irretrievably lost and the only trace of her historical existence is textual, in the words she wrote and left behind, firmly entrenched in the national literary tradition that claims her as its own.

The Rhythm of the Subject

For readers familiar with 7he Woman Warrior and its sequel, China Men (1980), it is quickly apparent that 7ripmaster Monkey “sounds” very difterent. The novel is not overtly autobiographical: it employs a sometimes elusive third-person narrator who guides the story and the development of the protagonist.” Moreover, the language of Tripmaster Monkey is frenetic, intense, packed with cultural and historical allusions, aggressive and confrontational even as it abounds with humor and irony. Set during the 1960s in the San Francisco Bay area, the novel features the hip and distinctive voice of its protagonist, Wittman Ah Sing, an alienated and angry fifth-generation Chinese American fresh out of college. Wittman is an aspiring writer whose

abrasive personality and short temper make him unable to hold a steady job. He decides to focus his efforts on writing and staging an epic drama about the Chinese American experience, a picaresque quest that involves getting married, collecting unemployment insurance, and taking a road trip in search of his relatives. Against the backdrop of the escalating war in Vietnam and the threat of the draft, the novel recounts his transformation from an angry beatnik into a pacifist. Sound plays an important role in 7ripmaster Monkey from the start. The subtitle, His Fake Book, refers to a type of printed music commonly used in

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jazz and popular music. Wittman Ah Sing’s name homophonically evokes Walt Whitman’s frequent use of musical tropes and in particular his famous declaration at the beginning of “Song of Myself,” “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” (1). Whitman’s attempts to inaugurate an American po-

etic tradition are paralleled by Wittman’s desire to establish a Chinese American aesthetic, but the more immediate model for Wittman is none other than Frank Chin: 7ripmaster Monkey is widely regarded as Kingston’s response to her cultural nationalist adversaries, and critics have repeatedly noted her remarkable ability to capture his unique mannerisms and tone.'° By creating a character who replicates Chin’s hysterical polemics, Kingston offers a fictional treatment, and often parody, of cultural nationalism. Nevertheless, she gives credence to its claim that racism has deprived Chinese

Americans of authentic forms of aesthetic expression and replaced them with Orientalist practices that pander to the exotic desires of mainstream America: What theater do we have besides beauty contests? Do we have a culture that’s not these knickknacks we sell to the bok gwai [white devils]? If Chinese-American culture is not knickknackatory—look at it— backscratcher swizzle sticks, pointed chopsticks for hair, Jade East aftershave in a Buddha-shape bottle, the head screws off and you pour lotion out of its neck—then what is it? No other people sell out their streets like this. Tourists can’t buy up J-town. . . . So what do we have in the way of a culture besides Chinese hand laundries? (27)

Wittman’s quest for authentic culture is a search for an identity that would free him from the constraints of racism. In this context, sound plays a key role in facilitating his development as a political subject. This relationship comes to the forefront in an early scene in which Wittman is sitting at home writing his play late into the night. As he works in earnest, the novel inserts a fable in which Wittman is transformed into a singer who travels with a group of musicians on a “music boat a-roving the rivers of China” (34). The musicians inhabit a dream world in which music and daily life are seamlessly integrated, a world identified as Chinese even though the musicians play an eclectically multicultural repertoire. Their idyllic existence abruptly comes to an end when they immigrate to North America, which marks their irreversible entry into global capitalism, a system in which art can no longer be practiced freely. Kingston associates immigration

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86 Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

with the loss of creativity as musical performance gets subsumed into wage labor.'!! In San Francisco, there are “no more entertainment dollars. The musicians sell their instruments and sing a cappella. Then, following the unlucky fishermen, they go on land, where they become as vagabond as poets who wrote on rocks and leaves” (39).'* The novel laments, “story boats and story teahouses where a professional can talk are as gone at Lake Anza and the Bay as they must be gone from China. What is there beautiful and adventurous about us here?” (41). If music was once superior to language, its status has been thrown into doubt in the modern world (Kingston is essentially making an Rousseauvian point here), and the fable ends with the singer-turned-storyteller telling his customers to pay up. The novel abruptly returns to Wittman’s apart-

ment where he is still trying to write and finds himself distracted by the noise around him. The most immediate and annoying distraction is the sound of a typewriter emanating from an unspecifiable spot in his building: “whenever he stopped typing, he heard someone else nearby tapping, tapping at a typewriter, a typing through the night” (41). Wittman turns on the radio to drown out the noise, but the resulting sonic montage distracts him even further. Abandoning this strategy, he tries instead to listen to the typewriter. What follows is a fascinating passage that brings together sound, writing, and subjectivity: Yes it was there, steady but not mechanical. . .. Now and again, the noise did hesitate, as if for thought, then a few word-length taps. An intelligence was coming up with words. Someone else, not a poet with pencil or fountain pen but a workhorse big-novel writer, was staying up, probably done composing already and typing out fair copy. It should be a companionable noise, a jazz challenge to which he could blow out the window his answering jazz. (41)

When Wittman imagines a “workhorse big-novel writer,” he aligns the novel with labor by drawing a contrast between the novelist’s use of the typewriter and the poet’s use of the less intrusive “pencil or fountain pen.”

This passage also suggests that the subjectivity of the novelist can be detected in the irregularity of the typewriter sounds, which indicate hesitation, thought, and therefore “intelligence.” Wittman tries to imagine a productive engagement with this mysterious intelligence by turning the sound into a “companionable noise” and invoking jazz as a model of free-flowing

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communication. But he quickly changes his mind and takes a more aggressive tone as he re-imagines what he hears as an expensive electric machine-gun typewriter aiming at him, gunning for him, to knock him off in competition. But so efficient—it had to be a girl, a clerk typist, he hoped, a secretary, he hoped. A schoolteacher cutting mimeo stencils. A cookbook writer. A guidebook-for-tourists writer. Madam Dim Sum. Madam Chinoiserie, Madam Orientalia knocking out horsey cocky locky astrology, Horatio Algiers Wong—he heard the typing leave him behind. (41)

With its misogyny and racial anger, this passage clearly mocks the rhetorical excesses of Frank Chin. Patricia P. Chu reads it as a sign that neither [Kingston] nor Frank Chin writes alone. Even when composing late at night in their separate garrets, each hears and responds to the other’s work, thereby creating a tradition. . . . [But] at this point in the novel, Wittman is resistant to intertextual dialogue; nor would the jazz metaphor of improvisation within a tradition appeal to him. No wonder, then, that Kingston, the “workhorse big-novel writer” takes aim at Wittman/Chin and “leaves him behind.” (Assimilating 176)

Chu identifies what I have been calling an autobiographical impulse by noting how “Kingston herself, figured by the typist .. . , seems closely identif-

able with her novel’s narrator, a distinctly feminist, maternal voice that evaluates and manages Wittman” (182). I want to suggest, however, that Kingston constructs a complex account of sound and subjectivity by leaving the identity of the voices in this scene somewhat ambiguous (are we reading Wittman’s mind, so to speak, or the words of a narrator?).'° As a result, it is difficult to precisely locate the auto-

biographical impulse, which is diffused into the text as an operation of narrative language. As Barthes writes in “Death of the Author,” “writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (142). While we can identify a similar kind of slippage here, it is important to note how Kingston’s (self-)figuration as the typist, and therefore Wittman’s rival, renders the autobiographical impulse into a sonic event. Unlike Ts’ai Yen’s voice, which functions as an exemplary instance of free expression, the meaning of this sound is uncertain because it is not fleshed

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88 Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

out, as it were, into a character. Instead, subjectivity comes across in the form of rhythm, in the irregular frequency of “word-length taps.” “An intelligence,” after all, is “coming up with words.” As we saw earlier in 7he Woman Warrior, attempts to deduce a subject through the sounds it produces run into interpretive challenges that require

us to pay attention to the materiality of sound and its social implications. In contrast to the voice, which is often understood as a direct expression of a subject’s interiority, rhythm is closely related to the realm of time as an objective dimension that functions independently of the subject. In his essay “The Echo of the Subject,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe writes, “To each individual or subject, then, there corresponds a rhythm, and one can consider social life as a whole, at least on the level of the affective and pulsional, as governed fundamentally—and more or less regulated, between cohesion and discord—by a general rhythmics” (198). Rhythm can be understood as

a temporal inscription that suggests an originary relation to the subject, a sign that the subject can only acquire actuality in time. But for LacoueLabarthe, rhythm precedes the formation of the subject because it enables subjectivity to become apparent in the first place by placing it in time, for what the repetitive character of rhythm stages is the movement of time as such. For this reason, rhythm is “infra-liminary” and inheres “in the break between the visible and the audible, the temporal and the spatial” (199). Lacoue-Labarthe frames his account of rhythm as a reconsideration of psychoanalysis’s emphasis on specular processes such as narcissism and the

mirror stage, models that fail to recognize the role of rhythm in giving these images temporal consistency. This claim relies on Emile Benveniste’s definition of rhythm as “form at the moment it is taken by what is in movement, mobile, fluid, the form that has no organic consistency . . . improvised, momentaneous, modifiable” (qtd. in Lacoue-Labarthe 201). Lacoue-Labarthe continues, the word [rhythm] . . . already implies—at the very edge of what of the subject can appear, manifest, or figure itself—the type and the stamp or impression, the pre-inscription which, conforming us in advance, determines us by disappropriating us and makes us inaccessible to ourselves. A pre-inscription that sends us back to the chaos that obviously was not schematized by us so that we should appear as what we are. In this sense, perhaps, [according to Mallarmé] “every soul is a rhythmic knot.” We (“we”) are rhythmed. (202; emphasis in original)

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As the liminal zone of subjectivity, a point grammatically illustrated by the passive voice in the last sentence, rhythm is fundamentally different than music, a modality that assumes the originary presence of a creative subject. To theorize through music, and melody in particular, is already to invoke the subject, to assume the existence of what comes into being and unravels by way of rhythm. Music, speculates Lacoue-Labarthe, might be “simply a rhythm in which ‘T’ seek desperately to recognize ‘myself’” (203). What Tripmaster Monkey stages is the liminality of the subject in relation to rhythm. To grasp this aspect of the text requires us to suspend the desire (on the part of readers as well as, to a certain degree, the text itself) to identify and specify a subject as the source of the typing sound and consider instead how rhythm produces the illusion of subjectivity. As we have already seen, the difficulty of “reading” the sound of the typewriter is that it never decisively reveals a character. Unlike the earlier fable of Wittman the Singer, which foregrounds the subjectivity of the musician, the typing sound is only a faint echo of a presumed subject. In light of Chu’s observa-

tions about the scene's autobiographical impulse, we might extend this inquiry to ask how the novel actualizes the figure of “Kingston.” When the text attributes rhythmic irregularities to the presence of an intelligent subject, it suggests that rhythm as such is mechanical and inhuman so that it is only through its interruption that an autonomous subject can emerge. ‘This understanding of rhythm and time is not far from that of the 1991 preface to Aitieeeee!, discussed in Chapter 2. In both texts, linear time is attributed

to industrial modernity, a connection that other thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre have developed by focusing on the factory assembly line, which operates continuously at the same pace with no regard for bodily experiences of time.'* The worker, in this scenario, is made to conform to the time of the production line rather than the other way around. Kingston takes up these claims by suggesting that authentic subjectivity can only be actualized out-

side the relentless rhythms that stem from modern technology and the military-industrial complex. In making this critique, she endeavors to articulate a subject who can interrupt these rhythms to forge a space of creativity unencumbered by the mechanical marking of time. These issues come together in a later scene that takes place at a house party hosted by Wittman’s friends. The novel signals the prominent role of sound when it describes how “the street was jampacked with cars and music, no room in the air for one more decibel. The trees held loudspeakers in

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90 Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

their arms; their bass hearts were thudding” (81). Amplified and enhanced by stereo technology, music turns into a kind of noise and acquires a menacing presence as it seeps into the surrounding neighborhood. Inside, Wittman comes across a group of guests staring at a television screen. But instead of regular programming, the only thing on display is snow, shimmering black and white dots that create a mass of meaningless visual and aural noise. For the intoxicated guests, however, the screen generates hallucina-

tions that culminate in “mushroom clouds... the graceful pufing of H-bombs. Poof. Poof. Poof. ...A row of human brains on stems. The End. The End. The End. The End means the end of the world.” The novel’s language takes on a markedly repetitive (we might say rhythmic) character as the guests tune themselves “into an open channel to a possible future,” a post-apocalyptic world in which sound and light take on an unprecedented, and deadly, intensity (96). Wittman and his friends see a “parade of freaks” that consists of halfhuman and half-animal “nuke-mutants” (96). The text explains this spectacle as follows: “The reason we make bombs is that we want to play with Nature, so we throw bombs at her to make her do evolution faster. Nature panics”

(96). The result of these distortions is the loss of vision and touch, but oddly enough, hearing remains as the only means to reconstitute community in the wake of nuclear catastrophe: Those who can see must keep talking and reading to others, and playing music and ball games for them on the radio. After the bombs, there will be beautiful music, like the pod-picking scene in /nvasion of the Body Snatchers. We won't have orchestras and bands; the music will be on tape. Fingers will melt together. . . . Languages will have a lot of vowels like “Aaaaaaah!” (97)

What stands out in this pessimistic account of the future is the status of music, the only form of art still available to everyone since vision is no longer a shared form of sensory perception. But even music has been dehumanized because it exists only in recorded form, a terror-ible trace of an earlier world

in which it could still be performed by living human bodies. Music itself turns into a source of distraction and destruction as Witt-

man moves into a parlor filled with strobe lights and dance music. Although he joins the guests on the dance floor, no meaningful interaction is possible because all communication is overwhelmed by the powerful beat. Wittman sees his own body as “a marionette who flies apart, scares kids,

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Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and “Tripmaster Monkey’ gI

and suddenly re-connects. My parts dance whether I dance or not. Might as well dance” (108). As he continues to dance, Wittman is overcome by the pulsating rhythm: Flashes and music were beating together now. Wittman was getting used to things, yeah, his feet in step, the old bod bopping okay, and his monkey mind going along. His heart was beating with the bass. . .. And the world is in syne. In sync at last. God Almighty, in sync at last. Feet go with drums. Heart booms to bass. My pulse, its pulse. Its pulse, my pulse. Ears, eyes, feet, heart, myself and all these people, my partners all. In sync, all synchronized. (109-110)

The novel alludes to the oratory of Martin Luther King Jr., but its substitution of “sync” for “free” distorts that reference, for to be in sync is to lose all freedom as technology eviscerates any remaining traces of autonomy. Echo-

ing the short, repetitive rhythms of the music, the language of the novel registers the coercive character of rhythm as moments of fleeting protest (“but”) are immediately absorbed into the beat: All right. All right. And —. And —. And —. And then —. Bang bang. Bang bang. But —. But —. But —. Banga. Banga. Lost. Found. Lost Found. Gotcha. Gotcher teeth. Gotcher face. Boom. Boom. Bomb. The Bomb. Bomb flash. Bomb flash. In what pose will the last big flash catch me? What if. This were. Bomb practice? ... Why is the beat so even? ... Why is this tape going on for so long? Whose music is this? What. If. Music. Can. Kill. Evil drummer finds your heart, and drums it. You dance along, drumbeat and heartbeat together, like harmony; but what if all of a sudden—a last bang—the drummer stops, and stops your heart? But this set—ominous undertoning bass—goes on and on... . A race to the death. (110)

By depicting rhythm as a deathly product of modern technology, Kingston recalls Lacoue-Labarthe’s contention that rhythm is a liminal state that both constitutes and unravels the subject, but what distinguishes their positions are differing investments in a politics of the subject. Whereas LacoueLabarthe mobilizes rhythm in order to deconstruct the subject, Kingston uses it to confirm an underlying humanist commitment to nuclear disarmament and pacifism.” Yet what is remarkable is how Kingston goes on to

undermine her own political claims by adopting a kind of post-modern cynicism to the point where, as well will see, the text can no longer pursue its political project through its treatment of sound. There is, after all, no

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92 Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

Bomb, no apocalypse, and no death in this scene. We are at a party and, as Attali memorably puts it, “just as death is nothing more than an excess of life, noise has always been perceived as a source of exaltation, a kind of

therapeutic drug capable of curing tarantula bites” (27). In this druginfused world, pleasure and destruction, ecstasy and fear, blend seamlessly into each other, resulting in a jarring discrepancy between the scene’s contents and the gravity of its political commentary. This contradiction comes to the forefront as the music finally ends and

a mass of exhausted “survivors” slowly regain their breath. At this very moment, the deafening sound of a “supersonic jet war fighter plane” (110) blasts through the house. As the guests duck for cover, “Sound waves [push] on them, and [hold] them flattened.” Wittman assumes that a real nuclear bomb has been dropped: “they've gone and done it. This is it. Blown up the

planet. Nothing left but noise... you could scream all you want, nobody could hear you—opening their mouths like the Munch painting” (111). He imagines falling into an all-encompassing state of noise in which, like Munch’s iconic Scream, sound turns into space, into a frozen image exempt from the passing of time. In Lacoue-Labarthe’s terms, this reversion back to the image marks the subject’s fatal detachment from rhythm and time. It turns out, however, that Wittman and his friends are merely victims of a practical joke. The sound of the Bomb is actually a sound effect played by the host from a recording that includes “mortar shells from rifle shots, fighter planes diving, hand grenades, machine-gun fire, and the A-bomb

at Nagasaki and the A-bomb at Hiroshima, and—finale—those bombs over-dubbed in multiplex bombilation. The boom of the Bomb, then subsequent booms, the resounding, rolling aftershocks—roaring, roaring, roaring. We are all hibakushas” (111). The reference to survivors and witnesses of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of this passage is especially jarring because it undercuts the validity of historical experience and under-

mines the qualitative difference between actual events and their technically reproducible sound. There is something inappropriate about this evacuation of historicity, which indicates a cynicism that undermines the ethical project of the novel by questioning the possibility of historical knowledge in relation to some of the most horrific instances of twentiethcentury violence. If the sound (effect) of nuclear warfare is something of a denouement to this scene, it also marks the exhaustion of sound as a productive mode of

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social formation: associated earlier with unmediated self-expression in the form of music, it has degenerated into the monotonous rhythms of indus-

trial modernity and finally the noise of nuclear annihilation. Sound, it seems, can no longer support the emergence of an emancipated subject. Having arrived at this impasse, the novel takes a decisive turn toward signifying language. In the calm of the party’s afterlife, Wittman encounters a different kind of community when he sees a woman performing poetry before a captive audience. Tafa de Weese, whom he will later marry to avoid the draft, is in the midst of reciting Robert Service's ballad “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” Wittman is enraptured as he hears himself described in her words: “a race of men that don’t fit in, / A race that can’t sit still” (113). Language, in the form of poetry, offers the means for him to recognize himself and, in doing so, construct a stable identity. This turn to meaningful language will culminate at the end of the novel with the staging of Wittman’s own play, a carnivalesque event that involves a huge cast of performers and participants; “everyone, the narrator remarks, “really does want to get into the act” (276). Yet even here, noise remains viscerally present as a constant threat to the coherence of this emerging community. Sau-ling Wong vividly describes his play as a production in which “a virtual encyclopedia of Asian American history and lore is alluded to, acted out, scrambled up, troped upon, celebrated, satirized, and perhaps most importantly, witnessed by a laughing, catcalling, riotous audience” (Reading 206;

emphasis in original). The novel tells us that the play peaks on its third straight night with a “climactic free-for-all” (301) in which the actors fight to a cacophony of firecrackers, “drums and cymbals,” “scab song[s],” “bullets and arrows zingling],” “rain barrels explod[ing],” and “pummel and cudgel and wack-wack” (301). In the midst of this sonic chaos, the novel tries to establish a social formation in which noise, contained by signifying language, is no longer destructive: Wittman was learning that one big bang-up show has to be followed up with a second show, a third show, shows until something takes hold. He was defining a community, which will meet every night for a season. Community is not built once-and-for-all; people have to imagine, practice, and re-create it. His community surrounding him, then, we're going to reward and bless Wittman with our listening while he talks to his heart’s content. Let him get it all out, and we hear what he has to say direct. Blasting and blazing are too wordless. (306)

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94 Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

What follows is a thirty-odd-page monologue by Wittman in which he covers a wide range of themes in Asian American history and culture. But what produces community is not the content of his speech, but rather the social relations engendered among his listeners in the course of his performance. Listening is directly elicited from readers by the narrator and this afhrmation of language is also an assertion of the novel’s autobiographical impulse insofar as we can only listen to Kingston by listening to Wittman. Even though it is not clear whether this new community can be sustained into the future, at the very least noise is no longer an intrusive threat to social life.

The Cusp of the Subject

In the previous section, I suggested that Kingston’s treatment of rhythm differs from Lacoue-Labarthe’s because she remains deeply committed to a humanist politics through pacifism. I would like to revisit this comparison here to underscore how sound reveals and informs her conflicted depiction of subjectivity. At the end of “The Echo of the Subject,” Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that it may be impossible to “get beyond the closure of narcissism, even by shaking its specular model” and return to a moment in which rhythm can be apprehended without being filtered through the (image of the) subject (205). Even though rhythm logically precedes the subject, this ““before’ is in principle unassignable” (205); to think in terms of rhythm is already to assume the subject’s existence. To put it differently, to think through rhythm is already to slide back into the humanist assumptions that underscore music and melody. Thus while Kingston and Lacoue-Labarthe are invested in different theories of the subject, we might plot a possible convergence in their thinking in a murky middle ground that emerges in their respective texts, a terrain in which sound is distinct from subjectivity but not clearly separable from it. For her part, Kingston’s treatment of sound and subjectivity has implications beyond passages in which sound is explicitly depicted, for it informs her investment in an autonomous subject who can overcome the effects of racialization. As we have seen, 7he Woman Warrior is driven by the desire to articulate a female Chinese American subject, while Tripmaster Monkey reconfigures Asian American identity as a response to the global threat of

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nuclear militarization. David Palumbo-Liu insightfully observes that the narrator of Zhe Woman Warrior “is poised on the threshold of an individual subjectivity that knows no preexisting labels—it is declared as a unique and irrepeatable Self; Wittman, on the other hand, is to become a pacifist and antiwar activist, that is, he will conjoin his subjectivity to a social collective formation” (406). Palumbo-Liu encapsulates the developmental trajectory of Kingston’s political and literary imagination, and it is therefore signifcant that both texts deploy the logic of the captivity narrative to depict a threatened hero/ine whose emancipation involves some sort of return to a purportedly original community. Ts’ai Yen’s captivity and return underscores her allegorical role as a figure for the narrator and Chinese American women more generally. Wittman is not only held captive due to his racialized status, but also because he lives in a modern world in which technology has distorted social relations and placed the future of humanity at risk through nuclear annihilation. His emergence as an autonomous subject involves the creation of a new community constituted by aesthetic activity, but insofar as that community is located in Chinatown (in his family clan association in fact) and includes many of his Asian American friends and family, it also evokes an “originary” ethnic identity, a more diverse version of Asian America that remains rooted in American culture while rejecting its racism and Orientalism. In this manner, Kingston registers the ongoing paradox of Asian American identity as a constructed formation that acquires stability in the course of its deployment. Kingston, to put it differently, seems to be heading toward a version of cultural nationalism. But in the last two pages of the novel, the plot takes a sudden shift as Wittman’s audience misunderstands his extended monologue “to mean that he was announcing his marriage to Tafa and doing so with a new clever wedding ritual of his own making” (339). The play abruptly turns into a wedding celebration, an unexpected development that threatens to derail the trajectory of the preceding pages. As if to confirm that 7ripmaster Monkey is indeed a parody of cultural nationalism, Kingston appears to pull the plug on its rhetorical excesses after generously giving

it space. The last paragraph takes direct aim at Chin and his comrades by

dismissing their heroic tradition and pointing out that the “masters of war were ultimately unsuccessful: “The clanging and banging fooled us, but now we know—they lost” (340). In order to save Wittman from the dead-end noise of cultural nationalism, the novel—or more precisely the

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96 Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and ‘Tripmaster Monkey’

narrator—transforms him into a pacifist who resolves to become a draftdodging peacenik. The ending of Tripmaster Monkey turns into comedy as the narrator directly manipulates the plot as well as Wittman himself. In doing so, the novel foregrounds its autobiographical impulse by drawing our attention to the presence of a narrator whose “identity” remains elusive. Nevertheless, the narrator seems to articulate political commitments that we can attribute to Kingston herself even though she is not directly enfigured as an autobiographical subject.'® Kingston’s apparent turn away from autobiogra-

phy even while she maintains a personal investment and presence in the text may be a critical response to the ways in which minority writers such as herself have long been confined to self-ethnography by mainstream literary

culture. Her turn to fiction, not to mention her departures from realism, seems designed to assert authorial agency apart from the racialized norms that hold her captive, so to speak.'” This well-known, indeed predictable, reading effectively replicates the problematic logic of the captivity narrative. By contrast, let me offer a different explanation by returning to Paul de Man’s contention, cited at the beginning of this chapter, that autobiography is an effect of any text that is “stated to be by someone and assumed to be understandable to the extent that this is the case.” De Man’s point is that the supposedly referential relationship between the author and the text’s central persona is not fixed, but operates tropologically through a logic of substitution. Reading autobiography entails a “double motion” that involves “the necessity to escape from the tropology of the subject and the equally inevitable reinscription of this necessity within a specular model of cognition” (923). De Man identifies the central trope in autobiography as prosopopoeia, “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity” that “confers upon it the power of speech” as well as the trappings of identity and subjectivity (926). The problem with prosopopoeia is that its substitutionary structure works both ways: just as the living (author) can confer life onto the voiceless, so too can lifelessness be conferred on the living. This is precisely what happens once the author is textualized into an autobiographical subject: he or she becomes a material of narrative, a linguistic figure that can no longer be securely tethered to an external, living, referent. It is precisely in this sense

that we should understand the status of the autobiographical impulse in Kingston’s writings. Indeed, this condition is brilliantly conveyed in her

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Sound and the Subject in ‘The Woman Warrior’ and “Tripmaster Monkey’ 97

apostrophic address to Chinese Americans at the beginning of 7he Woman Warrior (with which I began this chapter): as soon as Kingston invokes a living Chinese American collective subject, she immediately registers its unraveling, its dissolution into heterogeneous socio-cultural as well as textual materials that no longer cohere except through the dictates of the author. Kingston’s predicament—how to articulate a living identity when the act of representation unsettles this very possibility—illuminates the theoretical conundrum of post-identity Asian American Studies. Ironically, her authorial agency is most evident not when she asserts an identity, but rather when she facilitates its dissolution. Kingston’s intellectual and aesthetic prowess is most evident when, to borrow Sneja Gunew’s description of how a minoritized subject can write theory, she “manage[s] to escape being confined to a particular group and its attendant stereotyping, a little like double (or multiple) agents” (369). Kingston accomplishes this by drawing our attention to the ways in which subjectivity becomes meaningful in the first place: The Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey not only narrate subjects, but also show how the logic of subjectivity unfolds in textual form. In the process, however, the subject is itself defamiliarized even as it remains indispensable to her political and literary imagination. For Asian American literary studies, Kingston remains an enduring figure because she articulates the conflicted relationship between political commitment and textuality, and repeatedly demonstrates how the operations of post-identity take place in a liminal zone between these two poles, in the simultaneous deployment and unraveling of identity politics.

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FOUR

Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in A Gesture Life

In her provocative book Toward a Global Idea of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva argues that race is integral to post-Enlightenment formulations of subjectivity that are centered around an ontological figure that she calls the “transparent I.” Reflecting its colonial context, the transparent I was understood from the start as European, and then more generally as Western, effectively marking the majority of humanity as disposable and unworthy to access “universal” values such as justice, freedom, and equality. This figure prescribed the means for non-Western subjects to achieve self-determination and freedom by acquiring its status, but because this teleological trajectory reproduces rather than dismantles the racial assumptions of transparency, it results in the extinction of the non-European Other through assimilation or, more tragically, extermination and death. According to Silva, the logic of racialization stems from two ontological

contexts, the historical and the global, which correspond roughly to the temporal and spatial. Drawing on Roland Robertson’s conception of globality as the production of collective identities through interactions among various societies, she suggests that globality “fuses particular bodily traits,

social configurations, and global regions” to reproduce “human difference ...as irreducible and unsublatable” (xix). Combined with a Eurocentric historicism that renders the non-European as perpetually belated to modernity, globality posits the universality of subjectivity while entrenching the difference between the West and its Others in absolute spatial terms. In this manner, it justifies the violent and genocidal effects of 98

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ 99

colonialism and imperialism by splitting humanity into two essential categories: “While the others of Europe gaze on the horizons of death, facing certain obliteration, the racial keeps the transparent] in self-determination . . . alone before the horizon the life, oblivious to, because always already knowledgeable (controlling and emulating) of, how universal reason governs its existence’ (30).

I begin this chapter with Silva’s account of globality in order to foreground the dangers of the transparent I and its manifestations as the idealized critical subject that I have been tracking throughout this study. Insofar as non-Western peoples have tried to appropriate this subject as the basis for

various political projects, the violent consequences of humanism can be seen not only in direct encounters between the West and its Others, but also in other configurations through which non-Western subjects participate in a global modernity. In these situations, notions of subjectivity continue to inform hierarchical structures that mark some individuals and communities as dominant and others as disposable. Following the arc of Silva’s critique, we need to consider how these assumptions are embedded in modern understandings of space and time, in the epistemological frameworks through which the world is rendered knowable and representable. By tracing these assumptions, we can discern the operations of the idealized critical subject and the conditions of its emergence. This chapter takes up this task by focusing on the status of the realist novel in Asian American literature. My investigation returns to one of the basic analytical distinctions in literary criticism, namely between form and content. For realist texts that aim to secure a mimetic relationship with the real world, form inheres in the epistemological assumptions that define what constitutes objective reality. The realist novel is characterized by a selfreflexivity that draws attention to how these assumptions inform and shape its narrative content. These claims are extensively developed in Lukacs’s The Theory of the Novel, to which I will turn before offering an extended reading of A Gesture Life (1999), a novel by Korean American author Chang-rae Lee. I read this powerful novel of transnational memory and responsibility as a text that dissects the relationship between identity and narration and shows how the former facilitates the representation of historical information and its ethical consequences. I conclude by suggesting how its treatment of globality might inform Silva’s urgent call for alternatives to transparency and its violent consequences.

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I0O Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ The Novel in the Age of Transcendental Homelessness

The Theory of the Novel begins by drawing a typological contrast between the novel and its generic predecessors. Lukacs argues that modern thought, with its emphasis on reason and abstraction, has produced an age of what he famously calls “transcendental homelessness” (41) in which “the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of

meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality” (56).' In order to illustrate this condition, Lukacs offers a striking contrast between the novel and pre-modern literary forms that emerged from, and adequately represented, “integrated civilizations.” Greek drama, for example, belongs to an age in which “all understand one another because all speak the same language, all trust one another, be it as mortal enemies, for all are striving in the same way towards the same centre, and all move at the same level of an existence which is essentially the same” (44). As the epic of a world in which the organic totality of life has been irreparably shattered, the novel cannot rely on pre-existing generic conventions to accomplish its goals. Instead, it strives to “givle] form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life” (60) by adopting a secular and rational frame-

work that would render the fictional world of the text synonymous and continuous with the real world. It is in this context that the novel runs directly into the problem of abstraction, for “any system that could be established in a novel... had to be one of abstract concepts and therefore not directly suitable for aesthetic form-giving” (70). The significance of the novel

lies in the fact that its formal protocols are constituted by and around this crisis of representation, a crisis that questions the very possibility of realism. Even though Lukacs’s account of the novel is undoubtedly Eurocentric, it draws attention to epistemological assumptions that have also informed the reading practices widely applied to Asian American fiction. By treating fiction as a means to access neglected histories and experiences, these practices are ultimately concerned with the ability of the novel to give form to the world and render that knowledge accessible. Thus even though critics tend to focus on strategies that distance Asian American writing from the novel’s Western origins, they do so in ways that are largely continuous with Lukacs’s description of the novel. By foregrounding this similarity, I want to suggest that the “Asian American novel”—a heuristic category that I use

here to theorize the intersection between the claims of identity and the

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ IOI

protocols of fictional representation—can be read as a specific engagement with Lukacs’s notion of “transcendental homelessness”: for cultures with extensive histories of displacement and marginalization, cultures for which “homelessness” is a material as well as existential condition, “giving form” to the “concealed totality of life” necessarily involves representing the racialized violence of colonial modernity. Chang-rae Lee’s novels have been characterized by an ambitious desire to depict the socio-historical conditions of Asian America. His first novel, Native Speaker (1995), focused on Korean Americans in multicultural New York City and was widely compared to Ralph Ellison’s /nvisible Man.* But what arguably distinguishes Lee from Ellison is his dedication to literary realism: the power of his novels stems from their verisimilitude and careful attention to the everyday realities of race, features that rely on the materialist and historicist assumptions that underscore realism more generally. At the same time, Lee registers how conventional narrative genres such as the spy novel, the political thriller, and the novel of suburbia are racialized in ways that obstruct his realist project. In an interview with Ron Hogan, he remarks, “I’m a real fan of [writers such as John] Cheever and [Anne] Beattie, but I could never tell those stories straight through because of who I am.” In his essay “The Faintest Echo of Our Language,” he recalls, I remember writing short stories in high school with narrators or chief characters of unidentified race and ethnicity. Of course this meant that they were white, everything in my stories was some kind of white, though [ always avoided physical descriptions of them or passages on their lineage. .. . Mostly, though, they were figures who (I thought) could appear in an authentic short story, belong to one, that no reader would notice anything amiss in them, as if they'd inhabited forever those visionary landscapes of tales and telling. (220; emphasis in original)

Here, Lee exposes how embedded forms of racism have turned whiteness into a normative standard for literary authenticity by foregrounding his determination to depict Asian American characters and experiences. More important, perhaps, he conveys these stakes in the form of a narrative of racial awakening, a strategy that draws our attention to the mediating role of narration in articulations of identity. In A Gesture Life, Lee reframes his earlier meditations on Korean American identity by constructing a transnational narrative that situates Asian

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102 Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’

Americans in relation to colonial histories in East Asia. The novel is set in the fictional town of Bedley Run, a suburb of New York City that functions as a microcosm for mid-to-late twentieth-century America. Lee meticulously records the daily effects of post-Fordism and globalization as well as the social changes brought about by the civil rights movement and the 1965 Immigration Act. These depictions of postwar America are interspersed with scenes set in Asia in the years leading up to and during World War II. Lee focuses on the experiences of women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, a horrific atrocity that was perpetrated on an estimated 200,000 women, the overwhelming majority of whom were of Korean descent (Smith and Schaffer 126). Euphemistically labeled “comfort women, they were subjected to a highly organized system of human trafficking in which up to three-quarters of the victims died as a result of the violence perpetrated on them (Smith and Schaffer 127).° Against this backdrop, A Gesture Life repeatedly draws our attention to the unstable nature of identities, which are shown to be contingent effects of complex historical circumstances. The first-person narrator-protagonist, Franklin Hata, is an elderly Japanese immigrant who came to the United States sometime in the 1960s. We soon learn that he is actually an ethnic Korean who was born in Japan before World War II and later adopted and raised by a Japanese family. He embraces the imperialist ideology of the period and goes on to serve as an army medic during the war. While stationed in Burma, he develops a romantic relationship with a Korean “comfort woman” named Kkhutaeh, whom he calls K throughout the novel (for reasons that are not entirely spelled out, K was not forced to work in the “comfort stations” upon her arrival in the military camp and instead was confined in isolation under Hata’s charge). Their short affair ends abruptly when she is abducted and brutally murdered by a group of soldiers. Although Hata is not directly involved in these acts, for the rest of his life he feels an inescapable guilt over his role in her enslavement and death. After he immigrates to the United States, Hata adopts an orphan girl named Sunny, the daughter of an African American GI stationed in South Korea and a local sex worker. Hata and Sunny have a strained relationship and she eventually runs away from home as a teenager. Although his personal life is marked by failure after failure, Hata manages to become a successful business owner and earns a comfortable living, an achievement exemplified by his impressive house as well as the esteem accorded to him by

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ 103

the mostly white citizens of Bedley Run. As the novel begins in the 1990s, he has just retired and shows every sign of having successfully assimilated into his community, impressions that quickly unravel as he begins to recount his past for the benefit of the reader. In order to convey Hata’s story, A Gesture Life relies on flashbacks, a conventional narrative device that enables the novel to cover a wide time

span while remaining anchored in the present, the time in which he is, presumably, recalling his past. By positing time as linear and constant, A Gesture Life underscores its own historicity, but because it moves frequently between different times and places, the reader experiences the text as a constellation of overlaps, repetitions, and memories that exceed the confines of space and time. The use of flashbacks, however, relies on a chronological schema in which past and present can be clearly delineated. This schema, explains J. M. Bernstein ina commentary on The Theory of the Novel, provides a “temporal sequence which can be matched to empirical events which possess a different order of determination. The novel, then, alternates between formgiving and mimesis by shifting between two different forms of determination: a causal order of events and a narrative (formally figured) order of events”

(109). To borrow terms used by structuralist criticism, Lee constantly draws our attention to the distinction between story and narrative, between the events that constitute “what happens” understood in historical terms as a “causal order” and the formal strategies employed to present that material. In what follows, I explore how this distinction operates by focusing on two aspects of the novel. First, I examine A Gesture Life's treatment of character or, to be more precise, the ways in which it foregrounds Hata’s dual role as a character (the subject being narrated, the protagonist of the plot) and the narrator (the “voice” or “mind” that produces the novel). Second, I consider the novel’s treatment of narrative time in light of its realist adherence to chronological/historical time. By relying on important exceptions to this temporal schema, Lee relies on identitarian thinking while undermining the coherence of identities.

Ks Haunting For Lukacs, the distinction between narrator and character stems from the novel’s simultaneous attempt to posit an empirical subject while revealing

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104 Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’

the conditions under which that subject operates. Bernstein elaborates this distinction as follows: “In a novel, . . . an individual life is both what is represented and a means of representation. . . . [T]he self belongs to both transcendental (form-giving) and empirical (life) levels, it belongs to the form of representation and to the represented world” (92). A Gesture Life complicates these roles by making Hata an unreliable narrator who frequently misrepresents and distorts the details of his past. But while we quickly learn that he cannot be trusted to deliver an objective account of his life, the novel does not radically undermine the possibility of reliable historical knowledge. Instead, Lee strives to convey reliable historical information through an unreliable narrator, a process that requires the reader to constantly ascertain what has actually happened. As I will show, the novel relies on other characters who possess the necessary judgment and integrity to act as trustworthy sources of information. Lee’s commitment to historical accuracy is undoubtedly related to the

novel’s difficult subject matter. In light of the fact that he is depicting atrocities that are deeply traumatic and have yet to be properly redressed through juridical or political means, Lee is acutely aware of the responsibilities and pitfalls of his narrative project, which demands historical accuracy even while conveying Hata’s compromised relationship to the truth. Given Hata’s central role, it is worth noting that Lee had originally planned to write the novel from the perspective of a “comfort woman.” But after conducting extensive research and interviewing several surviving “comfort women, he found himself unable to synthesize his findings into a compelling story and eventually decided to narrate the novel from Hata’s point of view instead. In his interview with Ron Hogan, Lee explains, “I [originally] couldn't find anything to tell other than the horrendous crime, and it was just unrelenting. I found that it was simply too much for me to handle— and, in a strange way, because it was so straightforward, I couldn't find the drama in it.” Lee suggestively locates the “drama” of the novel in the mediated distance between narration and content and seems more interested in narrating around an event rather than depicting it outright: “[fiction should] bring home for the reader not just an act, historical or not, but the aftereffects, what happens in the act’s wake. And, most interestingly, how people live in that wake. They do, and they do so well. That’s what's so chilling about human nature sometimes, and that’s the stuff a fiction writer just drools over when he finds it.”

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ 105

For Hata, the very act of narration, which he considers a sort of ethical obligation, is an aftereffect of his past. Near the start of the novel, he remarks, “it seems difficult enough to consider one’s own triumphs and failures with perfect verity, for it’s no secret that the past . . . [is] never as truth-reflecting

as people would like to believe.” Nevertheless, he continues, “I have long felt that I ought to place my energies toward the reckoning of what stands in the here and now” (5). Etymologically related to notions such as counting and putting into order, the word “reckon” functions here as a stand-in for narration more generally. But instead of providing clarity about the past, reckoning produces a deep sense of self-alienation that exacerbates the gap between Hata’s roles as character and narrator, a point he confirms by describing the “unformed quality” of his memories, which feel “as if they are someone else’s memories and reflections, though somehow only available to me, to keep and to hold” (41). This distinction erupts again during a remarkable scene that takes place

about two-thirds of the way into the novel. By this point, Hata has recounted how he fell in love with K and we have learned that she is about to

be forced to work in the “comfort stations.” With the plot headed toward what will likely be a tragic climax, the novel brings us back to the present. In the scene that concerns us, Hata begins, Now and then, I sometimes forget who I really am. I will be sitting downstairs in the kitchen, or on the edge of the lounger by the pool, or here under the covers in my bed, and I lose all sense of myself. I forget what it is I do, the regular activity of my walk and my swim and my taking of tea, the minor trappings and doings of my days, what I’ve made up to be the token flags of my life. I forget why it is I do such things, why they give me interest or solace or pleasure. (285)

In this state of forgetfulness, he wanders into town at night “try[ing] to figure once again the notices, the character, the sorts of actions of a man like me, what things or set of things define him in the most simple and ordinary way” (285). But these efforts are ultimately futile: “I forget the usu-

als, who his friends might be, his associates; I forget even that he has a tenuous and fragile hold of family, this the only idea that dully rings of remembrance in his heart” (285).

Hata’s uncertainty intensifies when he returns home and realizes that K “has finally come back for [him]” (286). Her return, we are told, is

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106 Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’

immediate, real, and taking place right before his eyes. He hears the sound of her bare feet touching the hallway floor. She seems weightless as she sits on his bed. He can touch her cool skin. They converse. Hata is shaken by the sight of her scantily clad body, which has not changed in appearance since their days in the camp. He struggles to figure out what is going on in his own house and quickly decides that he is “not dreaming or conjuring, but simply reacquainting [himself] with her, as [he] might any friend of [his] youth.” “And so,” he concludes, “she visited me” (286). At first glance, we seem to be witnessing a scene of haunting in which K has returned as a sort of ghost. As Hata struggles to understand her presence, his uncertainty about her status undermines his attempts to narrate, and thereby exercise control over, her story. Insofar as K embodies the gendered, racialized, and colonized subaltern, her return suggests a momentary subversion of his narrative powers. But while this subtext seems fairly evident, her visit poses a considerable interpretive challenge for critics and readers alike: how should we make sense of this enigmatic, yet clearly significant, event?

In light of Lee’s ongoing engagement with American literary traditions, we might read this scene as an example of a phenomenon in contemporary ethnic American literatures that Kathleen Brogan calls “cultural haunting.” Cultural hauntings “re-create ethnic identity through an imaginative recuperation of the past” (4) that reveals the collective character of traumatic

histories so that “pathologies of memory take on a cultural and political significance, reflecting a society's inability to integrate with the present both traumatic experience and a precatastrophic lost past” (7).* To read in this manner is to follow Avery Gordon’s assertion that the ghost is a “social figure,” a “form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course” (8). Understanding K’s visit in these terms

would highlight how she disrupts Hata’s semblance of normalcy by reminding him of histories that he has tried to repress and forget. This scene thus exemplifies the novel’s concern with the ongoing effects of history, with the past as a lingering force in the present. What this reading doesn’t quite address, however, is why the text takes a sudden turn to a narrative mode akin to the gothic or magic realism. Its departure from the protocols of realism is jarring because this is the only instance in the novel in which we encounter what might be labeled supernatural; otherwise, A Gesture Life

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ 107 adheres closely to the parameters of realism.’ In order to makes sense of this

discrepancy, we might interpret K’s presence as an invention of Hata’s mind, a symptom of his ongoing inability to resolve traumatic events in his past. In psychoanalytic terms, K exemplifies what Freud called the uncanny, an utterly strange yet familiar experience that stems from the incomplete repression of infantile desires for a magical world that has not quite been eradicated by secular reason. These reading strategies remain unsatisfactory, however, because they ignore the more intriguing interpretation that is offered in the text itself, one that surprisingly refuses the very notion of haunting. Initially, Hata is “almost sure she [is] a spectral body or ghost” and thinks that there is something right, even reassuring, about being haunted. But he quickly changes his mind and declares that her visit is not a haunting and K, therefore, is not a ghost: [am not a magical man, and never have been. I am unversed in the metaphysical, have long become estranged from it, and if this can be so, I believe the metaphysical is as much unversed in me. We have a historical pact. And as deeply as I wished she were some wondrous, ethereal presence, that I was being duly haunted, I knew that she was absolute, unquestionably real, a once personhood come wholly into being. (286)

While Hata’s declaration of her unquestionable reality can be psychologized and dismissed, what is remarkable here is the way in which he proscribes his own desire for her presence as a ghost. He refuses to explain K’s presence by invoking a mystical explanation that would give narrative form to an inexplicable event, to narrate K’s haunting as such. Hata’s staunch denial of the “metaphysical” stands as a moment when the formal demands of realism get articulated at the level of plot. In refusing K’s haunting, he reafhrms the philosophical assumptions that underscore the novel’s realism. But because the scene seems to defy these very assumptions, it recasts the claims of realism into a pathological attachment, part of his ongoing, but always insufficient, attempt to confront the immensity of his past. His stubborn insistence on realism does not, in fact, result in a better grasp of the past, or a breakthrough in personal understanding; realism, at least for Hata, fails to deliver historical knowledge that can be translated into an ethically meaningful response. But even though K’s

“haunting” indicates a rupture in the novel’s realist commitments, it

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108 Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’

simultaneously reveals the formal basis of its historicism by suggesting that K cannot be contained within the parameters of Hata’s narrative. This crucial exemption underscores her indispensable role as the novel’s source of objective truth and ethical direction: K enables the text to combine its historicist and political commitments by way of a sublimated identity politics. This point becomes clearer when we consider how the novel shifts our attention from the metaphysics of her presence to its politics. During her visit, K reminds Hata of his promise, made many years ago in the military camp, to take her away to “Shanghai, Kyoto, even Seoul. Or some other place” (287). Hata testily asserts his wish to remain where he is and claim it as home, but K tells him that she hopes they can move on; in their current surroundings, she explains, she cannot die. Hata continues, “Her words at first confused me, as I thought she was saying this wouldn't be a suitable place for her to pass over to the next life. But then I realized she meant that it wouldn't be possible, as if this house were some penultimate trap of living, sustaining her beyond the pale” (287). These puzzling remarks suggest that Hata is less troubled by his responsibility in regard to her death than the opposite: he feels guilty for her presence, her inability to pass into what lies beyond the living. As he did years earlier in the camp, he tells her that he does not want her to die, that he wishes that she would stay with him instead. His entreaties seem to work, but precisely because they work, he feels even more guilty: I thought I had convinced her to remain yet again, remembering now how many times I had done so, today and yesterday and all the days before that, in a strange and backward perpetuity. I keep winning her over with hardly an argument, though each time an ill feeling comes over me, the soiling, resident sickness you develop when you have never in your life been caught at something wrong, when you have never once been discovered. (288)

Eventually, Hata drifts off to sleep and wakes up to find that K has disappeared. As he searches in vain for her, he is suddenly overcome by a desperate desire to escape his entanglement in the past. This can only happen, he realizes, with his own death, but he quickly recognizes that this would merely be a “fraudulent and dangerous wish” that would release him from

having to confront and work through his past (290). Ruling out death for now, Hata resorts to narration as a way to continue living ethically: “in

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ 109

fact, he concludes, “a man like me should be craving every last bit and tatter of his memory” (290). Hata’s embrace of narration has two important consequences. First, it prolongs his life as a character by sustaining the premise of the novel as the

product of his narrating imagination. Second, it posits narration as the principle that justifies the text as a whole, thereby highlighting the selfreflexivity of the novel as such. Both of these points, however, are tainted by the fact that narration is a thoroughly compromised act since for Hata, telling his own story involves appropriating and retelling the story of K. As K’s haunting dramatically demonstrates, narrating her story involves making her textually present, a condition steeped in the power relations that have framed their relationship. K’s continuing presence in the text endows her with what we might call an aesthetic afterlife sustained by Hata’s acts of narration. The novel draws our attention to the stakes of representation by including several instances in which Hata deploys artistic tropes to describe her as a beautiful object detached from the real world and exempt from the passing of time. He goes on to imagine their relationship as a realm separate from the military camp and idealizes her body as a work of art, a work of “transcendent, somehow divine” beauty (228) that seems “present but not present” (231). He tells us that she “would hardly be a person at all were it not for her seemingly insoluble beauty, which the time in our camp had not yet worn away” (231) and becomes obsessed with “how to preserve her, how [he] might keep her apart from all uses” (251), a horrific euphemism for the violent fate that awaited

“comfort women.” Hata’s aestheticism reflects a romantic understanding of art as free from instrumental use. In addition to highlighting how this ideological stance is entirely complicit in her enslavement, the novel also registers the Western origins of these claims, thereby contextualizing his aestheticism in the cross-cultural encounters engendered by modernity. During K’s haunting, Hata describes her naked body as a statue and tells us, “Her skin was cool and chaste to me, almost sisterly, alabastrine” (288). Lee’s reference to alabaster elicits a set of suggestive connotations: as a ubiguitous cliché in popular romances, “alabaster brows” have been frequently

attributed to beautiful young women with pale skin. As a material for sculpture dating back to the ancient world, it was associated with the exotic Orient, particularly Middle Eastern locations such as Egypt and Arabia. A somewhat more troubling allusion that seems especially resonant for this

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ILO Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’

scene can be found in Byron’s comparison of a young Turkish girl rescued

from Cossacks to a “lighted alabaster vase” in Canto VII of Don Juan (XCVI 8). In A Gesture Life, the most disturbing uses of sculptural imagery

occur as Hata describes his two sexual encounters with K, both of which are coded as instances of rape. In the first case, he describes her “as if she were the sculpture of a recumbent girl and not a real girl at all” (260), and just before their second encounter, he remarks that K was “the most beautiful statue of herself” (295).

Furthermore, Hata turns to Western literature in order to imagine their relationship taking place in a detached world that is nevertheless analogous to the real world—a realm, in other words, exemplified by the novel as such. He earnestly tells K, “I have enjoyed some modern novels, too, especially several French and German, which I have found to be passionate and distinctly dark in turn” (248). Although K is also interested in these books, her reply draws out the cultural hierarchies that determine his literary tastes:

I wish that we could read one of those novels you mentioned, and then talk about it. A story set in another land and time in history, with completely different sorts of people. Since I was a little girl, I always wanted to live a completely different life, even if it might be a hard one. I was sure I wasnt meant to belong to mine. Maybe you can describe the stories to me, and we could pretend we were in their lives, those European people in the novels, involved in their own particular problems, which I am sure must be very compelling. (249)

When Hata misses her irony and goes on to state that his favorite novels are often tragic, she replies, “I suppose it ought to be so. . . . Or else it wouldn't be much of a tale, would it, Lieutenant?” (249). In short, Lee foregrounds the ethically compromised status of aesthetic representation even though A Gesture Life makes a strong claim for the ethical value of narration. In its most troubling manifestations, aesthetic representation impedes rather than enables a meaningful engagement with the real world. Hata’s aestheticism reinforces his complicity in K’s captivity by blinding him to the full horror of the “comfort woman” system. When the novel finally recounts the circumstances of her death, it precipitates a crisis in representation that brings the gravity of Hata’s aestheticism to our attention. Hata does not describe the grisly event, which he did not witness

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ Il in person. Instead, he conveys his intense sense of shock at the suddenness and violence of her death. When he finds her remains in the jungle later, he feels completely detached from himself: “I could not know what I was doing, or remember any part” (305). This overbearing self-awareness finally forces his aesthetic fantasies to collapse so that the shock he feels is nothing other than the force of reality in all its overwhelming immediacy, its inassimilability to narrative form. This devastating moment, which will haunt him for the rest of his life, turns out to be the climax of the novel as a whole and here is the brilliant irony that Lee stages: all along, Hata has been retreating into the world of art in order to imagine an existence “outside of this place and time and circumstance” and bask in “the vagaries and ornate dramas of imperfect love” (263). It is only when these dramas collapse that the reader experiences the full drama of the novel: it is at this moment that we become acutely aware of having been seduced into the vagaries of a literary text.

The Gesture of Time

If A Gesture Life’s critique of aestheticism threatens to unravel its narrative project by foregrounding how it is tainted by Hata’s voice and imagination, what enables it to proceed as a realist novel is K herself, who, unlike Hata, is able to grasp the truth of her circumstances. As the novel unfolds, she provides crucial information about the coercive tactics used to traffic

women as well as the violent measures used to maintain the “comfort women’ system. In addition, she grasps the systematic nature of these atrocities by locating them within the larger context of Japanese imperialism. Most important, she clearly articulates the moral bankruptcy of this system and directly counteracts Hata’s disturbing tendency to sanitize or euphemize the enslavement of the “comfort women.” By making her the novel’s pedagogical and moral voice, Lee transforms her powerlessness into a position of epistemic and ethical privilege. K functions as the arbiter of historical truth and enables A Gesture Life to fulfill its realist commitments by highlighting Hata’s failures as both narrator and character. In a striking inversion, it is precisely her lack of power as a character that allows her to function as the anchor of the novel’s realist epistemology and political commitments.

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112 Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’

K’s authority depends on an identitarian logic that attributes objective knowledge and ethical discernment to marginalized subjects.° This claim may seem counterintuitive since A Gesture Life goes out of its way to depict ambiguous identities by deploying tropes such as adoption, passing, con-

flicting national loyalties, and racial mixture. What I want to highlight, however, is the discrepancy between its critique of identity at the level of content and its reliance on identity at the level of form. K is fully aware that, as a Korean “comfort woman,’ she is likely to suffer a violent and dehumanizing fate and, as someone who has little control over her life, she tries instead to choose the conditions of her death. Consequently, she insists that Hata is duty-bound to a fellow Korean to end her life rather than

allow her to serve in the “comfort stations.” But even though she vehemently chooses death, Hata is paralyzed by his sexualized desire to preserve

and maintain her life, a desire, as we have seen, that he codes through a series of aesthetic tropes. Just before her death, she exclaims, “You think you love me but what you really want you don’t yet know because you are young and decent. But I will tell you now, it is my sex. The thing of my sex. If you could cut it from me and keep it with you like a pelt or favorite stone, that would be all. You are a decent man, Lieutenant, but really you are not any different from the rest” (300). In this devastating indictment, K insists

that Hata’s apparent decency cannot overcome his complicity in her enslavement by virtue of his position as a male soldier in the Japanese army who embraces all these subject positions. As a Korean “comfort woman” in the hyper-masculine world of a Japanese military camp, she has already been reduced to an object to be brutally exploited. In the novel’s socio-historical context, K’s claims constitute a form of Korean nationalism, perhaps the foremost manifestation of the text’s identitarian structure. K, whose “name” can be read as a stand-in for her ethnicity, occupies a privileged role in the novel on account of her identity as a colonized Korean female subject. By contrast, Hata represses his family

history and staunchly denies that he is attracted to her on the basis of “blood or culture or kind” (239). Even when he reveals his background by speaking to her in what he calls “her own language” (232), he continues to deny that he is Korean and only admits that he “spoke some Korean as a boy” (235). K singles out his linguistic ability as a sign of his difference from

the rest of the soldiers and attempts, finally without success, to realign his identity within a Manichean colonial opposition between Korea and Japan.

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ 113

K exhorts him to choose his descent and reclaim his Korean-ness, but Hata remains staunchly attached to his Japanese identity, a lingering marker of the assimilation process he undergoes by way of adoption.’ He notes that his birth family “spoke and lived as Japanese” (72) and earnestly wanted him to “become wholly and thoroughly Japanese” (235). His adoption by a Japanese family gave him the “comforts of real personhood” (72) and he subsequently embraces the racial/ethno-chauvinism of Japanese militarism,

which we never see him reject outright except through generalized and vague reflections on the horrors of war.® Hata never renounces his Japanese

identity and will, for the rest of his life, identify as Japanese even in the United States where no one, not even Sunny, knows about his complex ethnic background.’ As Lee remarks in an interview with Young-Oak Lee, “[Hata] is someone who was willing to give up who he was for comfort,

safety, and prestige.... But he considers himself Japanese... .I didn’t want him to be Korean because he is not Korean. He’s ethnically Korean, but really the way he perceives and wants to think of himself is Japanese” (222). After he moves to the United States, Hata is constantly aware of his

racialized status, but embraces assimilation in a manner that turns him into a willing exemplar of the Asian American model minority. The novel suggests that the desire for assimilation, first in his early life in Japan and then later in the United States, is symptomatic of a fundamental flaw in his character. As Sunny charges at one point, “all I’ve ever seen is how careful you are with everything. With our fancy big house and this store and all

the customers. How you sweep the sidewalk and nice-talk to the other shopkeepers. You make a whole life out of gestures and politeness. . . . It’s become your job to be the number-one citizen” (95). A Gesture Life modifies its anticolonial nationalism by offering a sustained critique of patriarchy and misogyny. The novel carefully conveys how violence against women was justified by a chauvinist militarism that saw rape as a necessary part of the imperialist project. As Hata chillingly recalls, “to the men in the queue, [the “comfort women” ] were nothing, or less than nothing; several hours earlier I had overheard a soldier speak more warmly and humanly of the last full-course meal he remembered than the girl he’d been with the previous afternoon” (250). It is only when he hears a comrade use “a base anatomical slur that also denoted [a ‘comfort wom-

an’s | Koreanness” that he is shocked by the ease with which they were taken for granted (251). K exposes the marginalization of women in colonial

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14 Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’

Korean culture and society when she tells Hata that her parents turned her over to a military recruiter in order to keep her younger brother at home (instead of placing her in a factory job as promised, the recruiter forced her to become a “comfort woman’). To summarize, A Gesture Life seems to offer a rigorous critique of essentialism by going out of its way to depict ambiguous identities through tropes such as adoption, passing, conflicting national loyalties, and racial mixture. Moreover, it carefully shows how identities are formed through relations of domination and oppression. But at the level of form, which encompasses the elements that structure and define the novel as a realist narrative, the text mitigates Hata’s unreliability and reaffirms its commitment to historicity by endowing K (as well as Sunny) with the ability to discern sociohistorical truths and their moral consequences, privileges that are directly attributed to their oppressed identities. Thus while the novel insists that categories of ethnicity, race, and gender are socially constructed, it nevertheless reinscribes them as the basis of its realism, a commitment that underscores its desire to give form to traumatic histories of militarism, misogyny, and racism. In short, identitarian thinking remains deeply embedded in the novel despite its apparent suspicion toward identity as such. These divergent understandings of identity account for two distinct timescales that operate in A Gesture Life, the narrative time that corresponds to the formal structure of the text, and the historical time in which the events of the plot and the lives of the characters chronologically unfold. This distinction corresponds roughly to Homi Bhabha’s description of the pedagogical and performative temporalities of national identity. The former, he writes, posits “the people as an a priori historical presence” that derives its authority from continuous traditions while the latter attributes identity to “the performance of narrative, its enunciatory ‘present’ marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign” (“DissemiNation” 211). While the contents of A Gesture Life, what takes place in the historical world

of the plot, foregrounds the interruption of pedagogical conceptions of identity by the performative, the novel effectively displaces the pedagogical into its formal structure, which relies on the presence of idealized critical subjects such as K and Sunny. Indispensable to the text’s realist claims, its ability to posit a continuous relationship between its contents and the real world, these figures cannot be contained within the historical parameters of the novel.

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ II5

In light of this structure, the “historicism” of the novel can be understood in two senses. First, the novel, as a realist text, situates its contents within the terrain of history, especially in relation to colonial modernity and racial formation; as Kandice Chuh observes, it “argues against essentialism [by] placing both the production and investigation of identity within the historico-discursive realm” (Zmagine Otherwise 103). Second, Lee

posits the inhabitation of time as the primary condition of the novel as such. While this understanding of time retains its chronological character, it clashes with, and finally undermines, the identitarian structure of the novel. In this sense, A Gesture Life recalls Lukacs’s argument in The Theory of the Novel that time constitutes the absolute limit of subjectivity: The most profound and most humiliating impotence of subjectivity consists... in the fact that it cannot resist the sluggish, yet constant progress of time; .. . that time—that ungraspable, invisibly moving substance—gradually robs subjectivity of all its possessions and imperceptibly forces alien contents into it. This is why only the novel, the literary form of transcendent homelessness of the idea, includes real time... among its constitutive principles. (120-121)

For both Lee and Lukacs, the realist novel’s adherence to linear time as the means to give form to the heterogeneity of modern life is, paradoxically, the limit of the subject as such. While linear time functions as the normative timescale of the novel, by attributing this structure to Hata’s narrative imagination, A Gesture Life also entertains the possibility of alternative temporalities. In this regard, K’s haunting marks an outright breach of realism by, among other things, foregrounding a decidedly nonlinear sense of time in which past and present can no longer be clearly delineated. Similar conceptions of time are manifested in various ways in the course of the novel. For example, Sunny seems to function as a stand-in for K, an uncanny parallel that enables her to act as a pedagogical voice in the parts of the novel set in the United States. Hata’s status as a static character—someone whose psychological contours undergo very little change over the course of the novel—indicates his extra-textual role as a narrator who speaks from a temporality distinct from the time of the plot. The intrusion of these temporal exceptions in the historical world of the plot engenders moments of jarring dissonance. As the novel’s idealized (and

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116 Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’

even romanticized) arbiter of truth, K exceeds the confines of Hata’s narra-

tive even though she is accessible to us only through his memory and imagination. This paradox underscores the illusion of realism—the illusion that the characters we encounter are somehow real. K’s presence opens up a discursive space that exceeds the “real” world of the novel, a point that is

dramatically demonstrated by her haunting, which takes place in a time frame apparently detached from historical time, what Hata suggestively calls “now and then” (285). This ambiguous temporality is the time of narration itself, which is intertwined with, but irreducible to, Hata’s daily life.

Thus, while his acts of narration can be considered events in their own right, they cannot be easily integrated into the historical time of the novel. Linear time remains the basis of the novel’s claim to historical accuracy, but it is only through its rupture that we arrive at the meaning of K’s haunting: K never dies—she cannot die—because the text depends on her continuing

presence even if it cannot depict that existence without destabilizing its own framework. The moment it reveals this discrepancy, it inevitably betrays its own realist commitments. It is precisely in this sense that K’s haunting defamiliarizes and disrupts the formal protocols that otherwise subtend the ethico-political commitments of the novel. These tensions are explicitly addressed in the ending, in which Lee reaffirms the temporality of realism in order to offer what seems at first to be a hopeful resolution. Throughout the novel, while Hata is reckoning with his past, a series of events unfold in his present life, the most important of which is Sunny’s return to the Bedley Run area as a struggling single mother. Sunny and Hata begin a tentative process of reconciliation. Toward the end of the novel, he helps save her son from drowning during an outing to the beach, a rare exception to his lifelong inability to foster and protect the lives of others. In the final pages, Hata consolidates this transformation by deciding to sell his cherished house and give the profits to Sunny so she can start her own business and establish a stable life for her son. By foregrounding his attempts to secure a future for her, the novel embraces linear time in order to give form to its own unfolding and conclusion, a move that recalls Lukacs’s observation that “time brings order into the chaos of men’s lives and gives it the semblance of a spontaneously flowering, organic entity. . . . Beyond events, beyond psychology, time gives them the essential quality of their existence” (Zheory 125).

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ 117

But Hata steadfastly refuses to enjoy a future that finally promises community and kinship.'® Instead, he settles on a future that consists chiefly of the unstoppable movement of time, a future, in other words, that is a function of the novel’s linear temporality rather than a product of his agency. Hata decides to leave Bedley Run and embark on an undefined journey. He will simply continue to live and, as we might expect, continue to reckon. In a poignant moment, he describes himself as someone “who is afraid not of

death but of the death of yet another living chance through whom [he] might reconsider, and duly reckon” (332). The curious use of “whom” here suggests that he views human relationships as “living” chances to “duly

reckon” once again. By linking narration to the continuation of life, the novel imagines the uniting of Hata’s roles as narrator and character, in other words, of form and content. But while this resolution would mark the triumph of the novel’s realism, it is ultimately a consequence of its temporal form rather than an organic resolution of the plot. A Gesture Life does not end with Hata’s cathartic transformation nor does he overcome his inabil-

ity to sustain human relationships. Indeed, the melancholy of the ending is due precisely to its inability to posit a tenable alternative to his present life. At one point near the end of the novel, Hata reflects, “I feel I have not really been living anywhere or anytime, not for the future and not in the

past and not at all of-the-moment, but rather in the lonely dream of an oblivion, the nothing-of-nothing drift of one pulse beat to the next, which is really the most bloodless marking-out, automatic and involuntary” (320—

321). Here, Hata hints at an alternative arrangement of time that is not schematized in terms of past-present-future, but what the text ultimately seems to question is not so much linear time as such, but whether giving form to life according to its terms is sufficient in light of Hata’s past. Lee deploys the figure of a human heart (a recurring trope in the novel) to suggest the intertwining of time and the rhythms of biological life, but finally settles on a “bloodless” marking of time. Time, of course, doesn’t stop; as Lukacs notes, it is a corrosive force, “the resistance of the organic—which possesses a mere semblance of life—to the present meaning” (Theory 122). The novel reveals this condition by depicting the subordination of subjectivity to the unstoppable movement of time, which propels the subject to-

ward the inescapable horizon of death. For Hata, death would not be a meaningful event, just a nihilistic cessation of his attempts to give form to

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118 Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’

his life. His description of time as “the nothing-of-nothing drift of one pulse beat to the next” cancels out his hopes for the future, a point that the novel reiterates by way of its enigmatically suggestive title A Gesture Life: the promise of life turns out to be a gesture whose fulfillment is always foreclosed by the movement of time. In reaffirming the temporal protocols of realism, the ending offers a critical meditation on its dependence on identity to give form to the traumatic histories it contains. In a broader sense, it reveals the epistemological work of “Asian American’ as a critical subject position that has been mobilized by critics to recover suppressed and neglected histories. The transnational and historical scope of A Gesture Life suggests that it participates in this larger project, but it does so while exposing the formal assumptions embedded in Asian American cultural politics. By undermining its own critique of essentialism, the text suggests that oppositional identities remain indispensable for realist claims to socio-historical accuracy. When the novel finally subjects identity to a historicist critique—by asserting the primacy of history over identity—it finds itself mired in formal conventions that fail to adequately resolve its narrative form. While the ending reasserts a commitment to linear time, it does so at the cost of a resolution that could adequately articulate its political desires.'' This impasse indicates the limits of

the Asian American novel, which are nothing other than the limits of identity as a mode of knowledge production and ethical engagement.

Home in the World If Lukacs posits transcendental homelessness as the condition out of which

the novel emerges, how might we understand the significance of Hata’s closing words? “Let me simply bear my flesh, and blood, and bones... . Tomorrow, when [my former] house is alive and full, I will be outside looking in. I will be already on a walk someplace, in this town or the next or one five thousand miles away. I will circle round and arrive again. Come almost home” (356). By emphasizing one of Hata’s most ingrained routines—his daily walk—the novel seems to hint at a reversion to cyclical temporalities marked by predictable and reassuring repetitions. But the word “almost” suggests the ultimate impossibility of a homeward return, a point

that is reinforced by the ambiguous spatial coordinates of this imagined

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Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ 119

future. Home, it turns out, cannot be concretized in a place or time, but can be experienced only in terms of a nostalgia for a lost past or as a deferred hope for the future. What does it mean, then, to define home as a place where one can never arrive? Silva’s account of globality offers a possible response to this question.

Globality, we recall, is an ontological condition that enables the postEnlightenment subject to acquire universality. After showing how race thinking is embedded in the intertwining of globality and teleological historicism, Silva proceeds to advocate a recuperation of globality, reformulated as as a mark of exteriority that radically undermines the autonomy of the transparent I by interrupting its presumed self-sufficiency.'* In this context, a discourse of homelessness refracted through the particular lens of Asian American writing acquires a critical force not quite realizable within Lukacs’s still Eurocentric framework. Hata’s relinquishing of home demonstrates the impossibility of aligning a specific time and place to the desire for security and belonging. Instead, the illusion of home is painfully disassembled in light of the socio-historical contexts that circumscribe the racialized non-Western subject, whose distance from the transparent I is dramatically revealed in the course of this unraveling. Hata’s inability to return home stands as a fatal indictment of his desperate longing for transparency, a lifelong quest that ends up implicating him in the violent oppression and extermination of others. By denying him home, the novel’s final gesture is to radically question the subject who wants to go home. While A Gesture Life pursues this line of questioning by depicting a character who occupies a relatively dominant position throughout the novel despite his own racialized status, the absence of home, understood as a symptom of a more general spatial/social displacement, has long been a poignant theme in Asian American writing. In her preface to the anthology Charlie Chan Is Dead (1993), Elaine Kim recalls, “I [used to] read Asian American literature as a literature of protest and exile, a literature about place and displacement, a literature concerned with psychic and physical ‘home’—searching and claiming a ‘home’ or longing for a final ‘homecoming’” (ix). She goes on to speculate, “Perhaps after all there is no “home, except for a place of contestation that negates as well as afirms. And identity, like “home, is ever in process, less a refuge than a site of contending, multiple meanings” (xii—xiii). Kim’s comparison between identity and home is suggestive, not the least because she conceives both as conjunctures of space

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120 Form Giving and the Remains of Identity in ‘A Gesture Life’ and time, “processes” as well as “places.” In addition, she alerts us to the ways

in which they organize and orient, even while frustrating, deep-seated desires for belonging. One response to this predicament has been to reframe the meaning of home in global terms. In her introduction to the sequel Charlie Chan Is Dead 2 (2004), appropriately subtitled At Home in the World, Jessica Hagedorn affirms the value of Asian American writing in this manner: We're in a global, blood-drenched funk, cynical and despairing of the future. ... But we go on... . We continue to assert who we are as Asians, Asian Americans, and citizens of the world... . There are those of us who write simply because we must. All those voices singing, all those lovely ghosts dancing in our heads. ‘The urge to create is essential, the same as the urge to live. (xxxii)

If Hagedorn offers a strikingly optimistic portrait of Asian American literature as a means of creatively contending with the uncertainties of the contemporary world, A Gesture Life, by contrast, foregrounds the psychic, ma-

terial, and cultural costs of desiring home. Its reliance on identity turns homelessness into the formal condition of the novel itself, a sign of its own unattainable desire to give form to the world. In The Theory of the Novel, Lukacs cites Novalis’s famous declaration that “philosophy is really home-

sickness... it is the urge to be at home everywhere” and argues that the same can be said of the novel because it, too, belongs to a world in which home is no longer possible even if the craving for home is inescapable (29). What A Gesture Life finally suggests is that to be at home everywhere in the world is in fact to be at home nowhere. It is upon the ruins of this literaryepistemological project that Chang-rae Lee locates the unshakable remains of identity itself.

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FIVE

Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

In recent years, Asian American Studies has embarked on a transnational turn that has expanded the scope of the field far beyond the borders of the United States. As an earlier focus on the nation-state has given way to an emphasis on global flows of capital, cultures, and peoples, scholars have had to grapple with the insufficiency of basing the field on a narrow and bounded definition of Asian America.' These efforts have given rise to new critical rubrics such as diaspora, hemispheric studies, globalization, and polyculturalism, as well as denationalized frameworks such as Asian North America, the hemisphere, and the Asia-Pacific. What these developments arguably share is a heightened interest in questions of comparison. To be sure, comparison has always been important in Asian American Studies in light of its pan-ethnic origins, which continually requires accounting for how different groups come together under a common identity. Similarly, intersectional and multiracial analyses rely on comparative approaches. In ways that are arguably more pronounced, however, the transnational turn places the work of comparison in a global context and therefore implicates Asian American Studies in the politics of knowledge in a post-colonial world. Comparison occurs whenever Asian American Studies encounters what lies outside its borders, however construed, and an awareness of those borders intrudes into, and unsettles, the field. Comparison is not just a matter of finding similarities and differences through variations of “compare and contrast” but consists of interactions, judgments, desires, investments, and, inevitably, misrecognitions.* Xudong Zhang writes, 121

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ides Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison Questions of comparison and comparability emerge whenever interactions between different socioeconomic, political, and cultural systems take place. Whether driven by competition and conflict or inspired by desires for and possibility of mutual understanding and benefit, questions of comparison and comparability . . . are existential rather than normative, political rather than formalistic or “methodological,” value driven rather than value neutral. (81)

Zhang’s observations situate comparison in a global economy of knowledge dominated by the neo-colonial privilege of the West. As a formation that is critical of such inequities while remaining, for the most part, located in and dependent on the West, Asian American Studies possesses a measure of privilege despite its relative marginality in the United States.’ One consequence of this conflicted position is the tendency to use materials from non-U.S. contexts with little or no attention to contextual differences, a point that scholars working in fields such as Asian Canadian or Asian Australian Studies have repeatedly raised. While it is necessary to guard against such acts of appropriation, calls for specificity can reinforce rather than question national, racial, and cultural

categories. In addition to reminders about the need for contextualization, what is needed is a more nuanced account of comparison as an inescapable intellectual operation that takes place whenever Asian American Studies encounters what is outside itself. Comparison must not, as Zhang observes, be reduced to a methodological matter, but rather foregrounded as a problematic integral to what Naoki Sakai describes as modernity’s “instigation of occasions when many regions, many people, many industries, and many polities are in contact with one another despite geographic, cultural, and social distance” (““You Asians ” 797).

What happens in a comparative encounter? How might we read comparatively? These questions animate this chapter's discussion of Anil’s Ghost,

a novel by Sri Lankan Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. Ondaatje, who is of Dutch, Tamil, Sinhalese, and Portuguese descent, is one of the most recognized names in contemporary Anglophone literature. Published in 2000, Anil’s Ghost received a number of prestigious awards including the Giller Prize, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, and the Governor General’s Award for English-language fiction in Canada. Despite his stellar reputation on the international literary circuit, Ondaatje has been a peripheral figure in Asian American, and for that matter Asian Canadian, Studies. As

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 13

Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn observe, Ondaatje is a “racially minoritized writer in North America [who] may no longer necessarily be associ-

ated mainly with the marginal, or Other” (2). Although they add that Ondaatje’s success does not negate his implication in histories of colonialism and racialization, his inclusion in a study of Asian American literature raises further questions about the political, national, and geographic parameters of the field. Ondaatje’s presence in this book thus evokes several possible axes of com-

parison: between Asian American and Asian Canadian writing, for example, or between ethnic and post-colonial literature. What makes Anil’s Ghost a more complicated case, however, is the fact that the novel is not concerned with either Canada or the United States. Canada never appears in the novel and even though the protagonist is based in the United States and can be considered nominally Asian American, this context does not play a meaningful role in the text. Instead, the novel conveys what Susan Koshy describes as the “embeddedness” of the South Asian diaspora “in the three major world-historical forces that have shaped global modernity: capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism” (“Introduction” 3). To read Anil’s Ghost as a diasporic novel is to draw attention to the “interplay of local contexts and global structural forces in producing the social exclusion of religious and cultural minorities in modernity” (4). By approaching these issues through the rubric of comparison, this chapter replaces the comparison of national differences with a diasporic approach that emphasizes the knowledge politics of globality.

The Surround of a Fact Anil’s Ghost is set during the early 1990s in a Sri Lanka that has been torn apart by civil war. Into this world steps Anil Tissera, a forensic pathologist dispatched by the fictional Geneva-based Centre for Human Rights to investigate war atrocities. Anil was born and raised in Sri Lanka, but has lived abroad for fifteen years. She holds a British passport, maintains little connection with her homeland, and has even forgotten most of the Sinhala she spoke while growing up. “In her years abroad,” the novel tells us, “during her European and North American education, Anil had courted foreignness, was at ease whether on the Bakerloo line or the highways around

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124 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

Santa Fe. She felt completed abroad” (54). Upon her arrival, the government assigns a local archaeologist, Sarath Diyasena, to work with her. Al-

though Anil and Sarath initially view each other with suspicion, they slowly develop a more comfortable working relationship as they focus on identifying a male skeleton (whom they nickname Sailor) that had been reburied in a restricted archaeological site. Because of this unusual setting, Anil suspects government involvement in his death and resolves to trace his identity. Even though they eventually succeed, their investigation is forcibly terminated when the skeleton is mysteriously stolen. Anil is forced to leave the country under duress while Sarath is murdered afterward by a government-connected death squad. Anil’s Ghost is Ondaatje’s most extended literary treatment of Sri Lanka to date. In light of the violence that plagued Sri Lanka in the late twentieth century, he is deeply aware of the pitfalls of its representational project: Anil’s Ghost—of all my books—was the one where I felt [the] responsibility [to diverse voices] most. This was not the imagined world of my parents in the 30s or 40s or Toronto at the turn of the century; it was the real contemporary world. Even if the central characters were fictional, there was always a fresco of reality in sight. Sri Lanka was also the world I had grown up in, so that at times Anil’s return and my journeys there echoed off each other. . . . Perhaps because I was aware of the responsibility to something outside myself, Anil’s Ghost in some way became my most personal work. (“Pale Flags” 62)

As the long list of sources and acknowledgments that appear at the end of the novel demonstrates, Ani/’s Ghost is the result of exhaustive research, but it is also characterized by a pervasive skepticism regarding the possibility of presenting an objective account of the conflict. Often depicted as a conflict between the majority Sinhala and minority Tamil ethnic groups, the civil war appears in Anil’s Ghost as an event that defies rational understanding. At one point, Sarath tries to explain the situation to Anil: You had, and still have, three camps of enemies—one in the north, two in the south—using weapons, propaganda, fear, sophisticated posters, censorship. Importing state-of-the-art weapons from the West, or manufacturing homemade weapons. A couple of years ago people just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition. There’s no hope of afhxing blame. And no one can tell who the victims

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 125 are.... What we've got here is unknown extrajudicial executions mostly. Perhaps by the insurgents, or by the government or the guerrilla separatists. Murder committed by all sides. (17—18)

Here, the novel appears to provide socio-historical analysis even while denying the validity of such knowledge. Ondaatje repeatedly suggests that

the extreme violence and complexity of the war makes it impossible to adequately determine matters of cause, responsibility, and culpability. In a blistering review, Qadri Ismail argues that Ani/’s Ghost is biased toward Sinhala nationalism despite its apparent refusal to engage in political judgments. Ismail observes that Anil’s Ghost has no Tamil characters of consequence and frequently depicts Tamil militants in a harsh light without indicting their Sinhalese counterparts. He concludes, Contemporary realities of the country, therefore, disappear from the effective plot of this novel, which simply refuses to engage with them, with the specifics of Sri Lankan politics. Making Anil’s Ghost, in the final analysis, both a Sinhala Buddhist story and, paradoxically enough, not much more than the typically flippant gesture towards Sri Lanka so often produced by the west. (29)?

What Ismail demands, in effect, is a sort of return to realism in the sense of a commitment to historical analysis that engenders what Jameson calls “a binding relationship to the real itself” (“Reflections” 198).° Yet the skepticism that Ismail condemns has been praised by other critics for exposing

the ideological bases of international human rights discourse.’ As with other texts in this book, the novel engages the problematics of realism, even

though it does not adhere to its stylistic protocols. Most important, it attributes mimetic representation to the imperialist assumptions of Western ethnography. In an exchange that exemplifies the novel’s geopolitical approach to epistemology, Anil tells Sarath’s mentor that she believes “The truth shall set you free” only to have him respond, ““Most of the time in our world, truth is just opinion’ ” (102).° Despite its skepticism toward rational analysis, Anil’s Ghost is obsessed with the powers of reason. Anil’s daily work requires her to apply a variety of research techniques, often in unorthodox and ingenious ways, to reconstruct the histories of bodily remains. Her extraordinary ability to generate

information from these fragments reflects a worldview acquired in the course of living in the West: “she had come to expect clearly marked roads

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126 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

to the source of most mysteries. Information could always be clarified and acted upon” (54). As the novel unfolds, it becomes evident that the techniques she has honed are not useful on her present mission because “here, on this island, .. . she was moving with only one arm of language among uncertain laws and a fear that was everywhere’ (54). Anil starts off as a figure who represents the West. Despite her commitment to advocacy on behalf of war victims, her authority depends on a global system formed by the legacies of colonialism, a system marked by the ubiquitous divide between the West and its Others. Indeed, the Sri Lankan government reluctantly authorizes her visit to “placate trading partners in the West” (16). Naoki Sakai argues that the West is not a place, but rather a name whose indexing function is evoked in order to spatially represent a particular social relationship which exists—say between the traveler and the resident, the colonizer and the native, the educated upper-class elite and the peasants from the countryside—in the guise of spatial direction at the very site where reference to or distinction regarding either the West or the Rest is enunciated. (“Dislocation of the West” 83; emphasis in original)

This distinction determines the distribution of economic, military, and cultural power on a global scale while imposing a rigid cartographic imaginary on what are otherwise complex lives. Sakai observes, One rarely exists either in the West or in the Rest consistently and coherently, except for the fact that, just as with social class, the means and resources to acquire certain qualifications and their qualities are not equally distributed. In fact, the means and resources are concentrated in certain groups in such a way that it is easier for those in certain privileged groups to acquire the qualifications for Westernness than others. (87)

Sarath is acutely aware of these hierarchies as he works in a discipline long dominated by Western academics who “flew into Delhi, Colombo and Hong Kong for six days, told their best anecdotes, took the pulse of the excolony, and returned to London and Boston” (79). Ondaatje’s critique of rationality takes on a more political edge as he seeks to formulate an anticolonial epistemology. At one point, Sarath tells Anil, “I'd believe your arguments if you lived here... . You can’t just slip in, make a discovery and leave... .1 want you to understand the archaeological surround of a fact. Or you'll be like one of those journalists who file reports about flies and

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 197

scabs while staying at the Galle Face Hotel. That false empathy and blame” (44). Sarath’s suggestive phrase “surround of a fact” and his suggestion that Anil should relocate to Sri Lanka not only indicates the importance of context to knowledge production, but also encapsulates a geopolitical stance that will turn out to be an identitarian argument about who has access to truthful knowledge and under what conditions. To live in Sri Lanka, the novel suggests, would involve a change in identity, rather than just location, for Anil. For her part, Anil is motivated by the demands of juridical prosecution, a system based on what the novel codes as Western legal practices that place great value on the discovery and substantiation of evidence. But while evidence is defined by its irreducible specificity—its ability to reveal the contours of a particular event, fact, or situation—Anil understands its signifcance in metonymic terms. Because the number of victims vastly exceeds the scope of any investigation she might undertake, she “turned bodies into representatives of all race and age and place” (55). In societies torn by war and violence, an individual victim can become “representative of all those lost voices” when his or her story is painstakingly recovered (56). Justice, in other words, becomes meaningful when the particular is made to speak for the whole. As Anil tries to make one bone fragment speak for a body, the body of a victim for a community, a community for a nation, she necessarily relies on generalizing categories, narratives, and assumptions; in short, her methods excavate detailed information only to eviscerate its particularity. Given the novel’s interest in the status of evidence, it is not surprising

that Ondaatje frequently draws attention to the condition of fragmentation. Visiting a local human rights center, Anil encounters “fragments of collected information revealing the last sighting of a son, a younger brother, a father. In the letters of anguish from family members were the details of hour, location, apparel, the activity ... Going for a bath. Talking to a friend”

(42; emphasis in original). In “Pale Flags: Reflections on Writing Anil’s Ghost,” Ondaatje recalls the process of writing the novel in rather similar terms: “Inventing a novel from the ground up, with experiences or imagined fragments. Gradually these pieces of mica are drawn together to make up a scene, then a landscape, eventually a vista and social context. If there is an ‘idea’ for the book it will emerge now, and out of all this” (62). For both Ondaatje and Anil, working with evidence is an uncertain process because the very condition of fragmentation undermines and resists narrative coherence.’

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128 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

Throughout Anil’s Ghost, Ondaatje implicitly raises the following question: how might history be recovered in and through the fragment? In his explanation of the ruin in German tragic drama, Walter Benjamin writes,

“In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay” (178). Decay, he argues, is the process through which “the events of history shrivel up and become absorbed in the setting” (179). The ruin thereby yields an understanding of history as fallen, transient, and decaying. Anil’s Ghost shares this melancholic preoccupation with the loss of historical truth through violence and the passing of time and, like Benjamin, is concerned with the possibility of redeeming the fragment—making it speak again, as it were. But whereas Benjamin turns to messianic models of history to reanimate the excluded remains and hopes of the past, Anil’s Ghost attempts to recover the sensuous materiality of the fragment and its surround through artistic (re-)creation. This approach enables Ondaatje to posit art as an alternative to rational knowledge and the basis of what he suggests is a different identity politics.

From Metonymy to Semblance Recovering Sailor’s identity turns out to be a very challenging task. Even though Anil and Sarath examine the skeleton with extraordinary care, the information they obtain hardly enables them to track down a single victim when so many have been murdered. Sarath subsequently proposes a different strategy: using the skull, they would reconstruct a model of Sailor's face and show the sculpture to his former neighbors in the hope that someone will recognize the image. Anil is not enamored by this idea and her skepti-

cism only deepens after she meets the artist hired for the task, Ananda Udugama, who turns out to be an unreliable alcoholic. We soon learn that Ananda is a master artist who also possesses “a mind of science” (170). He spends considerable time in local villages to observe the lifestyles and everyday practices of those around him. By taking note of how people eat, act, and comport their bodies, and what goods and materials they use, he recovers the surround of a fact, the “fact” in this case being Sailor himself. At the same time, Ananda relies on methods that have nothing to do with exercising the powers of reason. Anil quietly watches as he “pick[s] up the

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 129

skeleton and carrie[s] it in his arms” (170) in a dance-like embrace that seems to restore a sense of life to the skeleton. This sentimental emphasis on Sailor's humanity stands in contrast to Anil’s normally clinical approach,

even though she admits that “there had been hours when, locked in her investigations and too focussed by hours of intricacy, she too would need to reach forward and lift Sailor into her arms, to remind herself he was like her” (170).

In emphasizing Ananda’s eclectic methods, Ondaatje seems to be calling for a holistic approach to reconstructing Sailor’s life, but whatever the merits of this claim, Ananda’s efforts turn out to be somewhat inconsequential.

The puzzle of Sailor is solved rather quickly when Anil notices that the skeleton and Ananda share a similar foot bone structure, which, in the case of the latter, is the result of laboring in a gem mine. This miraculous coincidence soon enables her to identify Sailor as a local miner who had been abducted and murdered for being a suspected rebel sympathizer. The novel gives scant attention to these details; instead, it focuses on Anil’s encounter with the sculpted head that Ananda has created, a scene that turns into an extended meditation on the aesthetic dimensions of identity. Even though Anil is intimately familiar with the details of Sailor’s skeleton, she is utterly shocked by what she sees because this head was not just how someone possibly looked, it was a specific person. It revealed a distinct personality, as real as the head of Sarath. As if she was finally meeting a person who had been described to her in letters, or someone she had once lifted up as a child who was now an adult... . She just watched it point-blank, coming to terms with it. There was a serenity in the face she did not see too often these days. There was no tension. A face comfortable with itself. This was unexpected coming from such a scattered and unreliable presence as Ananda. (184)

The text offers two explanations for Anil’s shock. First, the sculpted head possesses an overwhelming particularity that the skeleton never had. As a metonymic figure for countless other victims, Sailor had been a mystery to be solved, but the head possesses an uncanny singularity, even “personality.” Second, its peaceful appearance seems completely at odds with the violence that the skeleton exemplifies. Seeing Anil’s stunned reaction, Sarath tells her that Ananda’s wife had disappeared a few years ago at a time when militias routinely stuck the

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130 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

heads of their victims on poles to warn others against collaboration. He explains, “He still hasn’t found her. He was not always like this. The head he has made is therefore peaceful” (185). These revelations reframe the meaning of the head: no longer the scrupulously reconstructed image of a once-real

person, it conveys the projected desires of a deeply traumatized artist instead. Its meaning, in other words, is symptomatic of the psychic wounds of war and inheres not in its mimetic ability to depict a real person, but rather in its refusal of mimesis as such. As Anil comes to realize, “the face was in no

way a portrait of Sailor but showed a calm Ananda had known in his wife, a peacefulness he wanted for any victim” (187). As an aesthetic encounter between an art object and its viewer, this scene

prompts Anil to embrace what Patricia P. Chu describes as a “heartfelt engage|ment] with suffering and injustice” that can sow “seeds for survival, community, or social justice” (“A Flame” 98). In order to explore exactly how these effects (or more precisely affects) come about, I would like to return to the concept of art’s semblance character, which I discussed earlier in the introduction to this book. For Adorno, semblance is integral to how art conveys meaning in forceful and compelling ways, without putting forth rational or factual arguments. In Aesthetic Theory, he writes, Meaning itself—that which creates unity—is asserted as being present in the [art}work, even though it is not actual. Meaning, which effects semblance, predominates in the semblance character. Yet the semblance of meaning does not exhaustively define meaning. For the meaning of an artwork is at the same time the essence that conceals itself in the factual: meaning summons into appearance what appearance otherwise obstructs. (105)

The artwork’s meaning unravels as its materials are critically dissected in light of their socio-historical contexts. The illusion of coherence nevertheless comes

across in a “tour-de-force” moment that simultaneously conveys the marginalized status of art in the modern world (106). Excluded from “proper” knowledge, art registers a powerful critique of instrumental reason. Understood in this sense, the sculpted head is a sensuous materialization of the social and psychic wounds of war. As such, its meaning inheres not in its mimetic claims, but rather in its trenchant critique of representation and knowledge. Openly out of place in its surrounding world, it exemplifies

the dissonance that, according to Adorno, constitutes the “paradox of the

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 131

aesthetic as a whole: how can making bring into appearance what is not the

result of making; how can what according to its own concept is not true nevertheless be true?” (107). Adorno’s questions foreground the seemingly irreconcilable gap between art and society; he contends, “all art is endowed with sadness; art grieves all the more, the more completely its successful unification suggests meaning, and the sadness is heightened by the feeling of ‘Oh, were it only so’” (105). As in the case throughout his writings on aesthetics, what is at stake in Adorno’s discussion of semblance is the status of subjectivity in the modern

world. Modeling subjectivity on semblance, his attempts to dispel semblance through critique are shadowed by the recognition of its ubiquity and necessity for finding alternatives to the disasters of modernity. In a commentary on Aesthetic Theory, Lambert Zuidervaart writes, Subjectivity is a semblance, but one such that no semblance (and hence no critique) could occur in the absence of subjectivity. ... When it comes to semblance and subjectivity, the one cannot be had without the other, and although each must be criticized, no critique can dispense with either one, for each holds potentials that exceed its constricted shape in contemporary society. (8)

Adorno’s dialectical approach to semblance and subjectivity, he continues, continually grapples with this uneasy relationship: Modern art is also a semblance of subjectivity, in both senses of that phrase: the production and reception of modern art requires the very subjectivity whose pretensions and failures it attests. Moreover, in simultaneously engaging and unmasking subjectivity, modern art gives expression to those repressed voices whose liberated and pluralistic chorus would mark collective subjectivity, were the logic of domination surpassed. In this more utopian sense, too, modern art is doubly a semblance of subjectivity: a negative image of a different collective future, but one whose capacity to project what is possible stems from hidden layers of contemporary experience. (9)

Insofar as the utopian impulse to surpass the logic of domination resonates with the political impulses that animate Asian American literary and cultural criticism, what would it mean to rethink identity in terms of semblance? How might conceiving cultural politics as the redemption of semblance offer alternatives to the idealized critical subject whose presence is

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133 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

meant to secure a rational grasp of social conditions in their totality? By drawing a parallel between the embattled condition of art and the subject, Adorno moves beyond a reductive choice between embracing or rejecting these formations to suggest a dialectical approach that illuminates their socio-historical conditions of (im)possibility while retaining their critical potential. The point, then, is not to simply embrace art as the privileged means to effect social transformation; rather, it is to recognize how politics, and the politics of identity in particular, contains an aesthetic dimension that relies on semblance to imagine social transformation.

The Shame of Diaspora

Por Anil, the sculpted head engenders an identification with the trauma experienced by those around her, a change that overcomes the emotional distance she previously cultivated. Once she realizes the truth behind the head’s appearance, it reverts to a kind of metonymy that enables it to signify the enormity of violence in the civil war. Overwhelmed, Anil stammers, “I... I feel ashamed” (185; ellipsis in original) and becomes emotionally devastated: “She could no longer look at the face, saw only Ananda’s wife in every aspect of it. She sat down in one of the large cane chairs in the dining room and began weeping. She could not face Sarath with this” (185).

The appearance of shame into this scene is both enigmatic and unexpected. As a matter of personality, Anil tends to be distant and cold (although she rarely hesitates to speak her mind), a result of her professional demeanor as well as the alienation she feels toward those around her. Indeed, we might say that she is rather shameless, which makes the intensity of this scene all the more surprising. Although this is the one place in the text where Ondaatje explicitly names shame, it plays a pivotal role in the development of Anil’s character. As Yumna Siddiqi observes, “the novel veers away from an attempt to represent and to interpret historical events altogether, emphasizing instead the domain of affect. In other words, the novel does not purport to index the ‘real’ of history via representation; instead, it locates the ‘real’ in the realm of affect” (211-212). I want to suggest

that this turn to affect confirms Ondaatje’s reliance on identity as the means to provide access to the real, to the surround of a fact. Given her experience as a forensic investigator, we cannot attribute Anil’s reaction

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 133

solely to the scale of violence she encounters in Sri Lanka. Instead, her shame stems from her up-until-now-repressed diasporic identity. By depicting a change in her identity, Ondaatje reshapes the novel into a narrative about recovering ethnic roots as Anil rediscovers her identity as a Sri Lankan and tries to overcome her Westernness.

What makes shame more than a passing detail is the novel’s careful attention to its dynamics and effects. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed describes shame as an intense and painful sensation that is bound up with how the self feels about itself, a self-feeling that is felt by and on the body. . . . The subject may seek to hide from that other; she or he may turn away from the other’s gaze, or drop the head in a sensation more acute and intense than embarrassment. In other words, shame feels like exposure—another sees what I have done that is bad and hence shameful—but it also involves an attempt to hide, a hiding that requires the subject turn away from the other and towards itself. (103)

Ahmed attributes shame to the subject’s exposure to an Other in a manner

that reveals its inadequacy, leaving it desperate for cover: “On the one hand, shame covers that which is exposed (we turn away, we lower our face, we avert our gaze), while on the other, shame exposes that which has been covered (it un-covers). Shame in exposing that which has been covered demands us to re-cover, such a recovering would be a recovery from shame” (104). Ahmed’s description helps us understand Anil’s encounter with the sculpted head, a moment in which she experiences an “intense and painful sensation,” physiological symptoms such as crying, and, finally, physically withdraws from the scene. Following Ahmed’s emphasis on exposure and re-covery, we might ask: who is the Other who elicits Anil’s shame? Two obvious answers would be Sarath and Ananda as she realizes that her earlier

judgments about both were formed without a sufficient grasp of their respective experiences. Shame in this regard has a retroactive quality: Anil is ashamed of how she has acted toward both, causing her to literally turn away from them. In light of the political allegory that has characterized the novel thus far, this scene functions as a moment of reckoning in which the West, figured through Anil, comes to terms with the truth of its violently acquired power and presumed epistemological privilege. This is a moment when the Other

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134 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison literally looks back and shatters the West’s illusion of superiority, a moment

when the West recoils back onto itself. In staging this process, the novel echoes what Satoshi Ukai describes as the ubiquity of shame in the contemporary world: Is there any one entity of those which are called culture or call themselves culture that does not tremble when facing the anxiety of shame vis-a-vis other cultures and the anxiety of death?—for these are the experiences of the finiteness of culture or the experiences of the cultural boundary. Furthermore, it is here where the power relation between cultures in a particular historical context is most cruelly exposed. (5)

Historicizing shame as a global effect of imperialism, Ukai insists that it is not homogenous but encompasses a set of uneven experiences. Every cul-

ture, by virtue of having to confront other cultures—for this is nothing other than the condition of globality—must deal with shame, even if it means repressing and denying it or, conversely, embracing and remaining attached to it. Ukai declares, “today, when the borders between public and private spheres as well as national and global realms are drastically collapsing because of the development of information technology, the expansion of the market economy, and the politicization of every sector of life, we declare the advent of a universal, global age of shame” (32). If we read Anil’s shame as an index of her relationship to globality, then her rediscovered diasporic Sri Lankan identity functions as a means to contain its effects. While shame initially seems to leave Anil’s identity openended, it soon becomes a hinge for what is essentially a narrative in which Anil rediscovers her Sinhala/Sri Lankan identity through a physical return to her homeland. The very fact that a diasporic return is posited as the most natural means to reconstitute her self indicates the novel’s investment in a

descent-based understanding of identity. This transformation is ethical as well as emotional and, as Patricia P. Chu observes, Anil finally develops into a sympathetic and compassionate witness.'? Having grasped the full meaning of the head, she refuses to let Sarath show it to local villagers for fear that it would cause more trauma. This change is confirmed toward the end of the novel when Anil is given a chance to present her findings to government officials. Sarath observes her from a distance, and notices her quiet explanations, her surefootedness, her absolute calm and refusal to be emotional or angry. It was a lawyer’s argument and, more important, a

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 135 citizen’s evidence; she was no longer just a foreign authority. Then he heard her say, “I think you murdered hundreds of us.” Hundreds of us. Sarath thought to himself. Fifteen years away and she is finally us. (271-172; emphasis in original)

Anil has changed from a “foreign authority” to a “citizen, a member—in

a psychic and cultural, if not legal, sense—of the national body she investigates.

But Sarath’s observations carry a strong hint of irony and registers the ambiguity of Anil’s transformation, which ultimately cannot overcome the geo-political circumstances that determine her presence in Sri Lanka. Anil cannot sustain the illusion of being “one of us”—after all, she gets to leave even if she is badly mistreated, while Sarath dies a violent death. Identity cannot overcome history; precisely for this reason, shame emerges finally as a pervasive condition that indicates the text’s inability to actualize its own ethico-political desires in the form of narrative. Anil’s Ghost demonstrates how Ukai’s notion of global shame inheres in its representational project. In his study of shame and post-coloniality, Timothy Bewes theorizes shame

as “an act of writing, a complex in which the tension between the ethical and the aesthetic dimensions of literature is brought into sensuous existence, made manifest in all its irreconcilability. Shame. . . is the material embodi-

ment of that tension, a moment at which the formal possibilities open to the work are incommensurable with, or simply inadequate to, its ethical responsibilities” (1). Shame indicates the resistance of aesthetic forms to the mimetic, ethical, or expressive demands made upon them: “It is the writing itsel{—the ethical and aesthetic presumption involved, the awareness of the presumption, the impossibility of proceeding other than presumptuously—

rather than anything revealed in the writing, nor anything deducible on the basis of it, that is shameful” (42). Por Bewes, shame is an inescapable legacy of colonialism, a totalizing condition that compromises any attempt to speak and write about the contemporary world. In the most immediate sense, it stems from the material conditions in which authors such as Ondaatje write and achieve recognition. As a novel that primarily circulates among relatively privileged readers, many if not most residing in the West, Anil’s Ghost cannot but find it-

self caught in the cultural politics it explicitly articulates. At one point, Sarath’s brother bluntly tells Anil,

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136 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison American movies, English books—remember how they all end? .. . The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombassa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. ‘The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He’s going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That’s enough reality for the West. It’s probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit. (286-287)

Here, Ondaatje wryly reflects on the literary tradition in which he himself participates. Much more can be said about this, but I want to pursue reading using Bewes’s notion of shame as form to return to the sculpted head and suggest that shame inheres in its semblance character, in the tourde-force moment that overwhelms Anil by highlighting the contradiction between its appearance and what it purports to depict. To put it differently, the Other of Anil’s shame is the head itself, understood as a figure of semblance that materializes the incommensurabilities of form, content, and political desire. What occurs in the course of their encounter is a transference of shame from the sculpted head to Anil herself, a process that unravels her sense of self. In this sense, her declaration, “I... 1 feel ashamed,” becomes legible as an attempt on Ondaatje’s part to represent as well as contain the effects of shame in grammatical form. His use of ellipses not only registers the temporality of her statement as an unfolding event, but also introduces a measure of differentiation in the enunciation of her own subjectivity. The fragility of this utterance signals the paradox of subjectivity as Anil experiences an intensified awareness of the self at the very moment when it is on the verge of collapsing, thereby illustrating Gior-

gio Agamben’s observation that “in shame, the subject...has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject” (106). By attributing Anil’s shame and the subsequent dissolution of her subjectivity to an encounter with an art object, Anil’s Ghost stages one of the central themes in aesthetic philosophy, namely the much-debated concept of subjective universality. Paul Gilmore explains, “In the aesthetic experience, the self seems to recede, as individuals give themselves over to the object (or more properly the perception of the object), and thus are left feeling as though anyone would have the same reaction” (11). The experience of subjective universality arises when “the individual feels at one with some

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 137

universal humanity who must have the same reaction” (12). On the one hand, this sense of identification implies a metaphysical human subject that exists free from socio-historical contingencies. But on the other hand, subjective universality also involves the disruption of this subject and the loss of individuality as “the aesthetic momentarily interrupts both the dominant sense of self as interested and autonomous and an instrumentalized

orientation towards the world” (11). Subjective universality can never be complete for the aesthetic moment “always posits a reference to other people” and raises the possibility that one’s experience might not be universal after all (12). In light of these divergent possibilities, a politics of the aesthetic constantly negotiates between universal humanism and indeterminate subjectivity.

Even though Anil’ Ghost depicts what seems to be the latter—the dissolution of Anil’s subjectivity through mechanisms of shame—the novel proposes her diasporic identity as the solution to her shame. While this trajectory may seem problematic insofar as it appears to embrace a sort of cultural essentialism, Ondaatje’s approach is fascinating due to his emphasis on

the role of the artwork in facilitating this transformation. Once again, the meaning of the sculpted head is crucial. Intended to be a depiction of Sailor, himself a stand-in for numerous other victims of war, its original meaning can be summarized in the following manner: Anil — (sees) > the head — (as a representation of ) > Sailor — (who stands

in for) > other victims of the war.

But in the course of their encounter, as Anil’s sense of self collapses, we learn that the head is not a source of information about victims of the war; instead, its meaning turns back onto Anil. To put things more schematically, we might say that the head — (becomes the metaphorical figure for) > Anil.

The novel confirms this transition by reconfiguring Anil into an artwork, an object that can be re-formed through a change in identity. This transformation is actualized in one of the most moving moments in the novel as Ananda consoles Anil: He moved two steps forward and with his thumb creased away the pain around her eye along with her tears’ wetness. It was the softest touch on

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138 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison her face .. . Ananda’s hand on her shoulder to quiet her while the other hand came up to her face, kneaded the skin of that imploded tension of weeping as if hers too was a face being sculpted, though she could tell that wasn't in his thoughts. This was a tenderness she was receiving. Then his other hand on her other shoulder, the thumb under her right eye. Her sobbing had stopped. Then he was not there anymore. (187) Anil’s face becomes configured as a blank surface to be sculpted by Ananda. She becomes an artwork, a living semblance of a peace that remains out of place. His touch not only changes her appearance, but also releases a flood

of memories that revive her repressed emotional ties to her homeland: “Ananda had touched her in a way she could recollect no one ever having touched her, except, perhaps, Lalitha [her childhood nanny]. Or perhaps her mother, somewhere further back in her lost childhood” (187). By staging this scene of subject (re)formation, the novel confirms its investment in the primacy of biological descent as the basis of cultural identity.'’ Reclaiming this originary identity enables Anil to contain and resolve her shame. For this reason, she can only have this experience in Sri Lanka and not the other troubled places where she has previously worked. This lexicon of identity is available to her only in her homeland through a deep experience of shame that unravels her erroneously chosen Western identity. The cost of this process is a noticeable loss of agency: it is Ananda who turns her body into an artwork. Her transformation turns out to be a moment in which identity overtakes her, unexpectedly healing the wounds of shame. There is perhaps something heavy-handed in the way the novel turns itself into a narrative of diasporic return, a hackneyed theme in contemporary world literatures and one that often reiterates essentialist assumptions. Nevertheless, by modeling Anil’s transformation on the making of an artwork, Ondaatje suggests that identity itself can be understood as a kind of semblance whose value stems from its antagonistic relationship to the social. In this manner, he tries to rescue identity as a mode of critique by investing it with the ability to provide access to the surround of facts, not as a matter of disinterested information, but as what inspires a passionate ethical response. Identity promises the covering of Anil’s shame and enables her to emerge as a defiant critical subject. But this resolution can never be complete for shame remains sublimated throughout the text as a reminder

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 139

of its inability to properly address and heal the wounds of history for it always threatens to return and disrupt the resolution promised by identity. Anil’s inability to complete her mission and her expulsion from Sri Lanka at the end of the novel, while certainly meant to evoke our sympathies, constitutes yet another instance of shame, not only of her privilege—she

gets out while Sarath cannot—but also of the fact that she is unable to overcome that privilege through the cover of identity. Identity politics finally fails to resolve the novel’s underlying conflicts but what remains in the end is art. The last pages belong not to Anil or Sarath,

but to Ananda, who directs the building of a gigantic stone Buddha. As Siddiqi eloquently puts it, he accepts the “responsibility of an artificer: to create through art the possibility of a world where enchantment remains—a world that is the antitheses of the demonic war around him” (215). Under his clothes, he wears Sarath’s cotton shirt as a sign that “he and the woman Anil would always carry the ghost of Sarath Diyasena” (305). Is Sarath there-

fore Anil’s ghost? If not, then maybe the title of the novel refers to her deceased parents, Ananda’s wife, Sailor, the numerous victims of the war... or the countless inaccessible, unrepresentable histories that can only erupt in powerful, albeit indirect, ways as aesthetic figures such as the sculpted head or the giant Buddha. The artwork appears to carry on where identity fails by promising the recovery of the past, but only as that which does not belong, that which remains out of place in the terror of the present. The haunted character of the text, its desire to speak of and for the dead, remains the basis of its shame.

Ondaatje leaves us with the ecstatic, even transcendent, feeling that Ananda experiences just as he is about to paint the eyes of the Buddha. We witness another encounter with a sculpted head, but the effect and affect of this scene are completely different. At the threshold of the material world, in the birds flying above, Ananda senses “the tiniest of hearts in them beating exhausted and fast, the way [his wife] had died in the story he invented

for her in the vacuum of her disappearance. A brave small heart. In the heights she loved and in the dark she feared” (307). In a sublime moment that tries to convey narrative closure, Ananda feels the hands of his assistant, “this sweet touch from the world” (307). The text comes close to eviscerating its own shame through such elevated language but after some 300 pages of trauma and violence, can this conclusion be adequate or

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140 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

convincing? Perhaps we had better remain faithful to the novel’s historicity and read against the grain of the ending in order to continue grieving,

not only with Ananda, but over the limitations of fiction as such: “oh, were it only so.”

By Way of Comparison

Through its elevation of art as a form a social critique, Anil’s Ghost tries to imagine alternatives to the violence and terror of the present and heal the psychic wounds of war by turning the artist into a sort of idealized critical

subject. Throughout this study, we have encountered other instances in which artists and authors are privileged in similar ways, but Anil’s Ghost clarifies the stakes of this move by elevating characters such as Ananda in conjunction with a critique of rationality that reframes the meaning of knowledge in aesthetic terms. Since the novel identifies the hegemony of reason as a legacy of Western imperialism, aesthetics offers a means to articulate an anti-colonial epistemology. The power of the idealized critical subject in this case does not lie in its ability to integrate rational knowledge and praxis, but rather in its rejection of these terms in order to elevate aes-

thetic semblance into the basis of oppositional artistic as well as ethicopolitical practices.'* There are obvious limits to this strategy. First, Ondaatje’s

understanding of art is itself derived from long-standing themes in (Western) aesthetic philosophy and, moreover, carry a strong trace of romanticism when it comes to the power of art. Second, the novel replicates many of the shortcomings found in models of identity politics. Finally, its treatment of identity is framed by a fundamental division between Sri Lanka and the West, a geopolitical structure that locks the text into a rigid binary opposition. Indeed, Anil’s Ghost ends up confronting its own inability to escape its Western positionality, an angst-filled realization that sheds light on the condition of literary representation in the post-colonial world. With these limitations in mind, I want to suggest that what Anil’s Ghost illuminates is the politics and perils of comparison. As consequences of an

uneven global modernity produced through extensive contact between peoples and cultures, comparative encounters are dynamic events in which differences and inequities are brought to attention even as identities maintain a measure of their illusory coherence. The oscillation between the dis-

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison IAI

solving and intensifying of identities can itself be understood in terms of aesthetic semblance. To make this connection is to entertain the possibility of recovering identity’s role in shaping understandings of the socio-historical world as well as the ethical and political commitments occasioned by this knowledge. Conceived in these terms, its critical force comes not from an idealized critical subject whose epistemological privilege underscores political resistance, but its semblance character and the ways in which this status becomes legible as a critical intervention.

How might an aesthetic understanding of identity reframe the practice of comparison in Asian American Studies? Comparative encounters have become more frequent as the field reconstitutes itself in global terms, and they have resulted in an outward turn beyond its borders as well as a turn inward as those borders become the object of renewed critical attention. This intensified self-reflexivity, while often deconstructive in intent, has had the consequence of ensuring the expansion and consolidation of the field through a continual process of unraveling and reconstitution that mirrors the condition of post-identity more generally (I will return to this point in the conclusion of this book). The lesson of Anil’s Ghost is that a measure of shame inheres in these processes. For Asian American Studies, despite its ardent anti-imperialism, its location in the West, and the United States in particular, places it in a global economy of knowledge in which U.S. institutions frequently play a dominant and dominating role. As a result, its engagement with what lies outside its conventional parameters, including the inclusion of non-U.S. texts such as Anil’s Ghost, runs the risk of reprising what Erika Lee calls “intellectual imperialism” (250).

To have these risks brought to attention, and to treat such dangers as more than just perfunctory nods toward contextualization and inclusivity, is to recognize the presence of what Ukai would call global shame. Instead of proscribing “border-crossing” readings in order to fend off these effects, I am interested in how they might inform comparative thinking in Asian American Studies.'’ In a suggestive example of comparative reading, Rajiini Srikanth places Anil’s Ghost in her book The World Next Door in order to critically reflect on manifestations of American hegemony in contemporary literature and geo-politics. Srikanth frames her reading in relation to an event that could not have informed the writing of the novel—the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003—and works backward from there to the events depicted by Ondaatje. Theorizing the conditions under which

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142 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

war and colonialism become legible as literary narratives, she suggests that the novel’s controversial avoidance of detailed political analysis reflects the author's unstable relation to the histories he depicts: “maybe,” she speculates, “this is the curse of being an outsider, or an occasional insider—that one cannot know where one should stand and what one should see” (80). As a self-critical and self-reflexive text, Anil’s Ghost exemplifies Srikanth’s vision of (South) Asian American literary studies as an exercise in learning “how to operate as foreigners to the text—foregrounding the extent to which we can-

not interpret or explicate the text and surmising from that gap, in that untranslatable zone, the vastness and complexity of what we seek to know” (21). Even though her reading is “constrained” by its location in the United States, what makes her account of Anil’s Ghost compelling is its comparative orientation, which prompts her to look beyond the borders of Asian American literature even as she works from within its institutional parameters.'4 Such readings indicate the intellectual possibilities offered by a transna-

tional and comparative Asian American literary studies. Unlike the essentialist assumptions that still inform Ondaatje’s engagement with diaspora, Srikanth mobilizes the terms of diaspora to interrupt the U.S.-centric tendencies of Asian American Studies. Diaspora thus functions as what David Palumbo-Liu calls an “enabling fiction,” a pretext for the exposition of profound notions of the national, of race, ethnicity, and history. . . . “[D]iaspora” does not consist in the fact of leaving Home, but in having that factuality available to representation as such—we come to “know” diaspora only as it is psychically identified in a narrative form that discloses the various ideological investments. (355; emphasis in original)

Palumbo-Liu disassociates diaspora from its identitarian connotations and mobilizes it as an analytical category to reveal what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes as interactions of friction: “the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (4). Anil’s Ghost remains a problematic text, but it also offers an instructive reminder that globally conceived knowledge projects, however rigorously conceived, do not easily avoid the trap(pings) of identity because cognition and representation are not disembodied or dislocated acts. Instead, they remain caught

up in assumptions about the subject of knowledge and the identitarian categories that render that subject legible. Once legible, however, these at-

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Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison 143

tachments become susceptible to operations of shame and semblance, as well as the uncertainties engendered by comparison. In Philosophy of New Music, Adorno offers a description of this dialectical process by returning to the link between aesthetic semblance and subjectiv-

ity. Adorno suggests that avant-garde art is defined by the collapse of aesthetic semblance.” Responding to a philosophical tradition that aligns formal resolution with the achievement of subjectivity and freedom, he contends that the unraveling of art’s “immediate clarity” and “unity” reveals the unattainability of its promises of resolution and reconciliation (96). The collapse of semblance “bears witness to the contradictions of the world” and, in the

process, yields the truth content of art as “knowledge” (97). In a manner that resonates with Ondaatje’s treatment of art, this knowledge exposes the violence of modernity and thereby constitutes a form of protest. Adorno correlates the collapse of the artwork with that of the subject under the pressures of modernity, and describes the latter’s fate in a striking image: “[the end of art is] closely akin to crying. It is the gesture of dissolving. The tension of the facial muscles yields—the tension that, while the face directs itself pragmatically toward the world, separates it from this world. Music and crying open the lips and bring delivery from restraint” (99). Is Adorno not describing a scene of shame? The subject, “pragmatically” facing the world, dissolves before it through an affective experience that is registered at the level of facial appearance. The encounter between the subject and the world thoroughly undermines the former’s coherence and it is precisely here that Adorno’s thinking takes a dialectical turn that avoids the irreversible collapse of the subject or its premature recovery through ostensibly secure, but in fact reified, identitarian categories. “The man who surrenders to tears in music that no longer resembles him,” he writes, “at the same time allows the stream of what he himself is not... to flow back into

him. In tears and singing, the alienated world is entered” (99). Only the subject who surrenders to the irreconcilability of form and the impossibility of subjectivity can reenter the “alienated world” in which life must con-

tinue. Adorno posits the paradoxical possibility that the relinquishing of form and subjectivity might constitute a kind of re-covery that enables the subject to reconfigure the conditions of ethical life. What is crucial here is the relationship between the critique and collapse of subjectivity and its subsequent reconstitution, a process that illustrates what I have been describing throughout this study as the semblance of the idealized critical

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144 Semblance, Shame, and the Work of Comparison

subject as it is manifested in Asian American literary culture and criticism. For what continually reinscribes this subject is nothing other than the gesture of protest itself, the very political commitments that constitute Asian

American Studies as a knowledge project and preserve its fidelity to its identitarian origins. This would be the utopian promise of post-identity: that the subject, however exhausted or embattled, might finally be reanimated in a reconciled future.

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Conclusion The Difference Asian America Makes The,pleasure,of, history, Is, its, knack, of, being, late:

To, arrive,a,ghost:

Or,the,metaphysics,of,success. —José Garcia Villa, “Aphorisms, II,” in Doveglion, 125

The writings of José Garcia Villa (1908-1997) offer at once an exciting op-

portunity to extend the canon of Asian American literature as well as a challenge to the coherence of Asian American literary studies. One of the most influential English-language Filipino writers of his generation, Villa moved to the United States permanently in 1930. A writer, editor, and teacher

who was well known in American high modernist circles, his innovative poetry, prose, and criticism attracted the praise of noted figures such as Marianne Moore and e. e. cummings. His work was published by prominent publishers such as Charles Scribner’s Sons and New Directions but after the 1950s was largely forgotten in the United States. Villa remained a literary legend (and a source of controversy) in the Philippines, where he was given the title National Artist by the Marcos dictatorship in 1973. Since his death, critics and scholars in both the Philippines and the United States have revisited his life and writings to reclaim him as an important figure in twentieth-century Anglophone writing. Villa advocated a rarefied, mystical, and elitist aestheticism while denigrating the politicization of literature.’ He strenuously refused to be labeled as a Filipino writer even though he was actively involved in shaping the literary scene in the Philippines from afar, a contradiction that surfaces in his critical writings. In “Best Philippine Short Stories [of 1934],” for example, he writes, In all my stories, in all my work, /do NOT write about the Filipino, I write about MAN. | am not interested in the Filipino as a separate brand of 145

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146 Conclusion humanity—I am interested in him as a human being, asa man... .I disbelieve in a Filipino literature as a special type of literature: a national literature is valid only insofar as it is world literature. (110; emphasis in original)?

If statements such as these indicate his belief in a universal humanism, they also suggest why his reception in Asian American literary studies has been uneasy. As Timothy Yu observes, “It is Villa’s very allegiance to the universalizing aesthetic dicta of high modernism and the Anglo-American literary canon that has prevented him, up to now, from being considered under the rubric of American ethnic writing” (“Asian/American Modernisms’). I end this book with a brief discussion of Villa’s writings because they offer an instructive case study of the relationship between literary aesthetics and the operations of post-identity. While Villa’s reputation rests largely on his poetry, his first major publication in the United States was a collection of short fiction titled Footnote to Youth: Tales from the Philippines and Other Stories (1933). Footnote is comprised of twenty-one stories; as Denise Cruz observes, those set in the Philippines are written in a realist style while those set in the United States, which account for about a third of the stories, employ a range of experimental narrative techniques. While the Filipino stories are characterized by rich detail, the American stories are sparse and elliptical; while the former focus on normative heterosexual love, the latter feature cross-racial as well as homoerotic desire.’ Several of the American sto-

ries are separated into numbered paragraphs, a device that turns them into prose poems with a jagged sense of time.4 Using these techniques, Villa foregrounds the distinction between his native and his adopted countries, relegating the former to ethnographic description while positing the latter as the site of creative innovation. Read through the lens of Asian American cultural criticism, this division is immediately problematic as it uncritically reinscribes a geo-political division without recognizing the formative role of American imperialism in the Philippines. Since these arguments have been elucidated in detail elsewhere (along with responses that seek to show Villa’s awareness of these histories), I focus here on the formal strategies used by Villa to articulate and narrate cultural difference. Many of his American stories rewrite the same underlying, partly autobiographical, narrative: an unnamed Filipino protagonist/narrator is sent to the United States by his father to break up a

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Conclusion 147 romantic relationship with a woman. He arrives as a university student and settles in New Mexico where he has affairs with various white women as well as intense friendships with white working-class men that are saturated with homoerotic desire. He eventually leaves for New York where he encounters and experiences poverty. By offering different iterations of this story, Villa draws the reader’s attention to the formal properties of narration while casting doubt on the possibility of narrative closure. In the shortest American story, titled “Young Writer in a New Country,” the narrator repeatedly declares, “in the homeland I was young.” This claim bifurcates his life into a Filipino past and an American present, a structure that echoes the text’s depiction of the effects of migration on his ability to narrate. At one point, he says: In the homeland—never any snow. In the homeland, greenness. O green, O warmth, O bamboos, unforgotten— In America it is cold. But Ernest, my roommate, does not find it so. He has lived in America all his life. He plays the trombone. He likes to play the trombone. America has taught him to play the trombone. What a strange train of thoughts. Ernest. America. Trombone. What I want to say is that I could not make out anything. I lay in bed, wanting sleep to come, but all the time my lips kept saying: “America, America’—fondling the words, wanting to know what they meant. But nothing got solved in my mind. (Footnote 300-301)

This passage foregrounds the strange materiality of language by placing the words “Ernest,” “America, and “trombone” in a tropological chain marked by displacements and substitutions. Villa articulates the narrator’s alienation from his own voice and his vexed relation to language, whose operations and characteristics repeatedly frustrate attempts to exercise control over it. “Young Writer” foreshadows Villa’s later poetic innovations, which,

as Eileen Tabios argues, are “his own way of imposing mastery on English, the borrowed language.” But whereas Tabios describes his poetry as “a politically radical act” (qtd. in Chua, “Colonialist” 184), here language proves to be corrosive to narrative coherence as it takes on a life of its own and disrupts the story as a whole. Although the United States appears to obstruct the narrator's linguistic expression, it is also the site of his (re)birth as an author. As the narrator

reflects on his friendship with David, the first of a series of male love

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148 Conclusion objects, he routes his erotic desires through an apostrophic address to his adopted land: I have asked America, the country America: Why don’t you make more Davids? I asked the question because it was the only way to express myself. He was not a liar and he could never end up a liar: David—Do you get

what I mean?... Do you see America getting clearer in my mind? Do you see myself getting articulate, getting voice? Little by little calm comes to my mind. Little by little my white birth—a white cool birth in a new land. (302-303)

While the act of speaking seems to announce the emergence of an articulate subject, the text remains decidedly ambiguous as it registers the erasure of the narrator’s racial difference (“white cool birth”), resulting in a deep anxiety that pervades the entire story, as well as Footnote as a whole. This awareness of the particularity of identity stands in contrast to Villa’s aesthetic universalism. In “Best Filipino Short Stories of 1933,” he argues

that the primary content of the short story should not be plot but rather “the revealment of the inner man” (78). The purpose of narrative form, moreover, is to ensure “the adequate and beautiful externation of substance... the liberation of the creative spirit: the concretion of imaginative and emotional beauty” (86). Not surprisingly, he describes the author in transcendent terms by attributing his abilities to a “faculty of artistic seeing—of

perceiving what the commonality fails to see: the spirit, the essence, of things” (92). Villa's grandiose rhetoric notwithstanding, his main point is that the creation of narrative content requires an authorial subject whose identity is formed through acts of narration, the same acts that, as “Young Writer” shows, also undermine his self-cohesion. Furthermore, “Young Writer” emphasizes the inescapable particularity of this identity as the narrator traces his emergence as an authorial subject: “my stories were born—of

the homeland and the new land....1, father tales. Fathering tales I became rooted to the new land” (303). Writing offers the means to assert belonging in the United States, but by associating writing with patrilineal reproduction (a point that uncannily foreshadows the later claims of cultural nationalism), the narrator ironically aligns himself with his hated father. Moreover, his interactions with America keep changing as he leaves New Mexico for the East Coast, which in turn induces a longing for the southwestern desert. By the end of the story, the narrator feels out of place

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Conclusion 149 in both his homeland and his adopted country: “Will the native land forgive? Between your peace and the peace of a strange faraway desert—Between your two peaces—O tell softly. Softly. Forgive softly” (303-304). These words are even more poignant when we remember that Villa’s subsequent reception

in the United States would be couched in decidedly Orientalist terms, an experience that further pushed him to embrace an ostensibly de-ethnicized and de-racialized modernism.’

If Villa’s relationships to both America and Asia are fraught with uncertainty, what does it mean to claim him as part of an Asian American literary tradition? At first glance, to recover Villa as an Asian American writer on the basis of his ethnicity and biography would considerably enrich the Asian American canon. As Timothy Yu observes, “the new interest in Villa can be attributed to the rise of new theoretical frameworks in Asian Ameri-

can literature—namely, those of post-colonialism and transnationalism— that give us a language in which to talk about Villa” (“Asian/American Modernisms”). Villa’s place in the field is uneasy, however, because his writings challenge the ethico-political values that have sustained Asian American Studies. His particular combination of experimental stylistics, universal aestheticism, colonial subjection, transnational migration, and

elitist nationalism exceeds critical attempts to keep track of the demographic, historical, aesthetic, and political aspects of Asian America. Villa, in short, is difficult to recognize and classify as an “Asian American” writer. Mindful of Chuh’s warning against “dead-end” discourses of authentication Umagine Otherwise 21), it might be more useful to consider how a figure such as Villa reveals the ways in which the concept of Asian America changes as a result of comparative encounters with what lies outside its historical, spatial, and political boundaries as presently conceived. Tracking these changes discloses the theoretical labor of Asian America and the crucial role of mediation in its unfolding. In his essay “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy,” Adorno defines mediation as a process that operates whenever knowledge is being produced through the interplay of concepts and particulars. Concepts constantly change by virtue of their inability to encapsulate what they purport to represent: “the movement of the concept is . . . the ever-present consciousness of both the identity of and the inevitable difference between the concept and what it is supposed to ex-

press, a consciousness that animates all genuine knowledge” (71).° For Adorno, the insistence on the identity of the concept and its referents is

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150 Conclusion complicit in the violent catastrophes of modernity, but instead of just privileging the value of difference, he insists on the need to pay attention to the dialectical interplay of concepts and objects—the interplay of difference and similarity—in order to redeem the former’s emancipatory potential.’

In a similar manner, we might say that the work of theorizing Asian America consists in tracking the oscillations between identity and difference, and how its referents—actual subjects, existing communities, and historical events—are transformed in the course of their interaction with the concept of Asian America. Not only does Asian America change through time, but, as I suggested in earlier chapters, it also engenders prosthetic temporalities that mediate the abstract passage of time by providing access and giving form to the past and the future. These temporalities in turn produce a myriad of material and psychic effects that permeate Asian American politics and culture. Recalling her politicization as a college student through the influence of the Asian American movement, activist and journalist Helen Zia writes in Asian American Dreams, A whole generation of Asian Americans was getting an education about our identity. We couldn't wait to leave the safe confines of our campuses to share our lessons and our pride in this newfound heritage. . . . [A] dynamic process was set in motion: we were reclaiming our stake in a land and a history that excluded us, transforming a community that was still in the process of becoming. We were following our destinies as Asian Americans. (20)

Zias powerful claim that Asian American identity provides a grasp of the past as well as the means to claim a “destiny” is bound to cause some discomfort among critics because it seems to defy rational—that is, historicist and materialist—alternatives to identity politics. Zia, in short, sounds very much like an essentialist and as Anne Cheng observes, “We are so often afraid in academia to talk about ontology, for fear of essentialism, universalism, or intellectual quietism. Yet sometimes the stringent fear of essentialism or essentialist labels prevents certain categories from being discussed, categories that, for all their inherent instability, nevertheless operate in powerful, fantasmatic ways” (Melancholy 27). Seeking to account for the “fantasmatic” power of identity, this book has deployed the notion of semblance to track the tour-de-force moments when identity gets attached to subjects and facilitates the production and

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Conclusion I5I representation of knowledge in the form of literature. In “Extorted Reconciliation,’ Adorno argues that the critical force of reconciliation as imagined in artworks derives from its status as “negative knowledge of reality. . . . [OJnly by virtue of this difference, and not by denying it, does the work of art become both work of art and correct consciousness” (225). I want to suggest that a similar tension—between the pressures of a racialized society and a political imagination that seeks to overcome these limitations—permeates Asian American identity, which draws on its semblance character to imagine an emancipatory politics. One of the main goals of this book has been to theorize how literary texts reveal and stage this process by articulating various aspects of the idealized critical subject, itself constituted through semblance, as a means to integrate knowledge with praxis. In tracing this subject, I hope to account for the staying power of identitarian thought, even in texts that are ambiguous about, or even critical of, identity politics. This, to my mind, is precisely the condition of post-identity: to borrow Lyotard’s description of post-modernism, post-identity is not identity politics at its end, but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.°® To put it differently, identity remains generative and productive even when placed under erasure. Thus even though the critique of identity politics continues to be necessary, identity is not a mode of thinking and acting that can simply be left behind, for it operates in our most familiar, as well as innovative, intellectual strategies and projects. Instead of proclaiming the death of identity politics, we might, instead, respond to its ubiquity by embracing what Paul Bové calls abandonment. Abandonment, he explains, not only means to leave behind, as in “abandoning a friend in need,” or to withdraw from a previously securely held place or position; it also means two other things that the mind finds it extremely difficult to hold together at the same time: first, “.. . to give up with the intent of never again claiming a right or interest in”; and, second, “to give (oneself) over unrestrainedly.” (308)

Bové asks, “Can there be a more frightening cry to the human scientist than to abandon the field? Does this not imply cowardice, a giving up and running away? ... It means, rather, taking seriously abandoning the organization of knowledge into fields as such and making an effort to hollow out any given field for the knowledge it provides” (305-306).?

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152 Conclusion It seems difficult, if not impossible, to imagine abandoning Asian American Studies; after all, calls to leave the field behind have often contributed to its institutional growth. What is also needed, I want to suggest, is a renewal of what Adorno calls “hating tradition properly,” a phrase that he coins in Minima Moralia in the course of a critique of Western intellectuals who fetishize and primitivize non-Western Others while remaining uncritically invested in their own traditions, institutions, and privileges. The result, he insists, is a failure to attend to the emancipatory strains located, but often repressed, in existing cultural traditions—thus the need to hate tradition properly and not, to use an English cliché he cites elsewhere in Minima Moralia, “throw the baby out with the bath-water” (43). As Neil Lazarus explains, Adorno directs his critical energies to “the tradition of modernity itself” (5; emphasis in original) so that “to hate tradition properly is . . . to mobilize its own protocols, procedures, and interior logic against it—to demonstrate that it is only on the basis of a project that exceeds its own horizons or selfconsciousness that tradition can possibly be imagined redeeming its own pledges” (7)."°

For Asian American Studies, “tradition” can refer to the intellectual and cultural traditions of the West, including many of the theoretical tools that we employ to dismantle Euro-centrism and its racial foundations. Hating these traditions properly means that we cannot simply appeal to historical, spatial, or cultural difference as the foundation of a critical project: despite its radical critique, Asian American Studies is by no means free from the power structures it seeks to dismantle. The second sense of tradition refers

to the legacies of identity politics that have constituted Asian American politics and culture. Instead of just trying to extricate ourselves from identity politics, the more difficult challenge of hating it properly requires critiquing its limits while holding onto its liberatory possibilities, the achieve-

ments of Ethnic Studies. In our attempts to “hollow out” the field from within, the pressing task is to scrupulously expose the dangers of identity politics while recognizing its critical potential. The politics of post-identity inheres precisely in the ongoing work of abandoning Asian American Studies while abandoning ourselves to it.

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Reference Matter

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Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. For background on the Asian American movement, see the works by Wei, J. Lee, and Maeda. 2. Alcoff adds that these terms are not meant to be mutually exclusive, but rather to provide a conceptual distinction that enables thinkers to “characterize the way in which a public self may not match a lived self, and to consider the manner in which we manage to separate ourselves from our public interpellation” (93). 3. Fora historical overview of Orientalism in the United States, see R. Lee. 4. The Combined Asian American Resources Project was cofounded by Frank Chin, arguably the most well-known cultural nationalist literary figure. Wei Min She was a Maoist organization active in San Francisco from 1972 until 1975 (when it combined with another group to form the Revolutionary Communist Party) as part of the radical wing of the Asian American movement. For historical background on these groups, see Wei. 5. Fora cogent discussion of this apparent contradiction, see Chiang. 6. In Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier, Palumbo-Liu borrows the term “racial frontier” from Chicago School sociologist Robert E. Park to describe how notions of the United States have been articulated in relation to Asia. While the “essential racial separation of Asians from ‘Americans’” has been “deeply engrained in the American imaginary” (3), this relationship, which he terms the “Asian/American split,” is in fact mutually constituting, and encompasses the long history of transnational crossings and interactions of which “Asian America” is one of many articulations. Palumbo-Liu’s formulation

I55

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156 Notes to Introduction offers an expanded spatial and historical context for Asian American cultural criticism that opens up possibilities for comparative perspectives that look beyond the borders of the United States. 7. By invoking Lukacs in this study, I am suggesting that his account of class can help us understand the identity politics of race by providing an analogous articulation of the theoretical logic of identity. The relationship between class and race has been the subject of extensive debate in U.S.-based critical race theory, and a thorough discussion of these debates is beyond the scope of this study. The centrality of this question is extensively addressed in Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s foundational Racial Formation in the United States (see 24-35 and passim), in which they insist on the irreducibility of race to class, ethnicity, and nation, a point that has since become one of the theoretical foundations of Ethnic Studies. Following in Omi and Winant’s footsteps, Lisa Lowe opens Immigrant Acts by insisting on the importance of race in globalization. In a more recent critique of this line of thinking, Colleen Lye suggests that it has inadvertently “turn[ed] race into a kind of transcendental signifier, emphasizing the foundational status of racism to U.S. society at the expense of describing its historical variability” (“Introduction” 2). 8. Although it is now widely acknowledged as one of the founding texts of Western Marxism, History and Consciousness was ferociously attacked by other European communists soon after its publication in 1923 and Lukacs himself would repudiate its claims by 1930 as he embraced Stalinism. For a detailed account of these debates, see works by Jay and Rees. g. My contention here is that there needs to be an alternative to the frequent use of strategic essentialism to justify the continuing deployment of Asian America, in spite of its well-known shortcomings, as a means of preserving the political gains achieved in its name. While I have no problem with this claim at a pragmatic level, I find it to be a limiting argument because it conflates the idealized figure of the Asian American subject with the material referents that have accrued through the political activities that have taken place under this rubric, while also having the effect of foreclosing other political imaginaries. Moreover, it assumes that we can easily decide what constitutes “good politics” when what is needed is an account of precisely how such judgments are conceived in the first place. That said, my discussion of the idealized critical subject is clearly indebted to the notion of strategic essentialism as articulated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in In Other Worlds. There, Spivak argues that invocations of subaltern subjectivity should be understood as an effect of textual representation, which posits the existence of an “operating subject” in order to hold together a “discontinuous” network of discursive strands (204).

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Notes to Introduction 57 10. This approach is complicated by Lukacs’s insistence on the need for a Leninist vanguard party to catalyze revolution, a claim that, in light of his long subsequent career as a government and party official in Hungary, has been cited by his more severe critics as evidence of his complicity in the repressive apparatuses of state socialism.

i. The contradiction here—that the group must be posited as already existing even while its existence is deferred to the future—recurs in Asian American cultural nationalism. I return to this problem in Chapter 2. 12. In “Traveling Theory,” Edward Said traces possible genealogies between Lukacs and anti-colonial liberationist thought. 13. It is worth noting that many translations of Kant use the word “impute” in passages where he discusses how aesthetic judgments can be demanded or required from all subjects in the absence of objective knowledge and logic. For example, he writes, “we must be fully convinced of the fact that in a judgment of taste (about the Beautiful) the satisfaction in the object is imputed to every one without being based on a concept” (59, $8; emphasis in original). While the German words used by Kant and Lukacs, ansinnen and zugerechnet respectively, are not the same (and Kant uses several other words with related meanings such as Anspruch and zumuten), these terms mobilize a similar logic. In this sense, we might locate an aesthetic dimension in Lukacs’s theory of class consciousness even though his more immediate point of reference is Weber's concept of objective possibility. | am grateful to Timothy Bewes for drawing my attention to these connections and their implications. For a discussion of imputation in Kant, see Guyer (123-125).

14. These hierarchies figure prominently throughout the history of aesthetic philosophy. As a result, aesthetics has been repeatedly criticized for justifying imperialism in the name of a false, that is Eurocentric, universality. For an example of this critique, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reading of The Critique of Judgment in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (10-37). In the context of Asian American literature, Sau-ling Wong offers an extended critique of aesthetic discourse by taking aim at its traditional (Western) association with notions of play and disinterestedness, which, she argues, have been historically unavailable to Asian Americans because their racialization has rendered questions of survival, utility, and community overwhelming and inescapable. Wong goes on to suggest that Asian American writers who embrace aesthetic play make a political intervention that “subverts white society's expectations on the Asian American's proper place and stimulates the creation of a heteroglossic Asian American culture” (Reading 210). 15. Kant argues that a judgment of taste is that in which “charm and emotion have no influence (although they may be bound up with the satisfaction in the

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158 Notes to Introduction beautiful)—which therefore has as its determining ground merely the purposiveness of form” (72—73, §13).

16. Redfield’s description of form draws extensively on Jacques Derrida’s discussion of framing in the The Critique of Judgment (“Parergon’). 17. Adorno gets especially personal when he excoriates Lukacs for, in his view, being complicit in the coercive state-sponsored cultural apparatuses of the Eastern bloc even while claiming that socialist nations had reached a stage in history in which the separation between art and reality could finally be overcome. For his part, Lukacs accused Adorno in 1962 of “[taking] up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss’. . . ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity’ ” (Preface to The Theory of the Novel, 22). Despite this exchange of attacks, it should be noted that Adorno’s work was greatly influenced by the account of reification offered in History and Class Consciousness even though he abhorred Lukacs’s commitment to political praxis, which he considered inseparable from the irrational impulses generated by totally administered modern societies. 18. The notion of Schein can be traced back to Kant’s writings, where it denotes what often gets translated as “transcendental illusion,” a necessary, but also problematic, component of cognition that allows reason to move beyond given experience. For a detailed discussion of this concept, see Grier. 19. Adorno’s understanding of art’s separation from reality is based on Marx’s model of the commodity fetish and, more important, Lukacs’s application of this model in his theory of reification. Adorno thus shares Lukacs’s basic diagnosis of the modern condition while rejecting his turn to Leninism as a way to overcome alienation.

20. Koshy outlines the limitations of this approach in her essay “The Fiction of Asian American Literature” (477-478). Also see D. Kim, Writing Manhood (204-205). For a critique of Asian American history as a narrative structure, see Yanagisako. 21. As Mark Chiang has recently observed, critics reconfigured an earlier insistence on historicist interpretation by renewing attention to matters of form in a bid for institutional legitimacy as Asian American literary studies became more established as an academic discipline (122-126). Important examples of this approach include Lowe Ummigrant Acts), Chu (Assimilating), and Nguyen. For a contrasting perspective that questions how realism came to be understood in the field, see J. Ling (18-23).

22. For more on the turn to form in Asian American literary criticism, see Davis and Lee, Zhou and Najmi, and Lye (“Racial Form”). 23. To put it differently, this study traces the history of Asian America as a concept but does not adopt the teleological temporalities that often underscore its

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Notes to Introduction and Chapter 1 159 identity politics. History in this context is not so much a matter of narrating its development but rather involves tracking its dynamic movement through time. Insofar as this study does not assume a political telos directed toward (achieving) the idealized critical subject, it views Asian American literature and culture as, to borrow terms favored by Adorno, a “constellation” that functions in a “negative dialectics” in which the constant mediation of aesthetics and politics does not result in a determinate social outcome. I am grateful to Weihsin Gui for reminding me of these terms and proposing this formulation. 24. As Chakrabarty notes, the attaining of this knowledge “promises to the human subject a certain degree of autonomy with respect to history. ‘The idea is that once one knows the causal structures that operate in history, one may also gain a mastery of them” (247). 25. Silva uses the term “transparency” to describe the ideal postEnlightenment subject. I will return to her account of the transparent subject in Chapter 4.

CHAPTER I

1. Amy Ling’s Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry, which contains a brief discussion of Chang’s life and career, is a notable exception.

2. For reconsiderations of Jade Snow Wong, see the works by Bow and So; for recent discussions of C. Y. Lee, see the works by Hwang and So. 3. Notable translations of Chang’s work into English include Love in a Fallen City (trans. Karen Kingsbury), Written on Water (trans. Andrew Jones), and Traces of Love and Other Stories (trans. Eva Hung). An earlier issue of the journal Renditions (no. 45) was dedicated to Chang's works. Eva Hung also edited Chang’s own translation of Han Banqing’s novel Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. 4. [wo previously unknown English-language novels by Chang have been recently published by Hong Kong University Press, 7he Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change. Chang also started but never finished an erotic novel titled The Young Marshal; the manuscript is currently held at the University of Southern California. 5. Ihe May Fourth period is named after a protest held on May 4, 1919 by students in Beijing against Japanese incursions in China. “May Fourth” has come to mean an intense period of intellectual and cultural ferment. Thinkers during this time largely rejected tradition in favor of Westernization and modernization. Hu is credited with leading language reforms that, among other things, replaced classical Chinese with the vernacular as the main mode of writing. For a discussion of the May Fourth period and its lasting influences on modern China, see Chow. For an overview of Hu’s career, see Grieder. Chang

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160 Notes to Chapter 1 creates a satirical portrait of the May Fourth era in her bilingual short story “Stale Mates” (1956).

6. Translations of Chinese texts in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted. 7. Inside the United States, the USIS was known as the United States Information Agency. It was formally dissolved in 1999. 8. Jinri Shijie was a publication of the World Today Press, which produced numerous translations of Western literature, history, and philosophy. For an account of the press and its influence on intellectuals in Hong Kong and Taiwan during this period, see Shan. Jinri Shijie highlighted the achievements of “Free China” while condemning the Chinese communist regime. Regular features included profiles of movie stars, “exposés” of the Chinese communist press, articles and photos extolling life in the United States, and other human interest stories. Each issue also included a literary feature. 9. Naked Earth was not completed until after her arrival in the United States, and was only published in Hong Kong (in a later interview, Chang claimed that it was commissioned with a predetermined plot). Zhe Rouge of the North was published in Britain and republished in 1998 by the University of California Press. Naked Earth is currently out of print; Chinese versions of both novels have remained in print since their publication. 1o. For an overview of anti-communist fiction from this period, see David Der-wei Wang, “Reinventing National History” and “Yizhong Shiqu de Wenxue.” u. As Christina Klein explains, readers in the United States (who were Chang’s target audience) were attracted to works by middlebrow intellectuals that “acted as Washington's ‘paraphrasers, translating the principle of international integration into terms and forms of culture that were accessible to the man on the street” (63). 12. This characterization is certainly questionable. Although Chang did, in a sense, escape from the mainland, her departure, ostensibly to continue her studies at the University of Hong Kong, was relatively smooth and there is no evidence that she was ever directly harmed by the communist government. 13. Hsia’s chapter on Chang had been translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan in 1956. Hsia was trained at Yale in the Anglo-American critical tradition and was enormously influential among readers and scholars in Taiwan and Hong Kong. History is widely acknowledged as a foundational work in modern Chinese literary studies. 14. Despite her admiration for the novel, Lung dismisses its satirical attacks on the communist propaganda apparatus as lacking in subtlety. On the first anniversary of Chang’s death, Taiwan-based critic Shui Jing, who has written

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Notes to Chapter 1 161 many admiring essays on her works over the years, published a rather critical reflection on The Rice-Sprout Song in which he argues that the text fails to be compelling because the author depicts rural subjects from the perspective of a petit bourgeoisie. 15. From more neutral perspectives, Dai Qing and Huang Yong, in their respective essays, compare The Rice-Sprout Song to communist propaganda fiction from the same period as an alternative perspective on land reform. 16. In C. T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, Chang’s aesthetic accomplishments are used to differentiate her from the dominant, often leftist, modern literary tradition widely associated with the May Fourth movement and its aftermath. In this sense, her apolitical reputation took on special meaning within the ideological struggles of the Cold War. 17. This preface is not included in the 1998 reissue of The Rice-Sprout Song by the University of California Press. In fact, the novel contains a minor character, Comrade Ku, who is a writer sent to the countryside to produce propaganda about land reform, but ends up witnessing the riot instead. In his foreword to the recent edition of the novel, David Der-wei Wang suggests that Ku’s story offers “an allegory about the vulnerable situation of Chinese writers of the time, Communist and anti-Communist alike” (xxiii). 18. In this passage, the terms “true,” “truth,” and “reality” contain the same root word in Chinese (zen), which denotes notions of objectivity, truth, and actuality. 19. In a sympathetic attempt to account for the novel’s shortcomings, C. T. Hsia psychologizes the author's “compulsive eagerness” to share her own experiences under communism. But even he admits that Naked Earth “falls short of the formal perfection of The Rice-sprout |sic| Song mainly because it attempts the almost possible: to render with full justice the manifold aspects of Communist tyranny. At times the author falls into documentary naiveté in her compulsive eagerness to tell the world what she has seen and heard in Communist China” (427). 20. Also see Hsia (392-397) for a discussion of sensuality in Chang’s early writings. 21. Right after this passage, the English version tells us that “it was a pardonable mistake at her age, and on the whole she impressed Comrade Fei [the party official she is talking to] as being a remarkably progressive old woman” (15). In the Chinese version, Chang uses a term for old woman, /ao taipo, that carries a somewhat derisive connotation, thereby inflecting “progressive” with considerable irony.

22. During the Japanese occupation, parts of China were controlled by a puppet regime led by Wang Jingwei in Nanjing. Wang is widely considered a traitor by communists and Nationalists alike. Chang’s first husband was a

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162 Notes to Chapters 1 and 2 minister in the Wang government and she later depicted the politics of collaboration in her short story “Se jie” (translated as Lust, Caution in Ang Lee’s recent cinematic adaptation; see Chang, Lust). 23. The plot is rather confusing here. Because Gold Root and Gold Flower were orphaned as children, they live with Big Aunt, Big Uncle, their cousin Gold Have Got, and his wife. During this episode, Gold Root and Gold Flower “happened to be out in the hills digging for bamboo shoots” (132). Gold Have Got’s wife (confusingly called Sister-in-Law Gold Have Got) and their baby manage to hide and survive the visitation. It is unclear what eventually happens to the baby, although there is a brief mention of Big Aunt’s grandson toward the end of the novel. Sister-in-Law Gold Have Got continues to live with her in-laws, but her husband never returns. 24. Her letter is reprinted in “Yi Hu Shizhi” (145-146). 25. Fora different application of Lukacs’s theories to Chang’s earlier stories, see Chow, “Seminal Dispersal.” 26. For her American readers, this parallel between reader and character is fraught due to the politics of translation. Even though Chang’s American readers can be considered spectators, this position confirms their relative power as Western readers. But Chang’s writing practices also undermine their ethnographic desires and questions the mandate she has assumed as a translator of cultures.

27. I thank Nancy Jakubowski for helping me to locate this broadcast. 28. This anecdote is recorded in Song Qi. In an entertaining account of the logistically disastrous production, screenwriter Loring Mandel, who witnessed the broadcast of the program live in real time, recalls that the makeup for Olive Deering (the actress who played Moon Scent) was a complete disaster: “[Only] one eye was open, [while] the other was pasted half-shut” (57). According to Mandel, the anti-communist production was largely staged by actors who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. 29. See Park (95-100, 122-127). CHAPTER 2

1. For biographical background on Iwasaki, see Wei (108-111). In /magining the Nation, David Leiwei Li suggests that Iwasaki and the Aizieeeee! editors share similar political and aesthetic commitments. In a contrasting reading that emphasizes their differences, Chiang argues that Iwasaki denies the autonomy of literature in order to subordinate it to politics while the editors are ultimately committed to the autonomy of literature. 2. Iwasaki subsequently revises his opinion on Lum in his essay, “Introduc-

tion, in Counterpoint.

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Notes to Chapter 2 163 3. Here, Iwasaki’s language recalls Frantz Fanon’s declaration in The Wretched of the Earth that “each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity” (206). 4. For discussions of Mao’s influence on the Asian American movement, see works by Ho, Maeda, and Wei. From 1949 until the beginning of the Reform era in 1978, the “Talks” were the de facto cultural policy of the People’s Republic. As such, they have also been blamed for the repressive cultural atmosphere of the Mao period. 5. For discussions of Chin’s misogyny, see E. Kim (Asian American Literature), Wong (Reading), and Lowe (Immigrant Acts). For discussions of homophobia in his writings, see D. Kim (Writing) and Eng. 6. Edelman’s argument relies on a Lacanian logic whereby narrative, identity, and politics belong to the realm of the Symbolic, which is in turn constantly interrupted by the death drive even though the latter is produced internally in the course of signification. 7. Fora detailed discussion of queer themes in Chin’s writing, see D. Kim (Writing). 8. This discussion of standard time and railways is taken from Bartky (One Time; Selling). Greenwich Mean Time more or less served as the global standard until it was replaced in 1972 by Coordinated Universal Time, which is determined by a series of atomic clocks located around the world. 9. Denise Ferreira da Silva argues that the politics of recognition is premised on inclusion in the terms of transparency, a process that obliterates the racialized subject in what she calls the “scene of engulfment” (71-76, 177-78, and passim). 10. This interest is partly autobiographical: his early writings include a never-published novel, A Chinese Lady Dies, that met with resistance from publishers unconvinced of its commercial viability (Chin would not successfully publish a novel until Donald Duk in 1991). u1. Although Chin focuses on texts that specifically depict the world of Chinatown, the “Chinatown book” is more defined by a self-exoticizing attitude rather than its setting per se. 12. For an incisive critique of the heroic tradition, see Chu (Assimilating). 13. David Eng has argued for a more positive reading of this moment. He writes that Donald’s triumph “indicates a newly claimed group identification with the Chinese once absent and unavailable to him. This plural ‘we’ thus solidifies a conscious identification with his ancestors of the past. It begins to heal the injurious psychic wounds of self-hate that marked the younger, isolated Donald through a new and future sense of group belonging” (89). 14. The editors offer a conflicted account of history. On the one hand, they insist on the objectivity of history in order to assert its truth: history is archival

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164 Notes to Chapters 2 and 3 and rationally knowable. On the other hand, they internalize history as an instinct, which makes it a key component of identity. Even as they berate others for a “hysterical shutdown of the instinct for history” (xxv), they proudly admit the shortcomings of their own historiography: The scholarship we muscled into the first anatomy of Asian American writing in the 1973 introduction to Aiiieeeee! was haphazard, serendipitous, and incomplete. We were writers at play, pausing to sniff out the spoor of our heroic literary past and, like good scouts, share a whiff of the riches of a sensibility beyond the pound and kennels where visionary victims are oppressed and denied a past by the keepers of the canon and their big rhetorical erasers. (xxiii—xxiv) 15. Here, the editors seem to be echoing Johannes Fabian’s famous argument in Time and the Other about how the West has long denied the temporal coevalness of its others. CHAPTER 3

1. See Park and Chiang for readings of 7he Woman Warrior as an ethnographic text about Asia. Even though Kingston’s writings are less “realist” than other writings examined in the book, they are nevertheless concerned with questions of identity and knowledge as well as the possibility of literature as a means to convey socio-historical realities. 2. For background and analysis on these debates, see the works by Cheung and Kang. 3. Attali identifies three functions that music has historically fulfilled in the West, each associated with a different mode of political and economic organization: music “make[s] people forget the general violence’; it makes “people believe in the harmony of the world”; and it “serves to silence, by mass producing a deafening, syncretic kind of music, and censoring all other human noises” (19; emphasis in original). These three functions correspond to pre-capitalist, early capitalist, and late capitalist modes of production. Attali’s analysis is mainly concerned mainly with music’s relationship to modes of production and in this regard Noise adopts a fairly Eurocentric historical structure, with occasional nods to non-Western contexts. My use of his work in this chapter departs from this tendency by deploying his account of noise to illuminate the racial politics that subtend Kingston’s writing. 4. For a more detailed biographical account of Ts’ai Yen and translations of her poetry, see Levy. It should be noted that Ts’ai Yen is not just Chinese, but a member of the dominant Han ethnic group. In this sense, the Sinocentrism that I trace should be more accurately labeled Han-chauvinism.

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Notes to Chapter 3 165 5. David Palumbo-Liu reads the ending of 7he Woman Warrior as a confirmation of American individualism. He writes, “As [the narrator] gains a voice, [her mother’s] becomes demythified and muted. Kingston is not without sympathy for this... yet the direction that dominates this narrative is clear—to be American is to take on a specific individualist character” (405). 6. There are other episodes in 7he Woman Warrior that are more ambivalent about this trajectory, but the decision to end with Ts’ai’s triumphant story does, to my mind, indicate the overall arc of the text. 7. For a cultural history of the American captivity narrative, see Slotkin. 8. In a different reading of this episode, Mark Chiang argues that Ts’ai’s song is devoid of representative meaning and instead enables Kingston to “[imagine] the birth of the aesthetic itself as an autonomous social domain” (170). What distinguishes her from her captors, then, is her ability to practice music as “art in its purest form: it tells no story, seeks no audience, and conveys no meaning or purpose” (170); the barbarians, by contrast, do not differentiate art from their daily lives. Chiang also notes that there is no translation in the plot, but reads the money used to ransom Ts’ai back to her people as the real site of “translation” in which aesthetic, political, and economic capital become exchangeable. It is precisely this structure that threatens the text’s investment in aesthetic autonomy. 9. In an interview with Marilyn Chin, Kingston claims that the narrator is Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva of compassion (or goddess of mercy) in East Asian Buddhism (M. Chin, “A Me/us Interview” 59). Following the claims of critic Patricia P. Chu, which I discuss later in this chapter, my reading will emphasize how the narrator embodies an autobiographical impulse. 10. See Grice for an extended discussion of this parallel. While it is difficult to ascertain for certain whether Wittman is indeed a parody of Chin, I adopt this assumption throughout this chapter in order to specify the cultural politics of identity that animate 7ripmaster Monkey. u1. In this sense, the novel illustrates Sau-ling Wong’s powerful distinction between Necessity and Extravagance whereby work and labor, the basis for survival in Asian America, are aligned with the former while the arts belongs to the latter (Reading 171 and passim). 12. Here, Kingston abandons the skeptical treatment of musical instruments that we saw earlier in Zhe Woman Warrior. 13. To be more precise, a significant portion of 7ripmaster Monkey is written in free indirect style, which removes linguistic markers of narration in order to present Wittman’s thoughts more directly. In the absence of such markers, the persona of the narrator becomes rather elusive, a point to which | will return to toward the end of this chapter.

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166 Notes to Chapters 3 and 4 14. See, for example, Lefebvre’s discussion of time and rhythm in Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 2 (42). 15. This theme is developed in more detail in 7he Fifth Book of Peace (2003),

which contains a fictional portion meant to be a sequel to 7ripmaster Monkey. 16. Which is to say that the familiar argument in literary studies known as the intentional fallacy, while obviously useful for preventing the simplistic conflation of the author and the narrator/speaker of the text, does not quite help us understand the possible convergences (but not conflation) of these figures. 17. For a succinct account of the critical issues raised by Kingston’s complex relationship with the assumptions of ethnography and autobiography, see Wong (“Autobiography”). CHAPTER 4

1. Although The Theory of the Novel lacks the historical materialist framework that informs his later account of reification, Lukacs’s diagnosis anticipates the claims of History and Class Consciousness in that both conceive modernity through a narrative about the failure of cognition. For a discussion of these similarities, see Bernstein. 2. As Daniel Y. Kim observes, Lee accomplishes for Asian American writing what Ellison achieved for African American literature by “cast[{ing] light on the psychic costs of the invisibility imposed on a minority community by white Americans and of the invisibility that prevents those within a minority community from recognizing each other” (“Do I Sing” 231). 3. In keeping with scholarly practice, I use the term “comfort women” in quotes in order to emphasize its problematic connotations and foreground its uneasy role as a descriptor for these women. ‘The treatment of “comfort women” remains a point of controversy to this day as the Japanese government continues to deny the full scale of this atrocity and its responsibility toward surviving former “comfort women.” Activists in different countries continue to struggle for justice, compensation, and recognition for surviving victims. Much scholarship has been published on this topic, an account of which is beyond the scope of this chapter. For overviews of this history, see the works by Hicks, Yoshimi, and Choi. For the implications of this history for Asian American Studies, see the articles collected in a special issue of Journal of Asian American Studies edited by Kandice Chuh.

4. Brogan’s account of cultural haunting offers a comprehensive framework for understanding this ubiquitous narrative device. I depart from her account in two ways, however: first, she argues that cultural haunting demonstrates a move from possession to exorcism, a form of narrative closure premised on the rediscovery of traumatic pasts and the rearticulation of ethnic identities. At least in

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Notes to Chapter 4 167 regard to A Gesture Life, this resolution is not achieved. Second, Brogan’s insights are limited by her focus on ethnicity—and specifically the possibility of ethnic choice and self-definition—instead of race. Yet the examples she uses (which do not include A Gesture Life) cannot be read outside questions of race. For a far more critical account of haunting in contemporary American literature, see Michaels, in which he argues that tropes of haunting assume an essentialist understanding of race that reiterates the exclusionary logic of identity politics. 5. While the generic boundaries between realism and the gothic or magic realism are not necessarily absolute, these categories do indicate different assumptions about the epistemology of literature, distinctions that are foregrounded by the very fact that this scene is such a marked departure from the rest of the novel.

6. This argument applies to Sunny as well. Sunny’s role lasts throughout the novel whereas K only appears in the middle of the text even though the latter’s story arguably holds the “key” to the entire novel. Because Lee depicts Sunny as a sort of stand-in for K, their roles are formally analogous even the latter is, of course, a unique character in her own right. 7. For a discussion of how adoption functions in the novel, see Jerng. 8. As Kandice Chuh rightly observes, A Gesture Life is a post-colonial rather than neocolonial novel insofar as it offers a limited critique of U.S. hegemony in South Korea during the Cold War imagine Otherwise 107-108). In this sense, Hata might be productively read as an allegory for the complicity of the American occupation in the cover-up of Japanese war crimes in the years after World War IT. As Naoki Sakai has argued, the perpetuation of Japanese cultural nationalism under the occupation was instrumental in preventing a full account of atrocities committed by the Japanese military during the war (““You Asians’ ”). 9. For an analysis of Hata’s assimilation into American culture and society, see the works by Carroll and Y. Lee. Contrary to the latter study, I would suggest that Hata’s assimilation does not erase his Asian/Japanese identity even though it does re-situate it within the terrain of U.S. race relations. In other words, Hata demonstrates the compatibility of his ethnic identity with late twentieth-century U.S. multiculturalism.

10. In her astute reading of the ending, Anne Cheng suggests Hata acknowledges the limitations of redemption by adopting an “active passivity” that consists of “an active refusal to act any further in bad faith” (“Passing” 571; emphasis in original). u1. Sunny emerges as a possibly hopeful character who maintains a degree of agency. As Kandice Chuh observes, whereas the death of K signifies the symbolic death of Korea, Sunny is “liberated from Doc Hata, from a colonial past,” and thereby “promises and delivers—through [her son]—continuity into the future.

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168 Notes to Chapters 4 and 5 Her name baldly gestures toward daybreak, a clearly forward-looking orientation” (Imagine 108). It is this contrast that for Chuh marks the “American-ness” of the novel insofar as it locates narrative resolution in the United States rather than Asia. Nevertheless, these possibilities remain largely undeveloped and conjectural. Lee has speculated in public about writing a sequel based on Sunny’s character, although he has yet to do so (see “A Gesture Life”). 12. The thinker Silva engages with here is Marx: her reading of globality is informed by Marx’s famous observation that social phenomena stem from conditions that “can be made accessible and controlled by human beings, but which are not of their own making” (188). Ultimately, she argues, Marx falls short of his own insights because he continues to assume a transparent subject as the foundation of his thought, a shortcoming that accounts for the pervasive Eurocentrism of classical Marxism. CHAPTER §

1. Classic statements in this debate include Sau-ling Wong, “Denationalization Reconsidered” and Susan Koshy, “The Fiction of Asian American Literature. For a more detailed consideration of these issues, see Parrefias and Siu. 2. In her account of comparative literature as a discipline, Natalie Melas outlines the stakes of comparison as a methodological practice. According to Melas, scholars in the late nineteenth century adopted an evolutionary timescale to turn comparison into “a prominent measure of social progress: the more a society advances—that is, expands and specializes—the more it brings under the purview of comparison” (21). This “intrinsically expansionist” approach was imperialist insofar as comparitism “can only be available in its most evolved scientific or reflective form to a privileged denizen of empire” (23). In the postcolonial world, these assumptions can no longer be taken for granted and, as a result, incommensurability has become the basic condition of comparison. Drawing on Edouard Glissant’s notion of relation, Melas suggests that incommensurability has become the basic condition of comparison as “the overarching commensuration of imperialism’s cultural comparison is overturned . . . as cultures come into constant contact without a unifying standard, thus engaging in ubiquitous processes of comparison that are no longer bound to commensuration” (37). Post-colonial comparison is thus caught between the promise of recognizing the heterogeneity suppressed by imperialism on the one hand and the homogenizing forces of global capital on the other. I would like to locate comparison in Asian American Studies in a similar critical terrain; as I argue below, this positionality does not exempt the field from participating in dominant power relations despite its anti-imperialist commitments.

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Notes to Chapter 5 169 3. This chapter thus takes a somewhat different approach than the previous chapter by emphasizing Asian America’s location in the West as opposed to its exclusion from the West. Since I am writing this while physically located outside the borders of the United States, I recognize the fact that Asian American literary studies has become a transnational project that is reconfigured differently in sites around the world. For an overview of these possibilities, see the 2008 theme issue of Amerasia Journal titled “Word Travels” (Russell Leong, ed.). For a cogent discussion of how Asian American literary studies functions outside the United States, see Wong (“When Asian American Literature”) and C. Wang. 4. I have addressed the politics of comparison in regard to Asian Canadian Studies elsewhere (see Christopher Lee, “Lateness”). Related arguments can be found in the works by Beauregard, Ty and Goellnicht, and Day. For a related discussion in regard to Asian Australian Studies, see J. Lo et al. 5. For Ismail, the very notion of “Sri Lanka” is problematic because it originates in Sinhala nationalism. Insofar as Anil’s Ghost does not engage this history in depth, Sri Lanka functions as a locality largely defined by its opposition to a colonial West. See Kanaganayakam for a comparative overview of Anil’s Ghost’s critical reception in Sri Lanka and the West. 6. Ondaatje’s emphasis on aporias of knowledge and judgment produces what Yumna Siddiqi describes as “a fragmentary, nonlinear narrative that shifts between the past and the present, and moves to different places, sketching episodes in the characters’ lives” (199).

7. For analyses of the novel’s treatment of human rights, see Derrickson and Ratti. 8. As I will detail below, this claim is a repudiation of what the novel codes as an imperialist desire on the part of the West for epistemological certainty as well as an indication of how the violence that has gripped Sri Lanka makes the decisive recovery of the past nearly impossible. 9. We can further extend this parallel to include Sarath’s work as an archaeologist, although his work is arguably not marked by the same kind of urgency. As I noted above, the thematic emphasis on evidence and fragmentation is paralleled by the episodic form of the narrative. 1o. See Chu (“A Flame” 94 and passim). u1. To be sure, the novel makes numerous gestures toward deconstructing identitarian categories. For example, Anil’s gender identity is depicted as somewhat ambiguous and critics have noted how her changing identifications emphasize the constructed nature of identities. While these aspects of the text are indeed important, the argument of the chapter is that Ani/’s Ghost ultimately embraces an identitarian logic to construct its telos of ethical formation.

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170 Notes to Chapter 5 and Conclusion 12. Of course, one could argue that Ondaatje’s suspicion toward reason is itself a disempowering and even paralyzing gesture. The role of reason and modern thought more broadly in decolonization projects has been taken up widely in post-colonial and ethnic studies. My purpose here is not to reiterate these well-known debates, but rather to examine in more detail the use of the aesthetic as a means to propose a counter-epistemology. 13. I borrow the term “border-crossing” from Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s presidential address to the American Studies Association in which she calls on her audience to “interrogate the privileged position that U.S.-based scholars and publications enjoy in the field of American studies,” a point that can be easily extended to Asian American Studies (36). 14. While Srikanth notes Ondaatje’s Canadian background, this context receives relatively little attention. In making this observation, my point is not to assert the priority of reading Ondaatje as a Canadian writer—as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the national difference between the United States and Canada is not a central theme in Azil’s Ghost—but to foreground how Srikanth treats the novel as an allegory of global power relations. 15. Adorno is writing specifically about the music of Arnold Schoenberg, which functions as something of an ideal prototype for critical avant-garde art. CONCLUSION

Epigraph permission granted by John Edwin Cowen, literary trustee for the José Garcia Villa Estate. 1. In light of Villa’s refusal to participate in anti-colonial movements, critics such as E. San Juan Jr. have argued that his writings are ideologically complicit with U.S. imperialism (see San Juan’s essay “Homage” in 7he Anchored Angel). For a reading of Villa’s politics as a form of resistance to his Orientalization in the United States, see Yu (“ “The Hand of a Chinese Master’”). See Espiritu and the essays collected in Tabios for historical and biographical background on Villa. 2. From the late 1920s until World War I, Villa published a selection of “Best Filipino Short Stories” every year. Even though he effectively appointed himself the arbiter of Filipino letters, his selections were enormously influential among the literary community in the Philippines. His sometimes acerbic judgments were accompanied by critical essays that espoused his views about fiction. After the publication of Footnote to Youth, he stopped writing fiction and turned to poetry instead. As Yu argues, this turn can be read as an attempt to transcend [the limits of his status as a Filipino] by shedding explicitly “Filipino” content from his work. By emphasizing

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Notes to Conclusion [71 formal poetic innovation, Villa sought to gain access to the US modernist canon, a task that must have seemed incompatible with his status as a respected Filipino writer or as a prose chronicler of Filipino life. (“The Hand of a Chinese Master’ ” 43) 3. See Cruz for a discussion of how Villa articulates a queer modernism in the Asia Pacific context. For another reading of Footnote that interrogates its spatial logic, see Yu (“Traveling Genres”). 4. In his later poetry (as demonstrated in the epigraph to this conclusion), Villa inserted commas between each word in order to regulate “the poems’ verbal density and time movement: enabling each word to attain a fuller tonal and sonal value, and the line movement to become more measured” (Tabios 35). 5. See Yu (“ “The Hand of a Chinese Master’”) for a detailed account of Villa's reception. 6. It is important to note that Adorno uses the word “identity” here to refer to the unity of concept and object, and not in the existential or subjective sense used in the rest of this book. 7. In this sense, as we have seen elsewhere in this book, Adorno remains committed to the values of the Enlightenment, including the power of knowledge as a means for emancipation, despite his severe critique of how this project has resulted in the violence of modernity. 8. For Lyotard’s original formulation of post-modernism, see Lyotard 79. 9. I discuss the meaning of abandonment for Asian American Studies in more depth in Christopher Lee (“Asian American Literature”). 10. Fora related discussion of “hating tradition properly,” see George.

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