Visuality and Identity
ASIA PACIFIC MODERN Takashi Fujitani, Series Editor Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, by Shu-mei Shih
Visuality and Identity Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific SHU-MEI SHIH
University of California Press Berkeley Los Angeles London
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B O O K
University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shi, Shumei, 1961– Visuality and identity : Sinophone articulations across the Pacific / by Shu-mei Shih. p. cm. — (Asia pacific modern) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-22451-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520-24944-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Chinese—Ethnic identity. 2. National characteristics, Chinese. I. Title. DS 730. S 5325 2007 305.895'1—dc22 2006037071 Manufactured in Canada 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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This book is printed on 60# Enviro Smooth White, 100% recycled and totally chlorine free. Enviro Smooth White meets the minimum requirements of ansi/astm d5634–01 (Permanence of Paper).
For Adam, Tim, and Ray
CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi About Romanization xiii Introduction /
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Visuality in Global Capitalism 8 Identity in Global Capitalism 16 Sinophone Articulations 23 1. Globalization and Minoritization /
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The Limits of a Coup d’État in Theory Flexibility and Nodal Points 47 Flexibility and Translatability 59 2. A Feminist Transnationality /
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Identity Fragment 1: Feminist Antagonism against Chinese Patriarchy 67 Identity Fragment 2: Liberal Antagonism against the Maoist State 71
Identity fragment 3: Antagonism of a Minority Subject 77 Identity Fragment 4: Antagonism against the Western Gaze 79 3. The Geopolitics of Desire /
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Beleaguered Communities 90 Sexualizing the “Mainland Sister” 94 Feminizing the “Mainland Cousin” 103 Gender and Public Sphere 114 4. The Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity /
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A Short History of the “Mainland” 124 “Eternal China” in the 1990s 129 The “Intimate Enemy” in the Twenty-First Century Struggles of the Sinophone 137 5. After National Allegory /
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The Allegorical Time and the City-cum-Nation The Allegorical and the Mundane 150 Refashioning Hongkongness 157 6. Cosmopolitanism among Empires /
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The Age of Empires and, Especially, Their Sizes Cosmopolitanism, Multiplicity, Danger 170 Untranslatable Ethics 175 Can Cosmopolitanism Be Ethical? 180
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Conclusion.: The Time and Place of the Sinophone / 183 Notes 193 Selected Bibliography Index 231
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ILLUSTRATIONS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 1 1. 12.
Michelle Yeoh (from Malaysia) 3 Chang Chen (from Taiwan) 3 Zhang Ziyi (from China) 3 Chow Yun-fat (from Hong Kong) 3 Taiwan poster for Pushing Hands 50 American poster of Eat Drink Man Woman Hung Liu, Olympia 68 Hung Liu, Father’s Day 73 Hung Liu, Grandma 74 Hung Liu, Avant-Garde 75 Hung Liu, Resident Alien 78 Original photograph depicting execution in old Shanghai, September 1904 80 13. Hung Liu, Souvenir 81 14. A dalumei image in Taiwan media 100 15. Interview of Qian Li from part 4 of Her Fatal Ways 112
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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.
Collage of images from Searching for the Strange on the Mainland 131 The set for Rivers and Mountains, Ten Thousand Li of Love 134 Susan atop a building in Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong 145 Moon in the shooting scene atop Victoria Peak in Made in Hong Kong 149 The bank robbery in The Longest Summer 152 Cameras positioned at the children’s eye level in small back alleyways of working-class Hong Kong in Little Cheung 156 Hou Chun-ming’s woodcut print of a Lo Ting from the 1997 exhibition 160 René Magritte’s The Collective Invention 161 Life-size model of a Lo Ting 162 An example of the Fake Art of Comics 163 Wu Mali, Sweeties of the Century 182
COLOR PLATES ( following page 114) 1. Hung Liu, Olympia II 2. Hung Liu, Swan Song 3. Publicity photo of Her Fatal Ways depicting ideologically coded characters 4. Detail of cover of The Practice of Chineseness by Yuk-yuen Lan 5. Display in Shanghai Tang store 6. Wu Mali, Epitaph 7. Wu Mali, Stories of Women from Hsin-chuang 8. Detail of words woven into cloth from Stories of Women from Hsin-chuang 9. Wu Mali, Formosa Club (1998), interior space; wooden board, pink sponge, neon light 10. Wu Mali, The Library 11. Detail from The Library 12. Wu Mali, Sweeties of the Century
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My collaborator and colleague Françoise Lionnet and her important work in Francophone studies inspired me to consider “Sinophone studies” as a field of study. Our collaboration on transnational and comparative studies of minority cultures over the past eight years has resulted in more than just a coedited volume, Minor Transnationalism (2005), and other collaborative projects; it has helped shape this book. I am most grateful to her for her intellectual inspiration and deep friendship. I have been fortunate to have many other mentors, colleagues, friends, and students joining me on my intellectual journey that this book has occasioned over so many years. Rey Chow, Arif Dirlik, Gail Hershatter, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Rob Wilson, and Mayfair Yang have graciously read and commented on either parts or the complete version of the manuscript at various stages. Tani Barlow, Stephen Chan, Ying-ying Chien, Kuei-fen Chiu, Allen Chun, Chris Connery, Prasenjit Duara, Tak Fujitani, Ted Huters, Ming-yan Lai, Ping-hui Liao, Liang-ya Liou, Lydia H. Liu, ]
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David Palumbo-Liu, Tetsushi Marukawa, Yue Meng, Stephanie McDonald, Toshio Nakano, Aihwa Ong, Susan Perry, Andrea Riemenschnitter, Lisa Rofel, Haun Saussy, Chaohua Wang, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Wen-hsin Yeh, and Lisa Yoneyama engaged with aspects of the manuscript in diªerent ways. Erica Lee, Curtis Lin, Mirana May Szeto, Ghazal Tajmiri, and Regina Wei were the best research assistants I could have had. The American Council of Learned Societies, American Philosophical Society, and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange provided me with extramural research grants, while I received on-campus grants from the Academic Senate, the International Institute, Asian American Studies, and the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA. A five-year grant from the University of California O‹ce of the President for running the Multicampus Research Group on Transnational and Transcolonial Studies greatly expanded my intellectual horizon, and the local members of the group—Ali Behdad, Michael Bourdaghs, Michelle Clayton, Gil Hockberg, Efrain Kristal, Rachel Lee, Seiji Lippit, Elizabeth Marchant, Kathleen McHugh, Harriette Mullen, Thu-huong Nguyen-Vo, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Jenny Sharpe, Dominic Thomas, and Henry Yu— provided me with a wonderful intellectual community in which to work. My heartfelt thanks also go to my colleagues and friends in the three departments in which I teach—Asian Languages and Cultures, Comparative Literature, Asian American Studies—you know who you are. My editors at the press, Reed Malcolm and Mary Severance, and my copy editor, Mary Ray Worley, are hereby gratefully acknowledged for their utter professionalism and support. Finally, without the cheer and excitement that Tim and Ray bring to me or the endless support from Adam, I doubt I could have written (or will ever write) any books. I dedicate this book to these three most important men in my life. Chapter 1 is a revised version of “Globalization and Minoritization: Ang Lee and the Politics of Flexibility,” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 40 (Spring 2000): 86–101; chapter 3 is updated from “Gender and a New Geopolitics of Desire: The Seduction of Mainland Women in Taiwan and Hong Kong Media,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 23, no. 2 ( Winter 1998): 287–320.; a portion of chapter 4 first appeared as “The Trope of ‘Mainland China’ in Taiwan’s Media,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 3, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 149– 83. I thank the publishers for permission to reprint the articles.
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Acknowledgments
ABOUT ROMANIZATION This book tries to follow the diªerent romanization practices in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China whenever possible, but generally follows the pinyin system per scholarly convention in the United States.
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Introduction The ticket cost was NT$250, and I was one of fewer than a dozen people watching the film. The theater was relatively small, with about eight rows of seats, each with fifteen or so seats, and I could easily feel all the empty seats. When the lights dimmed, the two chukou (exit) signs glared conspicuously in green from above the doors flanking the screen. The soundtrack crackled as the volume was turned up to an almost unbearable level, which is characteristic of the theaters in this intimate outpost of Taipei City, known for its hurried replications of Taipei cosmopolitanism. Outside the theater were streets crowded with shops and cars, peddling a middle-brow cosmopolitan stew of survival and pleasure: imported goods, local food, sidewalk stalls, inexpensive thrills and services. If theaters in Taipei set the volume high to enhance the thrilling eªect of the films, theaters in Chungho set it higher. Chung-ho theaters do not have the righteousness of Taipei theaters and cover up this lack by anxiously blaring at the theatergoers in exaggerated imi]
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tation of the capital city proper, while competing with the hustle and bustle of the streets outside. The poor sound quality unexpectedly crystallized to the ear the many diªerent accents of the Mandarin spoken by the actors and actresses, breaking down the fourth wall of illusion even before the camera obscura of illusion had a chance to establish itself. It was a real challenge to be convinced by a love story in so many accents, accents that inevitably foreground the diªerences and tensions among those geopolitical spaces the accents come from—in this case, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and Malaysia. It was also a challenge to be persuaded by the highly aestheticized and gravity-defying kung fu sequences that were already unrealistic in themselves but were then accompanied by the anachronistic tonalities and vocabularies in the lines delivered by the actors and actresses. The so-called Chinese-language cinema in general, and the martial arts genre in particular, has largely been a story of standard Mandarin spoken with “perfect” pronunciation and enunciation.1 Actors who speak with accents are usually dubbed over so that the illusion of a unified and coherent “Chinese” community is invented and sustained. Earlier Taiwanese-language cinema was very much a ghetto unto itself, and Cantonese-language cinema from Hong Kong was routinely dubbed in Mandarin when exported to other Chinese-speaking communities. It was therefore jarring to hear so many accents in this particular movie, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, to the extent that one was led to wonder whether the director, Ang Lee, had made a mistake or whether there was not enough money in the budget to dub the voices. More crucially, the accents break down the idea that the characters live in a coherent universe where relationships are inevitable, interfering with a compelling development of the diegetic narrative within the film, per the conventions of the genre. When the lead actor, Chow Yun-fat, mumbles his lofty ideals of love and loyalty in a heavy Hong Kong–style, Cantonese-saturated Mandarin, the classical lyricism of his words stands in stark contrast to what Mandarin speakers would see as an awkward delivery, not to mention that the diction of the presumed classical lyricism belongs to contemporary Taiwan-style melodrama and romance fiction. The dissonance among the diªerent accents seemed to parallel, in a strangely paradoxical way, the cacophony of the streets. So many voices, so many diªerent kinds of noise; but amid the din, life lives and life continues, despite inauthenticity and incoherence. A copy of the metropolis it will never become, Chung-ho ]
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Introduction
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
1
Michelle Yeoh (from Malaysia).
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Chang Chen (from Taiwan).
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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Zhang Ziyi (from China).
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Chow Yun-fat (from Hong Kong).
does not seem to care one way or the other. Besides, the city’s majority populace speaks Taiwanese, or more precisely Minnan, rather than Mandarin, and its political allegiance leans clearly toward Taiwan independence, again unlike the Mandarin-heavy Taipei. Inauthenticity and incoherence aptly describe the film and the setting and expose the illusion that such martial arts films must necessarily reference an eternal China and an essential Chineseness. The martial arts genre in film is closely related to the literary genre of martial arts fiction, which is often pseudohistorical but usually classical in terms of diction and syntax, and both forms, ironically, have developed and were perfected in places outside China. The classics of the film genre were produced in Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s, when China was an isolated communist state, even though the origin of the genre dates back to the early twentieth century in China. In the context of the 1960s and 1970s, Taiwan and Hong Kong’s relationship to the so-called classical Chinese culture Introduction
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had paradoxically been less ambivalent than it became in the ensuing decades. “Classical Chinese culture” was one of the legitimizing mechanisms for the Guomindang government’s rule of Taiwan—the logic being that the Republic of China on Taiwan, not communist China, was the preserver of the authentic Chinese culture, and by that, the Chinese mainlanders in Taiwan were culturally superior to the local Taiwanese, the Hakkas, and the aboriginals. As for Hong Kong, British colonialism engendered nostalgia for China among Hong Kongers. With China safely tucked away behind the “iron curtain,” Hong Kong and Taiwan were free to claim their versions of authentic Chineseness through nostalgic reconstructions of classical Chinese culture in popular media. Even though a degree of ambivalence existed and contradictory implications of nostalgia, reinvention, and resistance to the continental center of China proper could be detected (especially the anticommunist variety), the politically motivated valorization of the nostalgic mode helped the martial arts genre to serve as a privileged form for the fantasy representation of classical Chinese culture. Against this genealogy of fantastic projections of authenticity, then, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon enters the scene with such scandalous disrespect that theatergoers in various communities that speak Sinitic languages were aghast with disbelief when the film first opened. There has been no other martial arts film brandishing so many accents and so daringly risking the displeasure of audiences whose cinematic expectations of the genre have not changed with the times. As can be expected, the film had poor box o‹ce showings across these communities, until it won the award for best foreign film at the Oscars and opened for a second time. The Hollywood validation of the film indicates a transpacific sphere of cultural politics within which the filmic negotiations and transactions among China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are played out in political economical terms.2 For now, let me dwell on the important implications of the linguistic dissonance. The linguistic dissonance of the film registers the heterogeneity of Sinitic languages as well as their speakers living in diªerent locales. What it engenders and validates, ultimately, is the heteroglossia of what I call the Sinophone: a network of places of cultural production outside China and on the margins of China and Chineseness, where a historical process of heterogenizing and localizing of continental Chinese culture has been taking place for several centuries. What the film makes audible, hence also visible, is confirmation of the continuous existence of the Sinophone communities as significant sites of cultural production in a complex set of relations with such constructs as “China,” “Chinese,” and “Chineseness.” ]
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Introduction
To be more precise, the Chinese language spoken in the film is the Mandarin, or putonghua, also known as Hanyu, the language of the Han people, the majority ethnicity in China, where even by o‹cial count there are fifty-five other ethnicities (or what the Chinese government calls “nationalities”) other than the Han, but Hanyu is enforced as the standard language. We hear diªerently accented Hanyu on the screen through the voices of the four lead actors and actresses. Multiple accents for one standard language reveal a more powerful message in that they indicate living languages other than the standard one, whose hegemonic projection of uniformity is subverted through a straightforward representation that refuses to cover up dissonance with uniformity. If the film represents a certain temporally ambiguous “China” as the space of action and narrative, it is, like Chung-ho City, a copy, rendered with a fracturing of standardness and authenticity. Chineseness is here accented variously across geopolitical borders, and the film jolts the audience into a defamiliarized, alienated reception as jarring as the loud and uncomfortable sound blaring from the theater speakers in Chung-ho. The Sinophone may be a cruder or finer copy, and most importantly, di‹cult to consume, since successful consumption implies flawless suturing from the perspective of either monolingual putonghua (Beijing standard), monological Chineseness, or a monolithic China and Chinese culture. The Sinophone frustrates easy suturing, in this case, while foregrounding the value of di‹culty, diªerence, and heterogeneity. The important point here is that the copy is never the original, but a form of translation. It may desire to be the original, or to compete with the original, but this desire always already predetermines its distance from the original as a separate, translated entity. Translation is not an act of one-to-one equivalence, but an event that happens among multiple agents, among multiple local and hegemonic cultures, registering an uncertainty and a complexity that require historically specific decodings. At the conjuncture of the end of British colonialism in Hong Kong, the emergence and codification of independence consciousness in Taiwan, the rise of China as an economic and political behemoth, the ever-increasing intensity of U.S.-directed transpacific cultural tra‹c, and the gradually enhanced visibility of immigrant artists and filmmakers in the United States who reformulate their Chineseness, the spheres of cultural transaction and negotiation shift fluidly and the accents of Sinophone articulations have become more audible as well as visible. Introduction
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If Chung-ho is a copy of a metropolis, the film presents a corrupted copy of an empire that breaks down the illusion of wholeness and coherence. Representation as copy—the old theory of mimesis—here becomes the literal description of Sinophone cultural production, hence perhaps more intensely metarepresentational, more able to confront the flows of inauthenticity in the new borderless world, which might explain why the film was so popular in the United States. The central tension therefore emerges: while the Sinophone traces linguistic boundaries, as I will show in greater detail later in this introduction, Sinophone film and art as visual work open themselves to the global while simultaneously taking a varied stance toward what is known as “Chinese culture.” This makes it imperative that Sinophone visual practice be situated both locally and globally. This tension between the linguistic and the visual is dramatized by the way Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was received in the United States. For those American audiences without any linguistic ability in Mandarin, their comprehension of the film was limited exclusively to the glossy Hollywood filmic style and English subtitles, both of which project, more seamlessly, the illusion of a coherent linguistic and cultural universe. The diªerentiation between what is Sinophone as the destandardization of Chineseness and what is Chinese as the exotic and beautiful foreign culture is largely lost at this level of perception and reception. The visual without specificity of linguistic determination, then, necessarily opens itself up to the possibility of translinguistic and transcommunity consumption. It is no wonder that the visual has increasingly become the forum and the tool to articulate identity struggles, a desired medium with an expansive reach and a wide appeal. Ang Lee’s Sinophone to Chineseness, then, is what his Chineseness is to his Americanness: in diªerent contexts, his identitarian struggle is divergent. In this film, Sinophonic dissonance can be positioned against uniform Chineseness; but in his struggle against uniform Americanness, his alternative appears constricted by stereotypical Chineseness, rather than challenging it, as shown in his other films such as The Wedding Banquet. Herein lies the transnational political economy of representation that often reduces complexity and multiplicity that appear only through multilayered diªerentiation by projecting a particular logic of power, subjecting a national subject (Taiwanese) to minoritization (becoming Taiwanese American). In the act of representation and translation (from one medium to another, from the center to the margin, from China to the Sinophone, and the other way around), multiple contexts therefore come into play, which may easily be erased ]
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Introduction
by the global. The global asserts its preeminence as the largest and the most important context; thereby it can easily erase the geopolitical specificities of the Sinophone and its intra-area dynamics. To assert heterogeneity and multiplicity, as the reading of Crouching Tiger above requires, however, cannot be the end point of an analysis or an argument (as is the case for some contemporary theories). Heterogeneity as an abstract concept can itself be easily universalized to avoid the hard work of having to sort it through and become instead contained by a benign logic of global multiculturalism. To activate heterogeneity and multiplicity therefore means, above all, being historical and situated, because not all multiplicities are multiple in the same way, and not all heterogeneities are heterogeneous in the same way. The question is one of both content and structure, which are sensitive to multiangulated overdeterminations by such categories as history, politics, culture, and economy, both locally and globally. To use the Freudian notion of overdetermination in this context is to suggest that just as the libido and the unconscious are a result of plural causes, cultural formations in Sinophone places are attributable to a multiplicity of factors, which “may be organized in diªerent meaningful sequences, each having its own coherence at a particular level of interpretation.”3 As Arif Dirlik puts it, “Overdetermination is in fact nothing more than the sensible recognition that a variety of causes—a variety, not infinity—enters into the making of all historical events, and that each ingredient in historical experience can be counted on to have a variety—not infinity— of functions.”4 Raymond Williams has also defined overdetermination simply as “determination by multiple factors,” as opposed to the problematic economism of singular determination. As such, overdetermination can help better analyze “historically lived situations and the authentic complexities of practice.”5 Recognizing both continuous and discontinuous multiplicity, Simone de Beauvoir furthermore oªered the following in a diªerent context: “Without raising the question of historical comprehension and causality it is enough to recognize the presence of intelligible sequences within temporal forms so that forecasts and consequently action may be possible.”6 Beauvoir connects the possibility of historical understanding with subjectivity, which makes action possible. The coinage and recognition of the category called the Sinophone is itself then a form of practice and action, registering “intelligible sequences,” in this case, within both temporal and spatial forms. The pull between diªerent contexts in trying to analyze and comprehend a Introduction
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visual work that is linguistically determined to be Sinophone is also where the challenge of the Sinophone lies in an increasingly globalizing world. The seduction of visual practice as an identity practice, as Ang Lee’s film has shown, comes with its own pitfalls. It is because, more than any time before in human history, our contemporary moment marks the culmination, and perhaps final victory, of the continuous ascendance of the visual as the primary means of identification. VISUALITY IN GLOBAL CAPITALISM To be historical in the study of visual culture means history on diªerent scales, global, local, regional, interregional, and all other possible intermediaries in between and betwixt. But no matter how large or small the scale, particular manifestations of global capitalism at the contemporary historical conjuncture constitute the temporal matrix in which visual culture is situated. The specific temporal marking of this phase of global capitalism is in broad step with new developments in the formation of culture in its culminating turn to visuality. Stuart Hall has remarked how global mass culture is dominated by the image which can cross and recross linguistic frontiers eªortlessly and rapidly.7 For Fredric Jameson, the “cultural turn” is the turn to images, where the image itself has become the commodity, and where the video is the contemporary art form par excellence.8 W. J. T. Mitchell has coined a diªerent term, the “pictorial turn,” to describe the rule of mass media in the contemporary world, emphasizing that the turn is “not a return to naïve mimesis, copy of correspondence theories of representation, or a renewed metaphysics of pictorial ‘presence,’ but rather a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality.”9 In regards to non-Western cultural products, the turn to visuality has augured an unprecedented degree of translatability and transmissivity, as translinguistic visual works and dubbed or subtitled films seem to cross national markets with greater facility than ever. The rise and popularity of Asian cinema in the global scene and the success of Asian-inspired cinema in Hollywood are testimony to the notion that visual work seems to have a lower linguistic threshold and hence is more easily decipherable and consumable across geocultural spaces. Some have even claimed that film has become the lingua franca of our time.10 But the recognition of the visual turn has been at best a begrudging one. The general enthusiasm for new technologies of visual representation such as photog]
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Introduction
raphy and film since the early twentieth century provoked great anxiety on the part of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, whose critique of the sovereign subject was correlated to a critique of what he called the “pictorialization of the world.” Pictorialization of the world involves distancing of the world but at the same time a manipulation, control, and conquest of the world through representation.11 Jacques Derrida’s critique of the ontology of presence can also be seen as an expression of anxiety toward the visual. Even though Jacques Lacan frequently utilized visual metaphors and discussed the importance of vision in the mirror stage for constituting the self, he also gave it a largely negative interpretation (as opposed to Freud), emphasizing its blind spots rather than sight and clarity. Arguing that the specular identity constituted during the mirror stage is presocial, illusory, narcissistic, pre-symbolic, and has aggressive potential, Lacan stressed the notion of méconnaissance (misrecognition, misprision) to foreground the limits of vision.12 From Heidegger to Lacan to Derrida, the linguistic turn in European philosophy is solidified, and this linguistic turn was linked to a denigration of vision, befitting their opposition to Enlightenment humanism, and a clear valorization of writing as the best medium for knowledge and representation. In the passage quoted earlier, Mitchell was clearly trying to construct a picture theory after poststructuralist linguistic turn (hence his insistence that “presence” cannot be recuperated), and his theory is that which works with, rather than against, poststructuralism. Many contemporary Western thinkers share the suspicion of the visual and take diªerent notions from poststructuralism to elaborate a contemporary visual theory. If the modern society was the society of spectacle for Guy Debord and a society of surveillance for Michel Foucault, the postmodern has, according to Jonathan Crary, merged surveillance with spectacle to the point that they can no longer be distinguished from each other.13 What comes with the pictorial turn is not only a more eªectively sutured and disciplined society, but also the fear that visual images may eventually destroy their creators and manipulators.14 The profound distrust of the centrality of vision—coined as occularcentrism—by earlier thinkers continues to this day in diªerent permutations.15 In postmodernity, the society of spectacle has given way not only to surveillance but, more pertinently, to a society of simulacra ( Jean-François Lyotard); rational perspectivalism has given way to abstract expressionism; and mechanical reproduction ( Walter Benjamin) to electronic reproduction to the extent that the body disappears, and even labor has become electronic and digitized (Paul Virilio).16 Introduction
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These anxieties culminate in Virilio’s alarming notion of the “vision machine,” which, with its computerized digital power, automatizes perception and industrializes vision, leading not only to the complete displacement of the human eye but also to a scenario akin to the one in George Orwell’s 1984 where the seeing screen functions as an all-pervasive surveillance apparatus.17 Images can be embodied and disembodied; they project not a reality but operate within simulacra; they dissolve recognizable perspectives and, by implication, subjectivities; they reproduce infinitely, rapidly, and travel beyond boundaries; and in the end, they may destroy even us. Confronted with the almighty image that oppresses us in so many ways, Euro-American intellectuals and scholars have more or less articulated a culture of lament. Barbara Maria Staªord has criticized this lament as a diªerent kind of logocentrism, where the cultural bias of the superiority of writing has devalued visual forms of communication.18 For Martin Jay to write a six-hundred-page book, Downcast Eyes, critiquing the critique of occularcentrism is surely also a symptom of contemporary reevaluation of visuality. Whereas Euro-American intellectuals have largely dwelled on the function of the image within global capitalist ideology—which is usually its subtext—as its latest spokesperson or deputy, a diªerent visual literacy and understanding of the visual is palpable in various “minor” sites across the world, if “minor” is simply defined to suggest resistant practices and noncanonical perspectives. Deborah Poole has noted, for instance, the coexistence of two diªerent regimes of visuality: visuality as the ideological and discursive instrument of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism and visuality as an open semiotic field capable of coding, recoding, and decoding for resistant purposes.19 A frequently referenced theory in the second vein is Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum: that accidental, poignant detail or mark that “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow,” and “pierces,” “pricks,” and “bruises” the viewer.20 Feminist art historian Griselda Pollock similarly argued that visual images are situated at the point “where the will to know and the resultant relations of power are furrowed by the more unpredictable . . . plays of fascination, curiosity, dread, desire, and horror.”21 Visual images, in specific practices, can exceed the containment of ideology as well as global capitalism. Alternatively, we can draw on David Harvey from a diªerent context to suggest that hope can be located in the way visual culture can appropriate forces of capital rather than the other way around.22 Finally, a generalist theory of the virtue of images and visuality by Barbara Staªord would claim, via cognitive sci]
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Introduction
ence, that visuality is the metaphor par excellence for intelligence, and visual perception is the constitutive form of knowledge in the present.”23 These familiar dichotomies about vision and visuality cut across class, gender, and race positions in predictable ways. The dominant philosophical and intellectual discourses disparage the hegemony of visuality, and the resistant perspectives see potential in visuality as a medium for representing counterdiscourses as well as projecting desires and fantasies of the oppressed.24 Similar dichotomous views have been expressed about most all representational media, as well as diªerent practices of everyday life. For instance, literature can embody hegemonic views or literature can be counterhegemonic; consumption is sutured by capitalism and reinforces the relations of production or consumption is an exercise of agency, however small, and so forth. What is clear from these predictable dichotomies is that they cannot rest on any essentialism of a certain medium (writing or visuality) or a certain practice (consumption or production) as inherently hegemonic or resistant, but the specific and contextual usage of the medium and practice of everyday life determine where in the spectrum of hegemony and resistance it lies. As the particular practice and usage of a medium relies heavily on local and other contexts for its signifying function, the geopolitical, spatial, as well as historical contexts of a given articulation become necessary knowledge to understand, not the infinite but the necessary, elements to diªerent overdeterminations in visual representation. The problem is not that visuality is inherently bad or good, but that there are diªerent functions and practices of visuality with diªerent political, ideological, and cultural meanings, which also shift in diªerent contexts. What detractors of theories of globalization have often neglected is precisely the diªerent levels or scales of contexts other than the romanticized local or the demonized global, as if globalization still predominantly happens at the level of the nation-state as its boundary marker so that it has something recognizable to destroy. What makes contemporary capitalism truly global, however, is not that nation-states are becoming decentered (after all, nation-states are a relatively new invention), but that capitalism itself has become decentered. Contemporary capitalism is largely abstracted from Eurocentrism and the nation, and has spread to all corners of the world, where the units that matter are no longer just nations but also those “regions below the nation,” as well as whatever units of place that are “on the pathways of capital.”25 Diaspora has thus predictably become prevalent, while intranational, nonnational, and other transnational units have become visIntroduction
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ible as important spaces for the movement of capital. It is not that this fragmentation of contexts did not exist prior to the contemporary phase of capitalism, but that the degree and intensity of the scattering of capitalism is unprecedented in global capitalism. With this scattering, we are in need of diªerent scales of analyses and attentiveness, far from the kind of universalist, cognitive mapping on the one hand and the particularistic rhetoric of area studies on the other. It is a truism that between the global and the local, the universal and the particular, there are many more layers, scales, and contexts below, between, within, and outside of geographical and cultural units than we have allowed ourselves to recognize. In the longue durée of history, certain background factors may structure events without necessarily causing them;26 but these factors constitute, along with those that can be traced as more direct causes for specific events, the overdeterminations of history. To situate visuality within this unprecedented scattering of capitalism is, first of all, to emphasize that images and other visual products travel and scatter with ever greater intensity and speed, and travel to a large extent alongside and with capital. From the Taiwan-Hong Kong-China region, they travel back and forth across the Taiwan Strait following specific routes of capital’s travel, and they travel around the world, crossing oceans, especially the Pacific, to reach the immigrant communities in the United States and elsewhere. The speed and intensity of image travel exemplify the compression of space and time characterizing contemporary global capitalism in the most concentrated and representative fashion. Satellite television and the Internet transmit local broadcasting to Sinophone communities in real time, and, whether one is a frequent flyer or not, it is possible to live virtually in multiple social contexts at the same time. In the mean time, capital, transported either as hard currency or through electronic and virtual means, forms, re-forms, and de-forms communities from the aboriginal villages in Taiwan, to “flexible citizens” carrying multiple passports in the Bay Area, to those living in “monster houses” in Vancouver.27 A Taiwan artist may at the same time be a Taiwanese American (Ang Lee); a Hong Kong filmmaker may be simultaneously British, Chinese, and Hong Konger (if not Vietnamese at some point, such as Tsui Hark); an immigrant Chinese artist (Hung Liu) claims to be both Chinese and Chinese American, appropriating both sets of histories and cultures freely and with ease. Taiwanese business expatriates in southern China waver between their business interests (required to be on good terms with the Chinese govern]
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ment and strategically to comply with the “One China” ideology) and their Taiwanese nationalism (against the Chinese government) and are forced to be flexible in order to accommodate both. They live and work in China and watch satellite television programs beamed from Taiwan to quench their longings for home, and their demands for convenient travel between Taiwan and China propelled both sides to temporally open up the skies for direct flights during Chinese New Year’s holiday season. Second, as I have suggested above, visuality situated in global capitalism also means that contexts are multiple and that crucial contexts often reside in unexpected places, because images and other visual products go places and signify diªerent things in diªerent places, and thus literally exercise what I would call “signification in action” as well as “signification in transit.” In Mitchell’s words, “images have legs.” They go somewhere, they are living things in the social, and they often go on to unforeseen places leading to unforeseen associations and connections. As they travel with or without their legs, they may acquire and lose some aspects, and their meanings inevitably “refunction” in new contexts to engender place-specific associations.28 They produce, in other words, not just diªerence, but also similarity; not just incommensurability, but also new combinations and connections. If vision is an analogical form of cognition, then traveling images would trigger imaginative leaps to engender new a‹nities as well as new discords between two terms previously not related to each other, thus making possible multiple fields of meaning.29 Eªectively, terms of relationship exceed binarisms and dichotomies. Third, to situate images in global capitalism is to recognize the paradox that images are easy targets for commodification and commodity fetishism, as they produce surplus value facilely and eªortlessly. But in trading on “values of authenticity, locality, history, culture, collective memories and tradition” in what I have called “global multiculturalism” elsewhere,30 commodified visual culture can unwittingly serve as the site of alternative imaginations beyond metropolitan ideologies. The logic of this paradox works in two ways: (1) Culturalism can be the object of commodification par excellence, but politically productive appropriations of commodified culture are sometimes necessary survival tactics for marginalized peoples. Capitalist appropriation and artistic political creativity can occur simultaneously in diªerent combinations. Not to recognize as much but to hold up an ideal of class-based, noninstrumentalizable art is to risk the danger of purism Introduction
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as well as elitism. (2) It is not that commodified visual culture is the prime medium for producing authenticities, but that the commodified production of authenticities puts the notion of authenticity under erasure, so that narrowly identitarian, ethnocentric, and culturalist assertions of authenticity are exposed to be problematic. For marginalized peoples, challenges to authenticity to continental and metropolitan cultural hegemonies are often articulated precisely in the commercial arena through commercial means. Films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, even though they work largely through and within Hollywood commercialism and the political economy that underlies it, nonetheless allow for noncentrist and nonstandardized articulations of “Chineseness” against China-centrism. The balance sheet of a visual work’s meaning, function, and value needs to be calibrated carefully, and it must include multiple contexts across, within, below, and beyond the nation. The visual work, in this sense, may signify completely contradictory or even oppositional meanings when it refunctions in diªerent contexts. Fourth, it is not far-fetched to recognize that there are new locations of value in global capitalism due to the intensity of the visual mode of production and consumption. On the one hand, production of visual media is continuously on the rise, from film, television, art, the Internet, and so forth, and an unusually large number of people are involved in such lines of work. Hong Kong cinema practically functions as a national cinema in quantity, quality, and stylistic distinctiveness, for instance, to rival Bollywood and Hollywood. But Bombay and Hollywood are cities in large nation-states, while Hong Kong, until and even after 1997, was very much a city unto itself. On the other hand, the unprecedented saturation of visual media in our daily lives has fundamentally altered our relationship with time. If, as the capitalist truism goes, time equals value, we are spending more time than ever on consuming visual work and are thus bestowing it with more value. Ludwig Wittgenstein has put it very simply: “The human gaze has a power of conferring value on things; but it makes them cost more too.”31 The value of visual media is assessed by the quantity of its viewers, and so time spent watching a soap opera equals advertising dollars for the makers of the soap opera and so forth. Jonathan Beller, for instance, has even argued for an attention theory of value, by which he means that human attention is productive of value. As cinema colonizes the unconscious further, those films that enthrall the spectators’ attention acquire more value as well as more social, ideological, and even political viability.32 Spectatorship, to put it in a diªerent light, is a form of ]
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aªective labor that in turn influences performances of subjectivity. Other than economic value, surplus values of sociality, ideological consensus, and (de)politicization are manufactured in the process and need to be calculated. If the final form of commodity fetishism is the image as spectacle, and the accumulation of capital has now given way to the accumulation of images and spectacles,33 then we need to register the new object in Marx’s classic notion of commodity fetishism that obscures relations of labor by projecting an illusory value-relation between things.34 Within global capitalism, the image commodity has itself become an object of value, its fragmentary propensity translating seamlessly into the synecdochic nature of the fetish, and thus the illusory value-relation between things is no longer illusory but actual. The human relations of labor remain displaced and obscured in this process; it is the manner in which and the medium through which the displacement occurs that have changed in the global culture of images. This brings us to the question of political economy of visuality in global capitalism that insists on the power diªerentials in the production, consumption, and accumulation of images. Who has the capital to produce, who has the leisure to consume, and who has the ability to accumulate—these are inevitable questions of political economy, particularly since global capitalism has deepened and expanded the colonial process through neocolonial practices that seemingly appear less threatening than old colonialisms. Fracturing and complicating the West/ non-West neocolonial relationship are various regional subcolonialisms that operate through such lofty claims as shared culture and history (China to Taiwan), or sheer capitalist expansionism (Taiwan to Southeast Asia or Hong Kong to China) within this Sinophone region. Poole’s proposal for a “visual economy” is very useful in this regard. She notes four important points as constituting the field of visual economy: (1) Visual images are part of a comprehensive organization of people, ideas, and objects. (2) The organization of the field of vision has much to do with social relationships, inequality, and power. (3) The organization bears relationship to the political and class structure of society as well as the production and exchange of the material goods as commodities. (4) Visual images are globally tra‹cked objects.35 To insist on visual economy in global capitalism, then, is not only to continue to critique old forms of power wearing new disguises, but also to critique new forms of power produced by new values manufactured by the hypervisuality of our time. Sinophone visual culture partakes of multiple visual economies in diªerent Introduction
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contexts within, between, and beyond the nation, tracing the footsteps of histories of migration and movement of Sinitic-language-speaking peoples across the seas to various parts of the world. It contests existing values and imaginations while producing new ones; it struggles with layered complicities as well as resistances. With its visual form, it travels more readily across boundaries; with its linguistic particularities, it remains local in important ways. This dialectic between the visual and the linguistic spells out the tension among the global and the local as well as their intermediaries, making it necessary to situate each Sinophone visual cultural expression historically and contextually to avoid both a facile dismissal and a naive celebration of the visual. IDENTITY IN GLOBAL CAPITALISM The primacy of the visual in global capitalism also suggests that the means of constructing and representing identities are more and more predominantly visual. In the broadest sense, identity is the way in which we perceive ourselves, and others perceive us, and is constituted by a dialectics of seeing and being seen. At the core, identity is therefore a question of representation and occurs in and through representation. At a time when various visual media have inundated our lives, visual mediation of identity may have acquired a fundamental status in the study of representation. Arguably, the historical nature of the resources with which identities are constructed and negotiated today lies in their heavily visual character. As print medium continues to lose ground, the visual turn marks the transition of a writing-based imagination to image-based imagination not only for such collective identities as national identity but also for individual identities. The medium, manner, and style in which national and other identities are imagined, in short, have undergone a profound transformation. Martin Jay correlates, for instance, Renaissance perspectivalism in art with the rational, Cartesian subject, the description-oriented, impressionist and Dutch oil paintings with the bourgeois subject in market economy, and the baroque vision that foregrounds “opacity, unreadability, and the indecipherability of the reality it depicts” with contemporary subjectivity.36 Even though Jay’s identification of these three scopic regimes may be overly schematic, what is useful here is the historical impulse of theorizing that sees conjunctures between the mode of vision, the mode of subjectivity, and the mode of production. In this vein, vision’s historical character in the contempo]
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rary moment will have to factor in technological advances in visual apparatuses (the camera, film, video, etc.) as well as developments in artistic genres such as installation and video art. It is no wonder that the relationship between the eye and the “I,” and increasingly between the camera and the “I,” has emerged as one of the major theoretical issues in studies of visuality, using various combinations of psychoanalytic, Marxist, and poststructuralist approaches. Cases in point are Wendy Everett, who cites Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious opened up by the camera as heralding a new way of perception, R. Burnett’s argument that the camera eye increasingly stands for or stands in for the eye, Virilio’s “vision machine” mentioned above, as well as John Berger’s more general notion that seeing establishes one’s place in the world.37 All that eyes can do, cannot do, and are usurped from doing—the gaze and the gazed-at (Freud’s can of sardines that looks back at the fisherman), the look, the glance, surveillance (from panopticon to artificial vision), seeing, observation, and visual pleasure—have thus become central, and perhaps even fetishized, topics of analysis. To illustrate, among cultural studies, postcolonial studies, film studies, and psychoanalysis, one of the overlapping points of analysis is the structure of the gaze as a positional relationship of power in the constitution of one’s identity.38 This structure is thoroughly infiltrated by desire, which Lacan has called the scopic drive. While the subject’s looking is limited, the gaze of the other is pervasive: “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.”39 Tellingly, in Lacan’s schema, in the middle of the scopic field is the image or the screen, mediating the relationship between the gazer and the gazed-at.40 The screen’s mediation brings a dialectics of recognition and misrecognition into play and can serve as an apt metaphor for the mediation of identities by what we see and how we are seen through the screens of various identity images and visual narratives in a visually saturated world. More pervasively, Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage in the imaginary, where the look into the mirror helps the child constitute its ego through (mis)recognition, has been appropriated and expropriated for the study of film and other visual technologies when it comes to the question of identity and subjectivity. French film semiologist Christian Metz, for instance, applied Lacanian schema to the analysis of film to define film as “the scientific imaginary wishing to be symbolized,” simultaneously replicating imaginary ego-formation during the mirror Introduction
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stage and transcending the imaginary stage to the symbolic stage (through the Oedipal structure of the gaze). What the cinema projects is a figure of lack, since the object seen is physically absent. This keeps desire in play, never fully fulfilled, but deferred. But the lack also shows that cinematic scopophilia is “unauthorized,” much like a child’s seeing the parents’ amorous play in an Oedipal triangulation of desire.41 Film spectatorship is hence analogical to the Oedipal process through which one becomes a social being in the symbolic. The spectator, in the process, engages in multiple levels of identification: identification with his own look (primary identification), with the characters (secondary identification), and with the camera (which is interactive with the second screen, the retina of the eye). In this scheme, cinema serves as the passage where the transition between the imaginary and the symbolic takes place within a changing structure of gaze and through diªerent forms of identification in the process of identity formation. Feminist film scholars would challenge such a universalist theory and argue that filmic identification is inherently gendered and causes the institution of the male as the normative, since identification always involves recognition (of something known) before misrecognition sets in.42 The female spectator’s subjectivity is thereby set in a tortuous relationship within the structure of the gaze. Other feminist theorists utilized and critiqued not only cinema’s appropriation of Lacan, but also Lacan’s deployment of the images of visuality for its patriarchal biases. Luce Irigaray’s trenchant critique of the representation of women as the negative mirror reflection of men, and the need for women to burn those mirrors and despecularize themselves, is one famous example.43 A perspective more sensitive to the questions of ethnic and cultural diªerence, such as that of Trinh T. Minh-ha, would critique the same mirror structure to show that an infinite play of empty mirrors defers the notion of the original “I” and dissolves the illusionary relationship between subject and subject, and subject and object.44 Enter ideology, always already gendered. If Ideology is “the imaginary representation of the world” and its structure is speculary (Louis Althusser), and film is a “technique of the imaginary” (Metz),45 then film can be seen as a perfect medium for ideological interpellation. In this formulation, the spectator is produced by the filmic ideological apparatus as an interpellated, sutured subject. The film designates a spectator, assigns the spectator a place, and sets the spectator upon a certain journey, according to one formalist theory.46 To put it diªerently, the spectator is the Althusserrian “actor” in the mise-en-scène of ideological inter]
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pellation.47 From Althusser to Metz, and especially Jean-Louis Baudry, who sees the cinema as ideological apparatus par excellence, this specific Lacan-influenced line of thinking has been called the “apparatus theory” for its critical look at cinema as an ideological apparatus. An art historical version of this theory would be Mitchell’s synthesis of Erwin Panofsky’s iconology and Althusser’s ideology as mutually constitutive: iconology is itself an ideology, while ideological critique needs to be iconologically aware.48 The apparatus theory relates back to Marx, of course, who used the analogy of the camera obscura to emphasize the function of inversion in ideology. Just as the camera obscura works through inversion, so is ideology the inversion of the real: “The camera obscura of ideology simultaneously maintains a relationship to the real (which it reflects in an inverted form) and occults, obscures it.” Both being dark chambers, ideology and the camera obscura do not illuminate but obscure the real and hide the historical character of the ruling class’s domination.49 Understandably, the apparatus theory has been criticized for being universalistic and ahistorical, replicating a patriarchal bias, and foreclosing the radical potential of the film medium.50 This returns us full circle to the social nature of visual images, and thus an analysis of the relationship between visuality and identity must be historically informed. Universalist theories such as psychoanalysis and the apparatus theory therefore need to be thoroughly historicized and contextualized for them to be able to speak beyond Eurocentric terrains. I would posit that film as a product of industrial capitalism helped project a temporally more fluid notion of subjectivity (through the use of montage and other time-manipulating formal techniques), and that contemporary film and other visual media as a product of global capitalism take on a much more spatially fluid structure of transnationality, as temporal compression equally increases in intensity and speed. Such transnationality is produced in part by the intensity of migration of peoples and in part by advancements in the techniques of communication and our enhanced global awareness of interconnectedness, all of which are the result of human colonization of the globe becoming more and more thorough. The repertoire of images available to diªerent peoples today, qualitatively and quantitatively of greater diversity, is overall much more multicultural and transnational, making it possible to talk about a global image culture scattering alongside the scattering of global capitalism. In lockstep with the development of visual culture in global capitalism, the historical character of identity today lies in its predominantly visual mediation. Introduction
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If earlier formations of identities are primarily determined by nationality and ethnicity in the course of struggles to dominate colonized peoples or resist colonial and imperialist powers, contemporary identities are much more nuanced, fragmented, and multiple. It is increasingly the case that linguistic and cultural boundaries do not coincide with national boundaries (not that they ever have entirely), and increasing balkanization delineates national and subnational boundaries with finer and finer criteria of diªerence to the extent that diªerences can be overinvested. Such overinvestment in identity as diªerence on the subnational level is what has been criticized as identity politics. The fact that religious fundamentalisms have not been explicitly charged as playing identity politics on a global scale, while subnational race-based identity struggles have, indicates that the fear of the other within one’s community is what triggers the accusations of identity politics.51 Although identity politics, a politics based on inflexible definition of identities, may be a manifestation of the misuse of identity-based struggles, the critique of identity politics has had the unintended consequence of throwing out the baby (identity) with the bathwater (identity politics), eªectively shutting down the possibility of diªerencebased politics that have been and continue to be socially transformative. What is necessary, then, as Satya Mohanty and others have argued, is making distinctions between good and bad identities, good and bad politics of diªerence, rather than a blanket endorsement or repudiation, which are both universalistic gestures. Since in global capitalism the political does not necessarily travel according to one’s intention or translate across diªerent geopolitical boundaries the same way, identity-based struggles acquire diªerent valences and produce diªerent promises or limitations in divergent contexts. However, according to Mohanty, the epistemic status of identity should first be recognized: Identities are theoretical constructions that enable us to read the world in specific ways. It is in this sense that they are valuable, and their epistemic status should be taken very seriously. In them, and through them, we learn to define and reshape our values and our commitments, we give texture and form to our collective futures. Both the essentialism of identity politics and the skepticism of the postmodernist position seriously underread the real epistemic and political complexities of our social and cultural identities.52
Identities are not arbitrary, but are theories that help us make sense of experiences and turn them into knowledge, as we simultaneously draw from experiences as ]
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resources for the construction of identities. Most importantly, identities are theoretical claims that are evaluatable: some are empowering, others are oppressive, some are self-produced, and some are imposed.53 Identities can be socially productive, as Sartrean négatités, allowing for the capacity “to negate, to destroy, to change, and to imagine what is not,” and to resist those identities imposed by dominant narratives.54 In this sense, the oppressed may have “epistemic privilege” in producing socially transformative identities,55 and it also becomes possible to recognize identities as historical constructs as new identities are constantly being formed.56 With this so-called realist theory of identity, then, one can evaluate diªerent representations of identities as more or less transformative or regressive, and allow for the political potential or entrenchment of a visual work to be highlighted for analysis. For those identities in the process of being constructed for antihegemonic struggles, such as that of Taiwan, it is not that these identities did not exist in the past in a diªerent form for similar or diªerent purposes, but that they have acquired a heavily historical as well as resistant character due to the particular geopolitical situation in the contemporary moment. It is clear from the above summary that the realist theory of identity positions itself against the postmodernist celebration of the infinite deferral of identities and subjectivities. Similarly, critics such as Dirlik have voiced concern over the political price paid by the postmodernist notion of flexible subjects, which conforms to the flexible logic of global capitalism. The pronouncement that the subject is dead parallels, in this case, the death of the worker, as flexible production demands flexible workers to constantly retool while working multiple jobs without medical and other benefits. The dead subjects, in other words, tend to be working-class subjects, minorities, and women, just when they are clamoring for more representation and subjectivity and constructing identities that can serve their resistant causes. Dirlik concludes forcefully that the postmodern argument for fluid subject positions is ultimately “the fetishization of alienation.”57 In historical hindsight, high modernist fetishization of alienation seems to have continued to the present day, albeit with a very diªerent theoretical vocabulary and with a greater pretense to self-reflexivity. Class, gender, and race determinants operate invisibly but integrally in both cases. Samir Amin would argue, more simply, that multiple and polyglot identities were the condition of existence prior to the imposed homogenization of unified subjects by Western humanism and individualism. It is syllogistic, if not disingenuous, first to declare multiple identities to be a probIntroduction
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lem in order to institute and valorize unified subjects only later to disclaim unified subjects to reinaugurate multiple identities.58 This was evidenced by the poststructuralist enterprise, which, as we know, hinged on the critique of the unified subject. Recall that Heidegger’s suspicion about the pictorialization of the world through cinema and photography, mentioned in the previous section, is precisely based on the contention that such objectifying representation exemplifies human conquest of the world and helps constitute the human as the universal, founding subject.59 The critique against the poststructuralist notion of subjectivity is then twofold: (1) by universalizing a class-determined experience of alienation, it has made the notions of subjectivity and identity unusable for those who need them; (2) its project has been an “in-house” struggle against another fantastic construction, that of unified subjectivity in Western philosophy. The game has been played out on class-specific and Western-centric terrains, but it has pulled along those outside the West eager to keep step with the developments of so-called high theory and philosophy. The urgent task, then, is to distinguish between usable and unusable, resistant and hegemonic, and recalcitrant and transformative identities. Departing from apparatus theory and psychoanalytic theory, both of which posit subjection as inevitable for subjectivization (recent celebration of melancholia as a universal psychological condition of subjectivity is also a case in point)60 and can have the unintended danger of explaining away oppression, the implicit assumption here is that identities are productive of subjectivities, especially when they are resistant in character.61 Transformative identity is a form of a‹rmation of subjectivity, as opposed to the poststructuralist subject mired in fragmentation and rendered powerless in the face of transnational corporations serving new empires. Manuel Castells therefore aptly titled the second volume of his trilogy, The Information Age, as The Power of Identity to emphasize that cultural identity “was one of the main anchors of that opposition to the values and interests that had programmed the global networks of wealth, information, and power.”62 Powerful expressions of collective identity have challenged globalization and Eurocentric cosmopolitanism and have facilitated such proactive movements as feminism and environmentalism, as well as such reactive movements as various resistance movements on behalf of ethnicity, locality, and nation.63 Incorporating the insights from above, especially those of Castells, it may be possible, then, to distinguish six main kinds of identities in global capitalism: (1) ]
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fundamentalist identities such as those that undergird religious fundamentalisms, which need to be recognized as identity politics on a global scale; (2) commercialized identities that transact profitably with the market by appropriating domestic and global multiculturalisms; (3) legitimizing identities that operate through ideological interpellation by the state and the neocolonial apparatuses to legitimize themselves and to maintain the status quo of power distribution; (4) epistemic identities that are based on experience and function as means of understanding the world; (5) resistant identities developed out of cognition and knowledge to react against forces of domination and oppression; and (6) transformative identities that aid the emergence of new communities and bring about change.64 These identities are of course interconnected and they bleed into each other, but the distinctions serve as heuristic devices to refine discussions of identity in global capitalism as a nexus of complex relationships that cannot be uniformly dismissed as playing into identity politics. The charge of this book is to analyze those visually mediated identities that will or will not make a diªerence locally, regionally, or globally, in the context of global capitalism as well as the scattering of peoples in select sites across the Sinophone Pacific. SINOPHONE ARTICULATIONS The scattering of peoples from China across the globe over a millennium has long been an object of study as a subfield in Chinese studies, Southeast Asian studies, and Asian American studies, and also has a small presence in African studies and Latin American studies in the United States. This subfield, whose parameters are set by wherever the peoples from China have gone, has been called the study of the Chinese diaspora. The Chinese diaspora, understood as the dispersion of “ethnic Chinese” persons around the globe, stands as a universalizing category founded on a unified ethnicity, culture, language, as well as place of origin or homeland. Such a notion is highly problematic, despite its wide adoption and circulation. A Uigur from Xinjiang province or a Tibetan from Xizang province/Tibet who has emigrated from China is not normally considered part of the Chinese diaspora, for instance, while the Manchus and the Mongolians from Inner Mongolia may or may not be considered part of the Chinese diaspora. The measure of inclusion appears to be the degree of sinicization of these ethnicities, which discloses a Hancentrism of a long-distance variety, because what often gets completely elided is Introduction
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the fact that the Chinese diaspora refers mainly to the diaspora of the Han people. “Chinese,” in other words, is a national marker passing as an ethnic, cultural, and linguistic marker, since there are altogether fifty-six o‹cial ethnicities in China and there are far more diverse languages and dialects spoken across the nation. The Chinese language, as it is generally assumed and understood, is nothing but the standardized language imposed by the state, that is, the language of the Han, the Hanyu; the Chinese, as we know them, are largely limited to the Han, and Chinese culture refers mainly to the culture of the Han. In short, “Chinese” functions as a category of ethnicity only to the extent that it designates the Han, excluding all the other ethnicities, languages, and cultures. The term ethnic Chinese is therefore a serious misnomer, since Chineseness is not an ethnicity but many ethnicities. By this procedure of ethnicized reductionism, the Han-centric construction of Chineseness is not unlike the gross misrecognition of Americans as white Anglo Saxons. The conflation of the word Chinese with everything from China has been coproduced by agents inside and outside China. It may be partly traced back to a racialized ideology of the Western powers since the nineteenth century that presented Chineseness along the color line, which disregarded the many diversities and diªerences within China. This has paradoxically worked well with the unifying intent of the Chinese state, especially since the end of Manchu rule in 1911, which eagerly presented a unified and racialized China and Chineseness to emphasize its cultural and political autonomy from the West. Only in this context can we understand why since the turn of the nineteenth century the notion of “Chinese national characteristics” propounded by Western missionaries became popular among Westerners and Chinese alike, inside and outside China, and why it would continue to be a compelling idea in China in the present.65 There is no better way to understand this desire to universalize Chineseness as a racialized boundary marker than that, for the Western powers, it legitimated the semicolonization of the Chinese in earlier times and the management of their Chinese minorities within their own nation-states today. For China and the Han Chinese, the racialized concept correlates with three purposes: the racialized nation’s resistance against imperialism and semicolonialism in the early twentieth century; a practice of self-examination that internalized Western categories of the self; and, finally and most importantly, the suppression of its ethnic minorities for their claims on and contributions to the nation. ]
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What is abundantly clear from this very short exposition of the problems of such umbrella terms as the Chinese and Chineseness is that the terms were activated through contacts with other peoples outside China as well as confrontations with their internal others. These terms dwell not only on the most general level for their signification, but also on the most exclusive; thus they are universal and particular at the same time. More precisely, they are dominant particulars masquerading as the universal, which is complicit with the simplifying generalizations imposed on China, the Chinese, and Chineseness by the West, and to a certain extent, other Asian countries such as Japan and Korea, where resistances to the Chinese sphere of cultural and political influence have been prominent since the nineteenth century, if not earlier. The Chinese and Chineseness, then, are terms of conflation and manipulation that have carried various stigmas or purchases for those who are passively designed as such or who actively claim to be such. As much as the study of the Chinese diaspora has tried to broaden the question of Chinese and Chineseness by emphasizing the localizing tendencies of those peoples who have migrated out of China in their countries of sojourn and settlement, such as in various countries in Southeast Asia (especially Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore), somehow Chineseness remains a category of ethnicity except in cases where ethnic or racial mixture is absolutely undeniable. It is important to question, for instance, the unifying category of the Chinese diaspora, at once complicit with China’s nationalist rhetoric of the “overseas Chinese” who are supposed to long to return to China as their homeland, and the Western racialized construction of Chineseness as perpetually foreign. In postcolonial nation-states across Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America, the Sinophone peoples there are historically constitutive of the local. After all, some of them have been in Southeast Asia since as early as the sixth century, long before nation-states ever existed, and surely long enough to last many identity labels tied to nationality.66 The question is then who is preventing them from being just a Thai, a Filipino, a Malaysian, an Indonesian, or a Singaporean who happens to have ancestors from China and who can be, like his and her fellow citizens, multilingual and multicultural.67 Similarly, who is preventing the Sinophone peoples in the United States from simply being or becoming Chinese Americans with emphasis on the latter part of the compound term, American? We can consider the various racialized acts of exclusion such as the Chinese Exclusion Acts in the United States, the expulsion of the Hoa (local construction of the Chinese) Introduction
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by the Vietnamese government, ethnic riots against the Chinese in Indonesia, the kidnapping of Chinese children in the Philippines, and many other such examples. The externalized, reified category of the Chinese as a racial and ethnic marker readily serves the above purposes of exclusion, scapegoating, and persecution. Scholarship on the Chinese diaspora provides ample evidence of the desire of these immigrants to localize within their lands of settlement. In Singapore, even before it became an independent city-state, intellectuals who migrated from China saw that their culture was centered in the land of their settlement. They coined the category Nanyang (the South Seas) for themselves, and many rejected the claim that their culture was an overseas Chinese culture.68 The locally born peranakans in Indonesia and mixed-race babas in Malaysia developed their own particular cultures of hybridity and rejected the “resinicization” pressures from China.69 Chinese Americans have long considered themselves to be the children of the civil rights movement and resisted the “dual domination” and manipulation by both the Chinese state and the U.S. state.70 The Sino-Thais have localized their surnames and have more or less completely integrated into the fabric of Thai society. The Malaysian Communist Party, established in 1930, was one of the most active anticolonial units against the British, and its membership was mainly Chinese.71 The racially or ethnically mixed populations with some traceable ancestry in China such as the Lukjins of Siam, Metis of Cambodia and Indochina, the Injerto and Chinocholos of Peru, the Creoles in Trinidad and Mauritius, and the Mestizos of the Philippines pose the question of whether it makes any sense to continue to register these categories at all and for what purposes and for whose benefit such registration serves.72 We continue to see a certain ideology of racial and ethnic purity mandating the tracing of origins even after centuries have passed. Whether racialized pressure from the outside, or internalized racialization, the basis of such an ideology is not unlike the one-drop-of-blood rule for African Americans in the United States. The sentiments of Sinophone settlers in diªerent parts of the world of course are various, and there was a strong sojourner mentality in the earlier phases of the dispersion since many were traders and even coolies. Their diªerent intentions for staying or leaving provide diªerent measuring mechanisms for their desire to integrate or not. But the fact of the Sinophone peoples’ dispersion through all continents and over such a long historical span leads one to question the viability of the umbrella concept of the Chinese diaspora where the criteria of determination ]
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is Chineseness, or, to put it more precisely, diªerent degrees of Chineseness. In this scheme, for instance, one can be more Chinese, and another can be less Chinese, and Chineseness eªectively becomes evaluatable, measurable, and quantifiable. Wang Gungwu, the renowned scholar of the Chinese diaspora, therefore posited the idea of the “cultural spectrum of Chineseness.” As an illustration, he notes that the Chinese in Hong Kong are “historically” more Chinese, even though they are “not as yet fully Chinese as their compatriots in Shanghai,” but the Chinese in San Francisco and Singapore have more “complex non-Chinese variables.”73 Another renowned scholar of Chinese diaspora, Lynn Pan, states that the Chinese in the United States have lost their cultural grounding and are therefore “lost to Chineseness.” Pan further charges that the Chinese Americans’ involvement in the civil rights movement was nothing short of “opportunism.”74 Here we hear echoes of the accusation by immigrant parents in the early twentieth century in San Francisco Chinatown, that their American children were less than satisfactorily Chinese by calling them empty bamboo hearts ( juksing ), or the nationalist Chinese from China claiming their Chineseness to be the most authentic in comparison to those living outside China. If one Chinese American can be complimented for speaking good English in the United States due to the racist equation of whiteness and authenticity, he or she can be equally complimented for speaking good Chinese in China for someone who is not authentically Chinese enough. The equation for the latter is that between territory and authenticity. Two major points of blindness in the study of the Chinese diaspora lie in the inability to see beyond Chineseness as an organizing principle and the lack of communication with the other scholarly paradigms such as ethnic studies in the United States (where ethnic identities and nationality of origin can be disaggregated), Southeast Asian studies (where the Sinophone peoples are seen more and more as Southeast Asians), and various language-based postcolonial studies such as Francophone studies (where the French-speaking Chinese are French per the ideology of French Republicanism).75 In most of the scholarship on the Chinese diaspora, the “Chinese American” is a missing person, and even the Hong Konger or Taiwanese are missing persons who are recognized only as Hong Kong Chinese or Chinese in Taiwan.76 This is clearly ahistorical even within China, where the term for Chinese in America has gradually changed from overseas Chinese (huaqiao) to Chinese American (meiji huaren), and such terms as the Hong Kong and Macao compatriot (gang’ao tongbao) and Taiwan compatriot (Taiwan tongbao) have given Introduction
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way to Hong Kongers (xianggangren) and Taiwanese (Taiwanren). The overinvestment in the notion of the homeland in the study of the Chinese diaspora cannot account either for the global dispersion of Sinophone peoples or for the increasing heterogenization of ethnicities and cultures within any given nationality. From the perspective of the longue durée of globalization, heterogenization and hybridization have been the norm rather than the exception since time immemorial.77 I propose in this book not only to find bridges between the study of the dispersion of Sinophone peoples, ethnic studies, area studies, and Chinese studies, but also to explore the resonances of this dispersion with the Francophone, Lusophone, Hispanophone, and Anglophone worlds. Hence the notion of the Sinophone is used here to include those areas of the world where diªerent Sinitic languages are spoken and written outside China.78 The Sinophone, like the other nonmetropolitan areas that speak metropolitan languages, has a colonial history. When China was a cultural empire, the literary, classical Han script was the lingua franca of the East Asian world, where scholars could converse by conducting so-called pen conversations (bitan) through writing. This is similar to the o‹cial Francophonie, whose existence owes largely to the expansion of the French empire and its cultural and linguistic colonization of parts of Africa and the Caribbean, as was the Hispanophone Latin American world and Spanish empire, British empire in India and Africa, Portuguese empire in Brazil and Africa, and so forth. Not all empires acted the same way, of course, and linguistic colonization and influence did occur through varying degrees of coercion and cooperation and to diªerent degrees of success. What these empires uniformly left behind, however, are the linguistic consequences of their cultural dominance. In standard Japanese and Korean languages, for instance, there is a lasting, clearly recognizable presence of the classical Han script in localized forms: kanji in Japanese and hanja in Korean. Contemporary communities of Sinophone peoples outside China, however, are not strictly colonial or postcolonial in relation to China except in a few cases. This is the major diªerence between the Sinophone and the other postcolonial language-based communities such as the Francophone and the Hispanophone, but they do share other similarities. Singapore as a settler society with the majority population being Han is akin to the United States as a settler Anglophone country. Taiwan, whose majority population is Han who settled there around the seventeenth century, is also similar to the colonial United States in its intention to ]
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become formally independent from the country of immigration. Furthermore, Taiwan’s situation is akin to Francophone Quebec. In Quebec, roughly 82 percent of the population is Francophone, and a similar percentage of the Taiwanese speak the standard Mandarin. The French-Canadian identity in Quebec has increasingly given way to a localized, modern Quebecois identity through a process of Révolution Tranquille,79 just as the uniform Chinese identity imposed by the Guomindang regime in Taiwan has gradually given way to a localized New Taiwanese identity in today’s Taiwan. Mandarin is now only one of the o‹cial languages in Taiwan’s multilingual society, where the majority of the people actually speak Minnan, while the rest speak Hakka and various aboriginal languages. Finally, Taiwan as a settler society can also be compared to Lusophone Cape Verde and São Tomé, where the Portuguese settled in the fifteenth century and where diverse immigrants and Africans form a mixed-race community.80 Those who settled in various parts of Southeast Asia also rarely speak the standard language defined by the Chinese state, but various old forms of topolects from the time when and the place where they emigrated from. “The time when” is important, since the topolects would have evolved diªerently inside and outside China. The Han people living in South Korea, for instance, speak a mixture of Shandongnese and Korean, often creolized to the extent that the semantics, syntax, and grammar of the two languages are intermingled in a single sentence. This is especially true for second- and third-generation Shandongnese in South Korea, even though the standard Hanyu was taught in the educational system set up by the locals originally supported by the Taiwan government, and now by the Chinese government after the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between South Korea and China. As elsewhere, Hanyu there is standard only to the extent that it is a written language; when spoken, it is sounded out in Shandongnese. The Shandongnese spoken in South Korea is also diªerent from the Shandongnese spoken in the Shandong province of China, where there are in fact many topolects all calling themselves Shandongnese. The same can be said about the speakers of Teochiu, Hokkien, Hakka, and Hailam in Southeast Asia, speakers of Cantonese in Hong Kong, and all the diªerent topolect speakers and Chinglish or pidgin speakers in the United States. The Straits Chinese (who settled in the British Straits Settlements), such as the babas, speak English as well as patois Malay.81 It goes without saying that there are various degrees of creolization of the languages as well as outright abandonment of ancestral linguistic links to China. Introduction
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The Sinophone recognizes that speaking fractions of diªerent Sinitic languages associated with China is a matter of choice and other historical determinations, and hence the Sinophone exists only to the extent that these languages are somehow maintained. The Sinophone recedes or disappears as soon as the languages in question are abandoned, but this recession or disappearance should not be seen as a cause for lament or nostalgia. Francophone African nations have, to varying degrees, sought to maintain or abandon the colonial language and to devise their own linguistic futures. Hence, unlike the conception of the Chinese diaspora, the Sinophone foregrounds not the ethnicity or race of the person but the languages he or she speaks in either vibrant or vanishing communities of those languages. Instead of the perpetual bind to nationality, the Sinophone may be inherently transnational and global and includes wherever various Sinitic languages are spoken. By virtue of its residual nature, the Sinophone is largely confined to immigrant communities across all of the continents as well as those societies where the Han are the majority: Taiwan, Singapore, as well as pre-handover Hong Kong.82 From the perspectives of Democratic Party members in pre-1997 Hong Kong or independentists in today’s Taiwan, Sinophone articulations, furthermore, contain an anticolonial intent against Chinese hegemony. The Sinophone is a placebased, everyday practice and experience, and thus it is a historical formation that constantly undergoes transformation reflecting local needs and conditions. It can be a site of both a longing for and a rejection of various constructions of Chineseness; it can be a site of both nationalism of the long-distance kind, anti-China politics, or even nonrelation with China, whether real or imaginary. Speaking Sinitic languages with certain historical a‹nity to China does not necessarily need to be tied to contemporary China, just as speaking English is not tied to England per se. In other words, Sinophone articulations can take as many diªerent positions as possible within the realm of human expression, whose axiological determinations are not necessarily dictated by China but by local, regional, or global contingencies and desires. Rather than a dialectics of rejection, incorporation, and sublimation, there is at least a trialectics, since mediation is exercised by more agents than one, the perennial other. The Sinophone, therefore, maintains a precarious and problematic relation to China, similar to the Francophone’s relation to France, the Hispanophone’s to Spain, and the Anglophone’s to England in its ambiguity and complexity. The dominant language of the Sinophone may be standard Hanyu, but it can be im]
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Introduction
plicated in a dynamic of linguistic power struggles. As a major language, standard Hanyu is the object against which various minor articulations are launched resulting in its destandardization, hybridization, fragmentation, or sometimes outright rejection. The practice of the Sinophone, on the one hand, is, to appropriate what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have called “minor literature,” a form of “minor articulation,” that is, articulation by the minor or minoritized using the major language. In the process of this use, the major language is contested and appropriated for various constructive and deconstructive purposes. Ethnic minorities in China who speak the standard Hanyu as their ritualistic induction to Chineseness and Chinese nationality are prototypical of this kind of Sinophone articulation, as are those who resist Chinese domination outside China. On the other hand, the Sinophone is a constellation of local languages specific to their locality, and their meaning and significance do not need to be gauged only in terms of the major language. The Sinophone articulates its autonomy into being. The Sinophone may articulate a China-centrism if it is the nostalgic kind that forever looks back at China as its cultural motherland or the source of value, nationalist or otherwise; but the Sinophone is often the site where powerful articulations against China-centrism can be heard. The Sinophone Taiwan, for instance, is only an aspect of Taiwan’s multilingual community, where aboriginal languages are also spoken, and post–martial law Taiwan cultural discourse is very much about articulating symbolic “farewells to China.”83 The Sinophone pre-1997 Hong Kong also saw the emergence of a nativist fetishization of Cantonese against the looming hegemony of standard putonghua. Mainly due to the limitation of the author’s expertise, the Sinophone visual works examined in this book are limited to contemporary Taiwan, pre-handover Hong Kong, and the contemporary United States, but much work needs to be done to examine various other sites across Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Southeast Asia. The purpose of Sinophone studies is not to construct yet another universal category such as the Chinese diaspora and “Cultural China” with obligatory relationship to China, but rather to examine how the relationship becomes more and more various and problematic and how it becomes but one of the many relationships that define the Sinophone in the multiangulated and multiaxiological contexts of the local, the global, the national, the transnational, and above all, the place of settlement and everyday practice. As such, the Sinophone can only be a notion in the process of disappearance as soon as it undergoes the process of Introduction
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becoming, when local concerns voiced in local languages gradually supersede preimmigration concerns for immigrants and their descendents through generations, with the Sinophone eventually losing its raison d’être. The Sinophone as an analytical and cognitive category is therefore both spatially and temporally specific. The visual media through which the Sinophone is most clearly articulated are cinema and television, and Sinophone Taiwan, pre-1997 Hong Kong, followed by immigrant television broadcasting and filmmaking in the United States (mainly in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco) are three of the most vibrant locations of their production. In the more artistically oriented media such as conceptual art, oil paintings, installation art or digital art, Sinitic-language-speaking artists often convey distinctly Sinophone sensibilities. We can see this to the extent that art making and art viewing constitute subjectivity and that visual materials rely on textual meanings in the written form. To borrow from Miekie Bal’s narratological understanding of visuality, the Sinophone subject can be said to be situated in front of visual artworks as their focalizer and attains subjectivity by making narrative sense out of the artworks passing before him or her.84 An interdisciplinary and broad notion of visuality not only as a culture of images but also as what Mitchell has called “imagetexts,” also allows for the textual and narrative orientations of some installation and conceptual art to be considered as integral to the Sinophone. Imagetexts are intermedia and intersemiotic to include various textual applications of images and imagistic applications of texts as integrated practices.85 The notion of the Sinophone has the expansiveness to include both visual and textual practices, to make up for the lack of a term to describe the work of an artist who speaks a given Sinitic language. In the past, a Sinophone artwork would have mainly been defined by the ethnicity of the artist, not by the work’s position in the local context and the languages—visual, aural, textual—it speaks and writes. It should also be noted that the Sinophone is a very useful category for literature written in diªerent Sinitic languages. In the past, the distinction between literature written in Chinese languages from inside and outside China has been rather blurry, and this blurriness has had the eªect of throwing literature written in Sinitic languages outside China, standard Hanyu or otherwise, into neglect, if not oblivion. What used to be categorized in English as “Chinese literature” (Zhongguo wenxue, literature from China) and “literature in Chinese” (huawen wenxie, literature from outside China) added confusion. The singularity of the word Chi]
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Introduction
nese in both terms in English erases the distinction between Zhongwen (Chinese) and Huawen (Sinophone) and easily slips into China-centrism. Similarly, there was no clear way to designate Chinese American literature written in Hanyu, hence Sau-ling Wong’s designation of the important distinction between “Anglophone Chinese American literature” and “Sinophone Chinese American literature.”86 In the context of Chinese American literature, literature written in Hanyu has been systematically marginalized, if not considered politically suspect for its “un-Americanness” that can elicit charges of unassimilatability. Dismissed in both the canons of “Chinese literature” and “Chinese American literature,” which are based on models of nationality and ethnicity, respectively, the Sinophone has been crying for a name for itself. In this sense, it is also possible to consider literature written by ethnic minorities inside China as Sinophone literature, since some of these writers consider themselves to be subjects living under a colonial condition, external (if their desire is sovereignty) or internal (if they feel oppressed). They may write in Hanyu, but their sensibilities are ambiguously positioned vis-à-vis politico-cultural China and a uniform construction of Chineseness as Hancentered and Han-dominant. The Sinophone, like the category of the “Third World,” which can also exist within the First World, therefore also exists on the margins within China. In the unlikely event that the dominant Chinese relinquish the notion of cultural and linguistic authenticity, to accept that the Han is nothing but the name of a river, that the concept of “China” itself is but a series of constructions over a long historical trajectory, the Chinese as such may then be replaced by the Sinophone as heterogeneous practices of language and culture. Similar to its complex relationship to China and Chineseness, the Sinophone also evinces a complex relationship with the sites of its settlement and lived experience. For first-generation Chinese Americans who have emigrated from various other Sinophone sites or China, for example, their relationship to the cultures and languages of the United States is, though equally ambivalent and complex, of a qualitatively diªerent kind. As the Sinophone distinguishes itself from the dominant construction of Chineseness, it also distinguishes itself from the dominant construction of Americanness in a way that is borne out by the exigencies of lived experience in the United States. While the Sinophone heterogenizes both the dominant constructions of Chineseness and Americanness, it maintains its own subjectivity. Some might flaunt this as the postmodernist inbetween-ness, which I critique in this book; others are adamantly local in their arIntroduction
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ticulation of political and cultural meanings. Place matters as the grounding where the Sinophone acquires its valance and relevance. To sum up, the definition of the Sinophone must be place-based and it must be sensitive to time, being able to attend to the process of its formation and disappearance. If, for Taiwan in the late twentieth century, the Sinophone became a self-conscious category when mainland Chinese colonialism of the Guomindang was recognized and peacefully overthrown, for Hong Kong its incorporation into the Chinese polity in 1997 marked the waning of the Sinophone as its integration into China became inevitable. For recent immigrant communities in the United States that speak Cantonese, Taiwanese, and various other Sinitic languages, political allegiances often run the gamut of extreme positions at odds with each other, while the psychosocial investment in the land of settlement may increasingly outweigh older attachments. The Sinophone is kept alive by successive waves of new immigrants, while earlier immigrants may move further toward the mainstream to heterogenize the mainstream culture in a bid for pluralism and equality. But the sheer creativity of Sinophone directors such as Ang Lee, who makes movies in both English and Hanyu (in many accents), or Sinophone artists such as Wu Mali, who evinces a cultural cosmopolitanism that can be more adventurous and open-ended than that of self-righteous metropolitan cosmopolitans, and the impressive output of movies and art from Taiwan, pre-1997 Hong Kong, and Sinophone America attest to the vibrancy of Sinophone cultures in the making and becoming. In an increasingly globalized world, where cultures and languages are more and more decodable through visual mediations, the Sinophone stands as an open category that views China and Chineseness at an oblique angle in light of place-specific experiences. The history of the o‹cial Francophonie cautions us that the notion of the Sinophone also bears the risk of being appropriated by the Chinese state. In the case of the Francophonie as an institutional concept, the French state can willfully neglect its anticolonial character and instead highlight its potential as the champion of pluralism in order to refute the overpowering pressure of American cultural hegemony.87 The Francophonie can be partly seen as spectral remains of the French empire under whose warm shadow contemporary France’s waning cultural influence in the globe can be temporarily displaced. Unfortunately, it can be turned into a new fantasy of French global influence, if not a point of mobilization for imperial nostalgia. The notion of the Chinese diaspora has led to similar ]
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Introduction
consequences: it centered China as the place of origin and implicitly demonstrated China’s global influence. The Sinophone is many things, and as lived cultures and languages, it cannot be contained by uniform definitions. However, the Sinophone’s insistence on its settlement outside China, its minor status within China, and its place-and-time-specific articulation is where its historical character lies. Rather than a testament to the classical Chinese empire, such as the premodern Sinophone worlds of Japan and Korea, or an emerging Chinese empire that claims the sole right to Chineseness, contemporary Sinophone articulations, with the exception of those of minority groups in China, may determine whether to respond to such claims or to ignore them altogether. In the last two centuries, Japan tried to “overcome” China militarily by instigating the two Sino-Japanese Wars, and symbolically through a vernacular movement that displaced the Han written script. For Korea, the resistance was more circuitous: denouncing the ideology of “serving the great” (sadae juûi) in the seventeenth century was simultaneously producing its authenticity as preserver of Chinese culture against the Manchus,88 but twentieth-century history saw a gradual move away from Chinese influence and the fitful abolishment of the mandatory study of hanja (Han written characters) in its educational system until the recent rise of China as a global power. It is in order to register the agency of those who work in various visual and textual media in Sinophone areas that I use the term articulation to describe the expressive act of art and filmmaking. In the particular definition of the term by Chantal Mouªe and Ernesto Laclau, articulation is a social practice that participates in the larger discursive field by constructing new diªerences and interjecting contingency to necessity.89 If we posit that the Chinese discursive field envisages a list of necessary and fixed identities for ideological and political purposes, Sinophone articulation introduces diªerence, contradiction, and contingency into those identities. Articulation as a practice not only subverts fixed identities but also opens up the possibility for new identities, which in turn can lead to new social and cultural formations. Sinophone articulation, by the acts and practices of cultural production—naming, writing, making art, making film, and so forth— disrupts the symbolic totality that is Chinese and instead projects the possibility of a new symbolization beyond reified Chinese and Chineseness. Articulation by Sinophone peoples thus brings the Sinophone into being as a new social and cultural formation that interrupts fixity with diªerence, totality with partiality. The Sinophone’s favorite modes therefore tend to be intertextual: satire, irony, Introduction
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paradox, bricolage, collage, and others. This intertextuality, however, is not simply rewriting or reinvention, but a means to construct new identities and cultures. These new identities and cultures have been heavily reliant on visual culture and popular media in the past half century. For instance, we can consider Hong Kong cinema that traveled to various Sinophone sites in Asia from the 1960s to the present day as helping to construct the Sinophone as an imagined community. A person who speaks a smattering of Sinitic languages watching Hong Kong musicals and martial arts films of the 1960s and 1970s in South Korea is necessarily implied within a collective imaginary of the Sinophone across other Asian and Southeast Asian sites through the identificatory practices of the cinema. Through the rich images in these films, a “critical constellation” of the past and the present is represented, so that the images acquire a historical character. These and other dialectical images, by virtue of the dispersion of Sinophone sites, remain nonlinear and discontinuous, but nonetheless act as agents that “telescope” the past through the present, thereby helping to constitute the Sinophone as a transnational and yet historically specific, imagined community.90 This book is an attempt to understand the Sinophone in its various intertextual moments of cultural articulation situated within the transnational political economies and cultural relationships with China, Asia, and the United States. It analyzes Sinophone’s overdetermined (multiple but not infinite) axes of articulation in time and space. Identity, for sure, is a process that occurs in time; it is processional. It takes time to refute old identities and construct new identities, when changing political realities demand corresponding responses. The transformation of the “Republic of China” to “Taiwan,” colonial Hong Kong to (post)colonial Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Chinese and Taiwanese to Chinese and Taiwanese Americans all takes time. Equally, geopolitics changes the conception of space. Taiwan is farther from China in spatial imaginary than the Republic of China was; (post)colonial Hong Kong is closer to China than colonial Hong Kong was. Articulations of cultural nationalism against China are therefore more prominent in Taiwan, whereas Hong Kong film imaginary seems to travel more and more northward to include various Chinese sites as locations of action and narration after 1997. Across the Taiwan Strait, triangulation among Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China is clearly unbalanced: the Taiwan–Hong Kong cultural relationship is displaced by their vibrant economic ties with China, even though they are both under the shadow of Chinese political hegemony to diªerent de]
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Introduction
grees and in diªerent ways. The relationship is more vertical than horizontal. Crossing diªerent oceans, the Sinophone peoples in North America are closer or farther from China, Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or the other Sinophone sites in Asia where they have emigrated from, depending on their perceptions of both geographical and psychic space. In their rootedness in the local place, the Sinophone peoples across diªerent oceans and territories negotiate the relationship between space and place creatively in their articulatory practices. It will be apropos to end this introduction by returning to the film that I started with in order to illustrate, now more retrospectively, the diªerences between the Sinophone and the Chinese played out on the transnational stage. The case in point is a highly publicized rivalry between Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Ang Lee and Hero by Zhang Yimou. Although shown several years apart, the rumor has it that Zhang shot his film with the aim of showing the world how to make a “real” martial arts film after the global success of Lee’s film.91 Some of the resentment toward Lee’s film by Chinese audiences also had to do with the issue of ownership—who owns the genre and who are the most legitimate inheritors of the genre. A film that flaunts something essential about Chinese culture needs certified producers from China proper, not from a Taiwanese American. In various interviews in 2004, when Hero was finally released in the United States after several years of delay, Zhang credited the success of Lee’s film as having prepared the reception of his own film, but he made sure to mention that his film was developed long before Lee’s film, hence he was not following in the footsteps of Lee.92 This is despite the fact that Zhang used the same cinematographer and cast one of the same actresses for his film. To deflect the suspicion that he was following Ang Lee, Zhang again noted that even his second martial arts film, also released in 2004 in the United States, House of Flying Daggers, was developed before Crouching Tiger. In short, he developed both Hero and the House of Flying Daggers before Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, so neither was a case of imitation. The charge that the ending of the House of Flying Daggers appears to be a copy of Crouching Tiger was responded to again by either such simple assertion or temporal precedence.93 The compulsion to claim precedence is aimed to deflect the suspicion of imitation or reaction, but what it reveals most tellingly is the hidden assertion of authenticity and ownership. How can an inauthentic subject use the genre so successfully in the international film market when the genre belongs to the Chinese director, its true inheritor? Introduction
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Ownership of cultural material becomes an issue only when competitive claims are waged or when there is a need to demarcate the boundary of the cultural community. For Zhang Yimou to evoke Crouching Tiger in the context of the U.S. market makes advertising sense, but it does not make sense for him in terms of his perceived right to ownership and authenticity. In view of Zhang’s early films, which epitomized the fifth-generation cinema as national allegories, we may say that his claim to Chineseness has changed in strategy and direction. He had been criticized, for instance, as catering to Western tastes by oªering a typical, selfexercised Orientalism that criticized the authoritarian Chinese government on the one hand and exoticized Chinese cultural symbols on the other. The new mode he deploys in these two martial arts films retains the latter but discards the former. The national allegorical impulse that exposed repression by the Chinese gerontocracy is now turned into a celebration of empire in the film Hero.94 The hero must sacrifice for the “good” of the collective even if it means massive sacrifices will be required on the way to the unification of the empire. As Zhang puts it, “‘Hero’ is about sacrifice of oneself for a larger purpose, for one’s country.”95 Even though, and paradoxically because, the Qin ruler depicted in the film is so brutal, the hero’s sacrifice will guarantee the unification of the realm under heaven (tianxia) and end the condition of war among the various states. It is di‹cult to imagine another more blatant imperial apologia that rationalizes violence as the means to peace. Humanism gives way to a self-righteous celebration marking, so to speak, the rise of China in the global imaginary. If Crouching Tiger evinces a multiaccented or multilingual negotiation with China and Chineseness, Hero constructs a prehistory of China as the inevitable process of becoming a singular unity out of the instability of heterogeneity. There is nothing more telling than the historical fact that the Qin emperor is credited as having unified the Chinese written script and crushed intellectual dissent (by burying dissenting scholars alive and by burning books), in short, by suppressing heterogeneity and diªerence. At the cusp of China’s emergence as a superpower vying with the U.S. empire, the era of empires once again seems to have returned. Sinophone areas are in this sense important sites of cultural production on the margins of empires where empires collide and collude, and where heterogeneity and diªerence can be retained and celebrated. Present-day empires work through military might as well as mass media. It is therefore not surprising that some have made the far-fetched conjecture that Hero is also simultaneously an apologia for the U.S. empire, especially in light of its in]
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vasion of Iraq in the name of universal democracy. The time of heroes has again arrived—notice the proliferation of hero narratives in Hollywood around 2004— and these films uniformly celebrate star power and produce a cult of media personality. The Benjaminian aura around a work of art has now waned to be reincarnated as mass media star power, becoming, in Samual Weber’s ironic phrasing, “mass mediauras.”96 Here, a splitting occurs between the makers of the film and the audience of the film, with the former enjoying full subjectivity and mass mediauras, and the latter becoming subjected to illusory fantasies of subjectivity or alienating subjugation to the aura of the star. This is indeed far from the mass consciousness with revolutionary potential that Benjamin was allegorizing. Those who manipulate the means of production manipulate the audience, and in the case of Hero, the relation of production mimics the imperial relation between subject and object. The film functions as a “synopticon” in which the many watch the few, whose ability to hold the attention and fascination confers the few power over the many.97 No longer is to-be-watchedness only the mark of the feminine and the powerless as in classic feminist film theory and in Foucault’s characterization of power in the panopticon. Rather, to-be-watchedness is a term of value indicating celebrity status, which translates into money and fame. This returns us, then, to the attention theory of value discussed earlier in this introduction. Attention equals value for the watched; more pertinently, in the case of Hero, attention solicits subjugation just as the heroes in the movie solicit subjugation by all to the Qin emperor. This is the call of China-centrism of an imperial order; the realm under heaven, in this sense, expands to all reaches of the world. By contrast, the Sinophone, in its multiaccented fracturing of China-centrism, can embody the transformative capacity when its articulators take seriously the idea that the promise of image-texts is precisely the practice of potentiality and the imagination of new possibilities.98 The wherewithal of this capacity will determine whether a given artist succumbs to, resists, or transcends cultural and political economic realities in Sinophone sites across the Pacific.
Introduction
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It is subjectivities hybridized in colonial encounters that provide the most eªective medium for the conjoining of the colonial and the global. —Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity (2006)
1
Globalization and Minoritization Much has been said by scholars in the social sciences and humanities regarding the emergence of flexible subject positions in our late capitalist world governed by what David Harvey calls the “flexible regime of accumulation.”1 We have seen the repetition of the word flexibility in such notions as “flexible citizenship,”2 which tries to yoke the production of contemporary subjectivities to late capitalist processes. Frequently connected to the notion of flexibility is the widely used metaphor of flow. The mass migration of people; the hypercompression of space-time brought about by advancements in communications and electronic technologies; the hyperreal, disembodied movement of money and commodities; and so forth have come to take on the characteristics of flow, all appearing to move freely and fluidly through space and across boundaries. A‹rmative readings of flow have emphasized its liberating and resistant potential against disciplines of the nation-state, charted the emergence of transnational and diasporic public spheres, and identified the potential for new ]
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transcultural cosmopolitanisms, of which the notion of a “third culture” is a good example.3 Extending the utopic readings of the consequences of flow to the peripheral communities, or to put it more precisely, out of a competitive motivation to claim deterritorialized subjectivities for the margin, scholars have also rushed to identify Third World postcolonial hybridities as the quintessentially transnational, and some claim, postmodern. Frederick Buell, drawing from the work of many scholars, argues, for instance, that the Third World is “au courant” today, much further along as a contemporary hybrid cultural formation than the metropolitan center, since its colonial hybridization is precedent to the hybridity engendered by globalization in the metropolitan center. The Third World, for Buell, thus constitutes the source of new cosmopolitans.4 According to this line of argument, due to colonialism and imperialism, which disrupted native systems and forcibly imposed metropolitan cultures, Third World cultures can now readily flaunt hybridity and can serve as cosmopolitan examples and models for the center. Anthony King maintains in a similar vein that Third World colonial cities with their multiracial, multicultural, and multicontinental urban cultures were precursors of today’s world cities.5 Here, colonialism seems to have accidentally and ironically become a historical benefit that enabled the production of exemplary transnational, deterritorialized, and therefore contemporary and postmodern subjectivities and cultures in Third World postcolonial nation-states. Conversely, the migration of postcolonial people to the metropolitan centers as immigrants has also hybridized metropolitan cultures and turned these centers into world cities. Particularly with the post-1965 immigration of Asians to the United States, older paradigms of assimilation into the U.S. nation-state are said to have become increasingly obsolete, resulting in a decentering of the core by the periphery.6 Referring to all Americans of Asian descent, Lisa Lowe similarly argues that since Asian immigrants and Asian Americans have always been prevented from becoming authentic, assimilated citizens, their unassimilatability actually helped them carve out a space of critical resistance to the U.S. nation-state.7 Due to the racialized policing of the U.S. nation-state, unassimilatability could be actively deployed and deterritorialized subject positions could be eªected against the nation-state. In sum, in the articulations of postcolonial and immigrant agency, the erstwhile sources of oppression—colonialism, imperialism, and state racism— can become the basis of constructive and resistant disidentification with the nationGlobalization and Minoritization
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state, which, in the context of globalism, becomes a marker of some kind of power. In our era of globalization, allegiance to the nation-state can no longer be taken for granted, and its absence may actually allow for agency and subjectivity for both the immigrant and the minority. If we presume, then, that global capitalism’s favorite subjects are flexible citizens, and the immigrant and the minority have a privileged access to these subject positions, the question concerning us in this chapter is how this flexibility actually works for Sinophone visual workers and artists. Among the visual media, film and video are able to cross national borders much more easily than the traditional plastic arts. The success of Sinophone directors in Hollywood such as Ang Lee from Taiwan and John Woo from Hong Kong further suggests that the translatability of the medium makes the filmmakers themselves more marketable in diªerent cultural contexts, practically granting them the status of flexible subjects. This question of flexibility is therefore crucial to an understanding of the political economy of Sinophone visual culture across the Pacific. THE LIMITS OF A COUP D’ÉTAT IN THEORY With the exception of Buell, the various scholars mentioned above also uniformly evoked the dystopic potential of the transnational, even though a celebratory tone remains dominant in their works. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini note how transnationalism can work in complicity with oppressive nation-states to further the exploitation of labor;8 Lowe emphasizes the oppression of sweatshop laborers as a symptom of the new international division of labor and flexible production;9 Arjun Appadurai warns how migration exacerbates diªerence and deterritorialized fundamentalisms can heighten ethnic violence.10 The fact that none of these dystopic possibilities and actualities received in-depth and detailed analyses in these texts betrays to me not so much the limits of their arguments as their felt need to eªect a theoretical coup d’état. This coup involves the overthrow of the oppressive view of immigrants and minorities as the always already victimized and the institution of the nonreactive view of them as transnationally constituted subjects who need not be completely subjected to or dictated by their oppressive nation-states, whether native or adopted. Furthermore, it involves the enlargement of the frame of reference and discourse from the national to the transnational ter-
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rain, in which there are more possibilities of empowerment for the immigrant and the minority. This coup d’état, I suspect, is most crucially motivated by the desire for theoretical coevalness. The conferring of deterritorialized citizenship, in its proximity to postmodern subjectivity, acquires for the immigrant and the minority the status of being a contemporary with the metropolitan subject, not the embodiment of the perennial “past” of Western modernity as was the case in older modernization paradigms. The rhetoric of flexibility applied to the Third World subjects allows them to be coeval with the West in the temporal scheme.11 But the potential risk in the quest for theoretical coevalness is the flattening of historical and power diªerences, which may cause it to paradoxically repeat the kind of universalism that underpinned modernization theories. Avoiding the trap of another universalism, maintaining historical and geopolitical specificity, while arguing for coevalness is indeed a profound challenge. We may begin by defining coevalness not as a “peaceful co-existence” of cultures, but as the “co-temporality of power structures.”12 Contemporaneity, then, is marked at every turn and at every moment by the operation of power on an uneven terrain. From my vantage point as a multiply displaced immigrant scholar working within both the disciplines of area studies and ethnic studies, I worry about the seeming contiguity constructed among the flexible subject (Asian cosmopolitans), the minority subject (Asian immigrants and Asian Americans), and resistance against the nation-state. I understand the necessity of identifying agency in postcolonial and minority subjects and do indeed see new forms of agency emerging for minority subjects in the transnational terrain, but I wonder whether this necessity should always bear the burden of reactively employing vocabulary and terminologies that are current and therefore appear to confer power. What I worry about is that agencies have not been so much examined through their production and embodied practices as they have been identified or discovered via available terminologies in a theoretical turn toward coevalness. It may be fruitful for us to ask, for instance, what are the material consequences of flexibility? In Harvey’s conception of the flexible regime of accumulation, flexibility empowers the holders of capital, not the workers and producers of commodities—it is an extremely uneven practice. In the way late capitalism has moved the Fordist structure of production to the global arena to form an international division of labor, and in the
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way it sanctions flexible labor processes that deepen the exploitation of labor, flexibility can simultaneously be the prerogative of the few with mobility and economic power and a profoundly abusive practice subjecting workers to “flextime” regimes of multiple jobs with no traditional benefits.13 Stuart Hall’s penetrating statement that “the global is the self-representation of the dominant particular” aptly captures the extreme unevenness governing the production and circulation of cultures across the globe.14 Pushing Hall’s statement further, I would argue that the so-called postcolonial hybrid cultures that we celebrate today are usually seen by the center as but corrupted versions or poor cousins of metropolitan cultures and are seldom, if ever, seen as precursors. The proliferation of McDonald’s in Taiwan is a confirmation of metropolitan culture’s inevitability, not the occasion to study cultural hybridity as a model for American McDonald’s. Seldom does postcolonial hybridity provide enough of a threat or inspiration so that the metropolitan center feels the need to emulate. Neither has postcolonial cosmopolitanism ever shared the same exalted place on the pedestal with metropolitan cosmopolitanism. Postcolonial and metropolitan hybridities embody two diªerent histories, are derived from two very diªerent experiences, carry divergent “values” globally, and can never be equal.15 When these postcolonial cosmopolitan cultures do travel to the metropole through migration, they are met with profound ambivalence and e‹cient policies of containment, which include either naked racism or a multiculturalism that suppresses diªerence in the name of authenticity or utilizes diªerence for the purpose of commercial gain or absolution of liberal guilt. It is also imperative to reexamine the metaphor of flow so frequently evoked in studies of globalization and transnationalism. Flow is always aªected by topography—it must follow specific contours, layouts, and routes, which aªect its speed, direction, and density. The directions of flow are also always historically marked. For example, the flow of postcolonial people to the West in our historical moment mainly appears as economic migration, while the flow bound for the postcolonial sites appears chiefly in the form of tourism. Furthermore, for the production of meaning, flow is always arrested at a specific conjuncture of time and space; that is, it has its own chronotope, albeit a continuously shifting one, depending on context and therefore avoiding fixity and determinism. Like the way narratives achieve meaning through the application of closure as in classical theories of narrative or in Hayden White’s useful discussion of how “proper history” acquires narrativity through closure,16 flow acquires meaning only at a moment ]
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of temporal and spatial arrest within one or more contexts. Like “reality eªects” that are produced by the artful arrangement of everyday objects and the provision of descriptive details in realist narratives,17 larger meaning-eªects that are of crucial social consequence are more often than not constructed and manipulated by dominant institutions with their governing laws and discourses and are always permeated by power. Using a diªerent metaphor, Ernest Laclau and Chantel Mouªe call these privileged mechanisms of closure or fixity “nodal points”: The impossibility of an ultimate fixity of meaning implies that there have to be partial fixations— otherwise, the very flow of diªerences would be impossible. Even in order to diªer, to subvert meaning, there has to be a meaning. . . . Any discourse is constituted as an attempt to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of diªerences, to construct a center. We will call the privileged discursive points of this partial fixation, nodal points. (Lacan has insisted on these partial fixations through his concept of points de capiton, that is, of privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying chain. This limitation of the productivity of the signifying chain establishes the positions that make predication possible—a discourse incapable of generating any fixity of meaning is the discourse of the psychotic).18
For signification to be possible, then, meaning has to be temporally and provisionally fixed at nodal points, and the agents who have the privileged access to nodal points are institutions, organizations, and individuals whose wills to power and domination are forcefully expressed through discourses that repress diªerences, or in our new historical moment, recontain diªerences through channeling them to unthreatening venues. Examples are numerous. The discourse of multiculturalism that so easily slips into a recontainment of diªerences is a ready example. Another example: the flow of postcolonial migration to the United States is governed by the nodal points articulated by the Immigration and Naturalization Services in terms of priority and desirability clearly favoring immigrant investors over economic and political refugees. Likewise, the virtual flow of images and money, theoretically always in transit and deferred in their consumption—as in Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto’s intriguing formula of M-I-M (money-image-money) and I-M-I (image-money-image) in which capital “accumulates not only through the circulation of money but also through the circulation of images without end,” that is, Globalization and Minoritization
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“without being consumed”19—nevertheless accumulates meaning-eªects, or in Laclau and Mouªe’s language, confronts nodal points. The endlessly circulatable image is Stuart Hall’s “dominant particular,” to which the challenge from the margin is deferred and whose vitality is renewed through circulation and recirculation, whereas money, even in its virtual form, lines the pockets of some and not others. The necessary tension and contradiction between fluidity and fixity can be examined in detail through an analysis of flexible subject positions in the transnational context. In the following analysis of Sinophone filmmaker Ang Lee’s early films as well as their divergent reception in Taiwan and the United States, I will illustrate how the nodal points of meaning assert themselves across the global divide in and through flexible articulations of culture. My reading of the operation of these nodal points in Ang Lee’s early work will suggest the persistence of meaningproduction privileging the nation-state, albeit more than one nation-state. In the juxtaposition and interaction between the two nation-states, Taiwan and the United States, we will see how two nodal points—nationalist patriarchy and gendered minoritization—separately discussed in Asian Studies and Asian American Studies respectively but never together, and it is Sinophone studies that makes this unorthodox commingling possible— operate within and with flexibility. I briefly explain the ways in which these two nodal points are utilized below. In postcolonial historiography, as well as studies of colonialism in general, native nationalism has been an important discursive construct as the predominant form in which resistance is articulated. When analyzed as a gendered discourse, nationalism has most often been seen in its complicity with patriarchy and masculinity, which either represses internal feminist causes or competes with colonial masculinities. The works of Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World and The Nation and Its Fragments, have helped define the terms of the discussion, alongside various works on the relationship between gender and nationalism nicely summarized in Nira Yuval-Davis’s useful book Gender and Nation.20 While nationalism in the Third World is construed as a reactive cultural and political discourse that has ambivalent implications for Third World agency, it delimits the coherence of its power through the repression of internal dissent and diªerences, in particular, its female constituencies. Gendered minoritization, on the other hand, is a familiar topic in Chinese American Studies. By “gendered minoritization,” I mean that the process of minoritization—to turn an immigrant who was a national subject into the mi]
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nority subject in the United States—is often structurally revealed to be diªerent for men and women. Sau-ling Wong, for instance, has argued convincingly how gender becomes ethnicized for Chinese immigrants in the American context and thereby men and women acquire diªerential access to acculturation and assimilation: female immigrants seem to acquire “whiteness” more readily than do male immigrants in that they assimilate more eªortlessly and they are more easily accepted by white society.21 In mainstream representations, Chinese American men are more readily associated with their race than with their sex (hence they are racialized and desexed or feminized in stereotypes), while Chinese American women more with their sex than their race (hence they are sexually considered enticing and perceived as less threatening). The gendered minoritization of Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants has been a condition noted by many scholars, who bemoan, for instance, that Chinese American women writers have always received much more favorable reception by the mainstream audience and media, while male writers have suªered from neglect and prejudice. Hence the perceived necessity to construct hypermasculinity by Chinese American male writers such as Frank Chin in order to fight emasculation.22 In sum, in the operation of these two nodal points—nationalist patriarchy and gendered minoritization—“nation-ness” ends up dictating the discourses involved, and the category of the “national” remains an important determinant of meaning. FLEXIBILITY AND NODAL POINTS If the realm of legitimacy for nationalist patriarchy is the Third World nationstate, and that for gendered minoritization is the metropolitan nation-state, how does someone simultaneously situated in both places operate in terms of these two nodal points? The case of film director Ang Lee oªers an interesting example of how someone simultaneously Taiwanese and Taiwanese American eªects a flexible subject position with seemingly flexible gender and race politics. The crucial question for me in the following is this: what does it mean for someone to be a national subject and a minority subject simultaneously? To a large extent, the emergence of Ang Lee as a flexible subject has much to do with the U.S. cultural hegemony in Taiwan through decades of propagation of Americanism. Knowledge of American culture became a given for the educated Taiwanese to the extent that a national subject from Taiwan can be readily transformed to a minority subject in Globalization and Minoritization
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the United States. I discuss the supremacy of Americanism in Taiwan in more detail in chapter 6. Ang Lee’s success as a director began with his small-budget Father Knows Best trilogy (Pushing Hands, 1992; The Wedding Banquet, 1993; Eat Drink Man Woman, 1994), all produced by the Central Motion Pictures Corporation in Taiwan. The films were major box o‹ce successes in Taiwan, especially The Wedding Banquet, which was the most successful film in Taiwan history. Except for the last one in the trilogy, the films are set in the United States, and all begin with issues of cultural or generational conflict and end with some kind of resolution. There have been many movies with immigrant themes prior to and after Ang Lee (Clara Law’s Farewell China and Sylvia Chang’s Siao Yu, to name two prominent ones), but none has garnered such widespread appeal and box o‹ce success. Lee’s films’ success begs the broad question of ideology—cultural, political, and sexual—rather than the usual query about style and technique. My ideology critique that follows will reveal the reconstitution of patriarchy and patriarchal gender politics, the evasion of pointed political issues, and the subsumption of homosexuality under heterosexual hegemony as prominent features in the films’ appeal to Taiwan audiences. I then examine a diªerent set of conformities in the films’ appeal to the American audience to illustrate the particular content of Ang Lee’s flexible representation across the Pacific in these early films. Unlike his later films, which exploit flexibility with a much more nuanced critical awareness, these early films may be seen as model illustrations of how Sinophone films can be squarely caught within a political economy of culture structured by the unevenness of power along the axes of gender and nation. In Pushing Hands, we are told that during the Cultural Revolution in China, the patriarch Mr. Zhu was caught in a situation where he could only shield either his wife or his son from the violent raid of the Red Guards. As a good patriarch should, he chose to protect his son instead of his wife, who later died. The diegesis thereby establishes the patriarch’s absolute dedication to his son, Alex, as he has sacrificed his wife for him, so to speak; thereby any remotely unfilial act on Alex’s part becomes a moral, if not mortal, defect. Alex now lives in New York and is married to a white woman named Martha. When Mr. Zhu comes to live with his son, his discomfort due to cultural conflicts with his white daughter-inlaw therefore immediately becomes a question of Alex’s unfiliality, contributing to Alex’s immense sense of pressure from having to mediate between two cultures. ]
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The object of sympathy in the logic of the diegesis is always the displaced father, whose patriarchal and patrilineal orientation is sympathetically portrayed. An illustration of this is his peeking at his grandson Jeremy’s penis and calling it his “root of life” (ming’genzi) that will continue the family line (chuanzong jiedai) in a typical Confucian patriarchal fashion. Throughout the film as well, his conflict with Martha is mainly attributed to her inability to fulfill her traditional role of a daughter-in-law. The unsympathetic representation of the white wife may explain why the film was the only one in the trilogy not publicly released in the United States.23 The patriarch’s pathos from being an immigrant in the Unites States is time and again compensated by his moral righteousness, buttressed by his selfless dedication to his son, his extraordinary mastery of the Chinese art of taichi, and his attractiveness, confirmed by a graceful widow from Taiwan who falls in love with him. Any potential tension between China (Mr. Zhu) and Taiwan (the widow) is glossed over by a rhetoric of shared cultural Chineseness, and a sense of pan-Chinese sympathy is established.24 Here the Sinophone is problematically equated with a kind of pan-Chinese culturalism. Against white America, all Sinophone peoples are, so to speak, “Chinese.” This is the only film in the trilogy that presents a subject position closest to that of the national subject (albeit under the aegis of a politically suspicious “Greater China”). In The Wedding Banquet, a homosexual son must stage a heterosexual wedding in order to please his visiting parents from Taiwan. The white lover of Wai Tung, Simon, occupies the feminine role of the daughter-in-law in a patriarchal household: he buys appropriate gifts for the parents, cooks, and otherwise takes care of them and knows where Wai Tung places all his belongings, as a good housewife should. It is also he who suggests that Wai Tung stage a marriage with an immigrant woman from China who needs a green card, Wei Wei, in order to win the approval of Wai Tung’s parents. When first meeting Wai Tung’s parents, Simon acts nervously, as befits the role of a new and shy daughter-in-law per Chinese customs. So the tale of love configured here is a triangular one, with two women ( Wei Wei and Simon) vying for the love of Wai Tung in a heterosexual economy of desire. Such manipulation of homosexuality into conforming heterosexuality has led Hong Kong critic Lau Mun-yee to conclude that The Wedding Banquet did not at all subvert heterosexual hegemony.25 This entire comic drama, of course, leads to the conclusion that the patriarch is the one who always wins: if the patriarch desires heterosexuality, as he always does, then so be it. AlGlobalization and Minoritization
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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Taiwan poster for Pushing Hands.
though in the end it was revealed that the patriarch knew about the homosexual relationship between Wai Tung and Simon all along, he pretended that he didn’t until the marriage between Wai Tung and Wei Wei was consummated. With Wei Wei pregnant, the patriarch got what he wanted, and thereupon he let Simon know that he would accept their homosexual relationship. Through what the Taiwanese audience would consider benign duplicity, the patriarchal authority of the father is confirmed and shown to be capable of dealing with unexpected and unconventional challenges with flexibility. In a similar manner, what passes seemingly as a woman-centered narrative in Eat Drink Man Woman, where the love stories of the three daughters appear to dominate the narrative, in the end restores the woman’s place in the kitchen, as several critics have pointed out. In an understated manner, the old widowed father (played by the same actor as in Pushing Hands and The Wedding Banquet) ultimately emerges as the hero. Unlike his three daughters whose romantic experiences are filled with much bad air, the father has secretly nurtured a lover his daughters’ age. ]
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To everyone’s surprise (particularly to the young lover’s mother, who has had a crush on him), the father ends up marrying the young woman. One of the last scenes of the movie shows his newly wed wife heavily pregnant and sitting in a rocking chair in their modern-style apartment. His romanticism and youthfulness is confirmed at the expense of the young woman’s mother, who is represented alternately as hysterical and nauseating in her overtures to him; his virile, reproductive sexuality is confirmed at the expense of his daughters’ confused experiences with love and sex. In the end, the most career-minded of the daughters, the second, airline executive Chia-ch’ien, returns to the kitchen, and with her cooking she restores the sense of taste that her father had previously lost. In all three films, the resolutions return the credit to traditional patriarchy, which is now seen as even more capable of containing challenge and renewing its validity through flexible negotiations and “well-intentioned” duplicity when necessary. These are tales of “resuscitated patriarchs,” as Cynthia Lew has so succinctly characterized.26 There are other reasons why the films were such a success in Taiwan and why they have invited such lingering appreciation and loyalty from the Taiwan audience. Ang Lee’s success has been perceived as Taiwan’s national pride, even though Ang Lee refrains from expressing any Taiwan nativist sentiments about Taiwan’s independence from China. His fame is considered a reflection of Taiwan’s ascendancy in the global cultural arena. The films garnered a degree of international attention unprecedented in Taiwan cinema, with The Wedding Banquet and Eat Drink Man Woman earning the coveted Golden Bear Awards for two consecutive years at the Berlin Film Festival. Homosexuality, furthermore, is another marker of advanced civilization of the West: by watching a film about homosexuality, one is qualified to become a global citizen,27 and a largely recontained representation of homosexuality at that. In fact, by the early twenty-first century, gay-friendliness has become one of the selling points for Taiwan’s capital city of Taipei and part of its cosmopolitan appeal. For a nation and a city eager to be acknowledged and accepted by the global community, homosexuality may even be a strategy, as long as it can coexist, albeit through dubious means, with local patriarchy. The films therefore became “national” representations, exemplars of Taiwan’s successful globalization, that would advance the international image of Taiwan. The Taiwan government launched a much-publicized promotional campaign in 1994 upon the nomination of Eat Drink Man Woman in the best foreign film competition at the Academy Awards, including a banquet for hundreds of Hollywood Globalization and Minoritization
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personalities replete with the sumptuous dishes so luxuriously fetishized in the film, having flown in the chefs and ingredients from Taiwan. Ang Lee himself whetted this nationalist appetite by saying in interviews aimed at Taiwan audiences that he would love to receive an Oscar in order to bring glory to Taiwan. When it turned out that he was not even nominated for the best director category in 1996 for Sense and Sensibility, for which occasion Chinese American film critic Lu Yan and the Reverend Jesse Jackson separately accused the awards committee of racism, Ang Lee was extremely apologetic to his Taiwan supporters. He thereafter promised that the next Sinophone film he made would win the best foreign film award at both the Golden Globe and Academy Awards, saying that he “must win this honor for Chinese cinema.”28 And he eventually would, with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon winning the best foreign film award at the Academy Awards in 2001. He desperately wanted the recognition from the international community also in order to please his father, he noted. Having failed the college entrance examinations by which one’s worth was defined by one’s parents in Taiwan society, and having spent five years as a househusband without a steady job or any job prospects before he made Pushing Hands, Ang Lee wanted his father’s approval as much as he coveted national recognition for Taiwan. So even on the personal, psychological level, we can see the collusion between patriarchy and nationalism. If the trilogy clearly presents the perspective of a national subject, it also as prominently displays a representation of culture from the perspective of a minority subject. There is the stereotypical representation of consumable exotica and multiculturalism: the banquet customs, the exotic food, erotic and exotic women, the taichi moves, and so forth. What is at stake in this soft, multicultural filmic representation, however, is not merely the minoritization of ethnic culture but also what can be called the minoritization of Taiwan. Ang Lee himself seems cognizant of such an implication. In an interview he gave to China Times Weekly in 1993, he said that the Taiwanese today are Westernized just like Chinese immigrants in the United States, and both groups want to be Westernized yet maintain Chinese familism and Confucian ethics. He noted that “in the process of Westernization, Taiwanese people have already done many of the kinds of work that immigrants do. Although their bodies are not in the United States, they are psychological immigrants. . . . What is the diªerence between living in Flushing, New York, and Taipei? Except that one knows America better and sees more Americans, there is not much diªerence.”29 According to Ang Lee’s perceptive comment, Western]
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ization necessarily turns Taiwanese at home into psychological immigrants, which has the eªect of minoritizing Taiwan as it must conform to the cultural hegemony of the United States. Increasing global tra‹c of cultural production and consumption not only has subjected national cultural productions to minority status within the United States in the name of multiculturalism, but also has turned the geopolitical Taiwan into the minority “region-state” of the United States. It is therefore not surprising to hear certain Taiwanese jestingly call Taiwan the fifty-first state of the United States, since more than 80 percent of Taiwanese government personnel are graduates of American universities. A serious and organized version is the “Club 51” (wu yi julebu), established on July 4, 1994. Its motto is “Rooted in Taiwan with America in the Heart” (lizu Taiwan xinhuai Meiguo), promoting what they say was China historian John K. Fairbank’s original suggestion to turn Taiwan into the fifty-first state of the United States. The club’s ultimate goal is to call for a plebiscite on Taiwan’s union with the United States as its main agenda, and if agreed to by a majority of Taiwan citizens, present the proposal to the U.S. Congress.30 Part of the minoritization process of Chinese culture as ethnic culture in Ang Lee’s films also involves the fetishization of Chinese food. Ang Lee devoted about five minutes of the opening sequence of the film Eat Drink Man Woman to the preparation of exquisite Chinese dishes. After the release of this film, there were a series of two articles in the New York Times by food writer Suzanne Hamlin on the food in the film, complete with a recipe for “Stir-Fried Taiwanese Clams” and suggestions on how to find the dishes cooked in the film in local Chinese restaurants in New York. One particularly telling example: “To order any of the dishes seen in ‘Eat Drink Man Woman,’ requests must be made in advance. Shun Lee West, 43 West 65th Street, (212) 595–8895, will prepare any of the 14 dishes from the film, given 12 hours’ notice.”31 This passage captures the uncanny transformation of the foreign into the domestic, the national into the ethnic; the slippage is between Taiwan and the United States, mediated by Chinese food. Ang Lee seemed to have endorsed this transformation wholeheartedly—he himself went to this very same Chinese restaurant in New York and posed in front of a table full of luxurious dishes in a photo for the food writer. The Chinese food fetishism here in multicultural America is also appropriately gendered. It is revealing that while the Taiwan poster for Eat Drink Man Woman shows the venerable father in a pensive mood in the foreground (since Globalization and Minoritization
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the emphasis is on resuscitating patriarchy), the American poster shows only a sensual set of the three sisters with a beautiful, delectable dish of Chinese food— literalizing the Chinese metaphor that women are so beautiful they are edible (xiu se ke can). One reviewer notes, “The people in this movie are almost as great-looking as the food. One dish after another: the women slender, exquisite, volatile; the men, handsome but languorous, waiting to be awakened by the women.”32 And another reviewer: “The meals presented look mouthwatering, and the daughters are an equally tasty trio.”33 The transference of food metaphors to the women as tasty, delectable, consumable beauties neatly fits the porno-culinary genre in which the film falls. But more importantly, it registers the eroticization of the exotic female in the stereotypical mode of sexualization of Asian women, which is, of course, not at all a big surprise. The Father Knows Best trilogy, then, embodies the nationalist appeal to the Taiwan audience through resuscitated patriarchy and the Taiwanese craving for international fame, while embracing the exoticist requirements necessary for the approval of the American audience. Vis-à-vis the Taiwan audience, the films are national constructs, albeit the “national” has to remain ambiguous at times due to the confused designation of the relationship between China and Taiwan. Vis-àvis the American audience, the films embody the process of minoritization of national constructs into a consumable multiculturalism. On the surface, the national subject and the minority subject positions present contradictions. But upon closer examination, Ang Lee cleverly suppresses the potential contradictions. In all three films, the patriarchs are situated outside the U.S. economy of gender. They are old, they are objects of love by other Asian women, and they pose no threat whatsoever to the dominant economy of masculinity and femininity. The only attractive Asian male figure, Wai Tung in The Wedding Banquet, is also appropriately emasculated as a gay man, hence nonnormative. Curiously, therefore, what brings tears and sighs of relief to the Taiwan audience—the pathos of the patriarch— poses no threat to the voyeuristic enjoyment of the American audience. The national subject and the minority subject are successfully fused. More than that, there is ample proof that the minoritization of Chinese culture through exoticism and eroticism has itself become the desirable means of consumption in Taiwan,34 confirming Edward Said’s fear of the “dangers and temptations” of employing Orientalist structures of cultural domination by the dominated upon themselves.35 ]
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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American poster of Eat Drink Man Woman.
From the perspective of bilateral political relations between Taiwan and the United States, the two constructs of the national and the minority are closely intertwined, as Taiwan’s national fate is largely seen to be at the mercy of the United States. In no uncertain terms, Taiwan—a nation without an internationally recognized state, a non-nation-state nation—functions like a U.S. colony or minority state, with the Taiwan government and the entire populace deeply anxious about every minute change in U.S. rhetoric about Taiwan. Former president Bill Clinton’s public a‹rmation of the Three No’s policy toward Taiwan during his 1998 visit to China—“We don’t support independence for Taiwan, or two Chinas, or one Taiwan, one China, and we don’t believe that Taiwan should be a member in any organization for which statehood is a requirement”—is an instance of how Taiwan can be expendable for the enhancement of China-U.S. relations. How else should one name the U.S. power to determine Taiwan’s fate but as a new kind of colonialism, just as one struggles to name China’s containment policy toward Taiwan? For China and the United States, Taiwan functions as a minority to be conGlobalization and Minoritization
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tained, a die to be cast at will at each twist and turn in the relationship between the superpowers. On the one hand, the American Republican government’s use of Taiwan as a counterbalance to China is largely a continuation of Cold War policies that have now been conjoined with the rising discourse of China threat. On the other hand, the American Democratic government has always shown willingness to barter Taiwan in exchange for more engagement with China. In each case, Taiwan is a useful chip insofar as it weighs in on vilifying China or pacifying China, depending on the needs of the White House at a given moment. The minority subject position proves to be inescapable for Ang Lee as he begins to deepen his foray into Hollywood after the success of the trilogy. His directorial work in Sense and Sensibility (1995) has been quite uniformly applauded as a masterful feat, since somehow a “director from Taiwan” was able to capture quintessential Victorian England, prompting Prince Charles to say that he did not know England to be so beautiful until he saw the film at its royal premiere at the queen’s palace. Ang Lee employed numerous strategies of flexibility in rationalizing his participation in the making of the movie through a prominent evocation of the trope of translation. While facing the Taiwanese audience, he told them that although he had made an English film, since he grew up in Taiwan, he directed the film as if it were a Chinese film.36 To the Western audience, he recuperated age-old notions of Zen-like nonaction, Confucian morality, taichi (he actually taught Kate Winslet taichi during the shooting), “family values,” Confucian notions of ren (benevolence) and li (ritual), and so forth.37 Ang Lee also provided the following rationale: I feel very comfortable in the world of Jane Austen. Because as a society we Chinese are still in transition from a feudal culture and filial piety to the modern world. In many ways, I think the Chinese would understand 19th century England better than the English today because we are still there.38 In my films I’ve been trying to mix social satire and family drama. I realized that all along I had been trying to do Jane Austen without knowing it. Jane Austen was my destiny. I just had to overcome the cultural barrier.39
A linear notion of time that identifies contemporary Chineseness with Victorian England is the premise of his argument in the first quotation, where Chineseness is equated with the past and the nonmodern. In the second quotation, this iden]
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tification allows him to place his own artistic destiny as Jane Austen; it is Chinese traditionalism that gives him authentic credentials for shooting a film about Victorian England. In a diªerent interview he invoked the foot-binding of Chinese women as a cruel Chinese tradition,40 implying the emancipatory meanings of Western modernity. Likewise, Western film critics and reviewers also had to rationalize why Ang Lee could do such a superb job with the English material— hence various evocations of universalism that are often used in discourses of tokenization or model minority: Ang Lee is good at depicting generational relationships, family issues, subtlety of human relations, and he also understands “the strains and stresses of social ritual extremely well,”41 all of which are universal for all cultures. Retrospectively therefore, one reviewer would call Eat Drink Man Woman a result of the combination of “Austen-like acuity with Chinese food.” 42 What gender implications can we draw from this fluid marriage between translatable cultures? What is the gendered position of this translatability? To put it diªerently, what transpires in the process when a director obsessed with resuscitating patriarchy ends up directing a semifeminist film that criticizes patrilineal property inheritance law in England? The minority gender implications of the film for Ang Lee can be discerned in both the production and the reception of the film. Firstly, there is the occlusion of Ang Lee’s contribution to this film’s success. Although Sense and Sensibility received awards from the London Critics Circle Film Awards and the New York Film Critics Circle Award, swept up the best screenplay and best drama awards at the Golden Globes, and was nominated for seven Oscars at the Academy Awards, Ang Lee did not receive the best director award from the Golden Globes, nor was he even nominated for the Oscar in the best director category, to the dismay of many. I suggest that this is where flexibility ends. To put it bluntly for the moment: racism disregards Ang Lee’s strategic flexibility and universal appeal as irrelevant at moments of crucial production of meaning. The Academy Awards’ exercise of gendered and racialized minoritization is such a moment of arrest, a nodal point, in the process of flow. But the absence of the award for Ang Lee is damaging even besides charges of racism: it suggests that Ang Lee, unlike many of his coworkers who were nominated for the film (best picture, best screenplay, best actress, best supporting actress, best photography, best fashion design, and best music) was merely one of the screws in the making of the machine, his fortune merely being that the producer (who is the designated recipient of the best picture award) did well in hiring him. He was merely Globalization and Minoritization
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a hired hand, not the original artist who put the film together. “Ang Lee was no devotee of Jane Austen, having never read any of her books before he was hired to direct Thompson’s script”43 (emphasis mine), a critic notes unambiguously. Therefore it is not surprising to read the same film critic, Graham Fuller, arguing in the influential Sight and Sound that the shaping vision behind the film belongs to Emma Thompson and that the audience is not to believe the credit shown on the screen that says “A Film by Ang Lee.” After analyzing the absence of the father figure in the film, Fuller notes that the older daughter, Elinor, assumed the “male position” in the disenfranchised female Dashwood house and the “heroic role” in the narrative. Extending this argument, he concludes that Emma Thompson is “Sense and Sensibility’s auteur, its suªragette and heroic ‘male’ surrogate.”44 Thompson herself captures her brushes with Ang Lee during the shooting of the film: she and other actors had diªerent opinions on how certain shots should be done, and Ang Lee was supposedly “deeply hurt and confused.”45 Unlike shooting in Taiwan, where “directors are allowed to do exactly what they want,” where Ang Lee was supposedly accustomed to being “followed with chairs, ashtrays, wet towels, tea in constant attendance,” the actors in England dared to challenge Ang Lee’s despotic directorial style.46 Thompson observes: “It’s easy to feel a terrible bully with Ang”; and, “Hugh has taken to calling him ‘the Brute.’”47 Ang Lee began as the consummate combination of Oriental despot and “selfcontained calm,”48 one who was authoritarian and yet taught the crew Eastern rituals (including meditation, taichi, and the good luck opening ceremony)—all typical “Oriental” imports with their stereotypical authoritarianism, exoticism, and spirituality. Toward the end of the shooting, there is ample sense that Lee is no longer a despot but is tamed into a democratic director who listens to opinions and buys champagne and Chinese food for his crew. Ang Lee’s directorial debut in Hollywood, the making of Sense and Sensibility and its reception, involves the taming of the shrew, the feminization of a despot, and the minoritization of a national subject. When Ice Storm appeared, again to the acclaim of many, Ang Lee’s credibility as an Asian director was again tested, this time in making a film about 1970s America. With the success of Sense and Sensibility, all manner of rationales for Ang Lee’s superb direction compared his sensibility to Austen’s favorably, as I illustrated above. But Ice Storm was not at all showered with such rationales of compatibility. At the Cannes Film Festival of 1997, Ice Storm was branded as a Holly]
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wood commercial film by French judges and considered an inauthentic representation of America by American critics.49 When Ang Lee tries to translate not the remote Victorian England but 1973 New England in the home front, and very negatively at that, American film reviewers were not as forthcoming with their praise. It might have been just too close for comfort. FLEXIBILITY AND TRANSLATABILITY If Ang Lee embodies the Taiwan national subject at moments when he tries to appeal to the Taiwan audience, he at times prefers the anonymity of the U.S. minority position. When Ang Lee did not receive the Oscar nomination for best director for Sense and Sensibility, he begged Taiwan media reporters not to make it a “national” issue or national shame at the hands of racism, repeatedly saying that he feels less pressure as an individual, as opposed to being the national representative. When short Jackie Chan was paired with the tall Kareem Abdul Jabar at the Academy Awards ceremony the same year, it ignited an angry reaction in Siniticlanguage media across diªerent Sinophone communities accusing Hollywood of “dwarfing the Chinese” (aihua zhongguoren). Jackie Chan told the media just to leave him alone, and Ang Lee mentioned in an interview that he understood Chan’s reaction completely. Chan is honored with the label “Hong Kong National Treasure” and Ang Lee, “Taiwan National Treasure,” hence their subjection to the logic of minoritization was nothing short of humiliating for audiences in both Hong Kong and Taiwan.50 What with the economic prowess, cultural vitality, and martial arts know-how of Hong Kong and Taiwan, should these stars be subjected to the same demeaning processes of minoritization? The ease and flexibility with which Ang Lee oscillates between and incorporates these two subject positions begs the question of translation, or rather, translatability in the transpacific political economy of power. The success of his trilogy owes much to the translation of a national culture (of China or Taiwan) to that of an ethnic culture. This translatability ensured easy assimilation, commodification, and consumption of an ethnic culture by an American suburban audience. It is perhaps ironic to evoke here Walter Benjamin’s rather positive assessment of a work’s translatability as the mark of its capacity for future flowering in the afterlife as a translation.51 If for Benjamin translatability secured a longer life for a literary work, translatability of Ang Lee’s films commandeers a bigger, Globalization and Minoritization
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transnational market and higher profit. If Benjamin’s translatability of the original text presumes a linear temporal relationship between itself and the translation, Ang Lee’s translatability is built on flexible encodings that can be readily decoded by both American and Taiwan audiences, so that the reception of both Taiwan and American audiences is contemporary, coeval, and simultaneous. But this contemporaneity encoded by easy translatability is more a symptom of the neocolonial cultural relationship between Taiwan and the United States, by which Taiwan is minoritized. Translatability, in this sense, is a necessary mode for the minoritized to acquire access to and acceptance by the center. Through flexible negotiations between national and ethnic cultural codes, easy consumption and assimilation are guaranteed. This is what I call “decipherable localism,” the presentation of local national culture with the anticipation of ready decipherability by the nonlocal audience. The reception of both Sense and Sensibility and Ice Storm, furthermore, shows how flexibility and translatability can be denied to Ang Lee and he can be squarely placed back to the minority position by U.S. racial politics. Translatability, in other words, is accepted only when it is nonthreatening. Unassimilatability becomes a ready excuse to circumscribe Lee’s success as a foreigner, hence the lingering doubt about the authenticity of Ang Lee’s translation of New England cultural codes of 1973. The coproduction and dialectic operation of neocolonial minoritization of Sinophone culture from Taiwan and the racialized, gendered minoritization of an immigrant cultural producer in the United States have circumscribed and will continue to constrict the production of true contemporaneity, even for someone like Ang Lee, who seemed to have crossed many boundaries. Although I agree with Rey Chow that there is power in the superficial and the surface in cinema in their ability to reach a wider audience and thus make a diªerence,52 it is important to continue to ask on whose terms and on what terms that reach is made possible. If translatability and flexibility that draw from the terms of the dominant can easily be contained for assimilation and consumption, they are also limited forms of empowerment when institutional nodal points arbitrate upon the worth of minority and immigrant cultural production by way of conservative and reactionary criteria. The flexible subject’s resistance toward the containment of the nationstates by evoking transnational paradigms of subjectivity is itself dictated by what the nation-states involved will allow. In examining popular culture, such as popular fiction and cinema, this contractual relationship between the flexible subject ]
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and the nation-state becomes especially apparent, as marketability has always been a game of marking the right boundaries or targeting the right consumers. Marketing specialists have always known to heed cultural diªerences traced along national borders. In the constellation of forces operating in the creation and reception of Ang Lee’s films, the nodal points of meaning, as I have shown above, will seem to continue tracing national boundaries by alternately extolling nationalist patriarchy and gendered minoritization. Sinophone articulations, when encountering multiple power dynamics, must negotiate with diverse nodal points of meaning, including the problematic calls of pan-Chineseness and racialized assimilationism.
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Each individual is the synthesis not only of existing relations but of the history of these relations. —Antonio Gramsci, “Notes for an Introduction and Approach to the Study of Philosophy and the History of Culture” (ca. 1932) An image is nothing more than a relation. —Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary (1940)
2
A Feminist Transnationality In this chapter, I examine a particular kind of transnationality in its intersection with feminist subjectivity in what may be called a feminist transnationality. The two terms here, feminist and transnationality, are not givens but points of interrogation. I say “a particular kind of transnationality” as a way to circumscribe my discussion of transnationality as a mode of representation constituted by immigration, not the feminist transnational collectivity or coalition that engages in feminist work across national borders. Thus feminist transnationality should be distinguished from transnational feminism or transnational feminist practice.1 In designating the work of Chinese immigrant artist Hung Liu as working through a particular kind of feminist transnationality, my intent is to register the location of the immigrant artist articulating a gendered visual economy deftly negotiating multiple cultural and cross-cultural nodal points of meaning and signification, inflected by transnational crossings through immigration, returns to China, and returns to the United States. ]
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Liu is not merely an ethnic minority subject as a consequence of immigration who maintains a racialized, minor perspective in her relationship with majority culture; she is also a Chinese national subject who keeps the category of China’s national culture alive in her work as a form of cultural capital, very similar to that in Ang Lee’s early work discussed in chapter 1. Both of these subject positions are underscored by what may be called a strong liberal, humanist, and feminist sentiment, which sets up a binaric structure of criticism of various forms of oppression. The becoming of this feminist subjectivity after immigration, based largely on a logic of antagonism against multiplex agents (Chinese patriarchy, the Maoist state, the U.S. state, and the Western gaze), poses a certain narrative of liberation which itself needs to be interrogated critically. In this sense, this chapter can be read as a twin to chapter 1: the concern in both of these chapters is the logic of travel of culture across the Pacific, that is, a transnational political economy of Sinophone visual representation. A gendered structuration— one male and socalled popular artist, and one female and so-called serious artist—is revealed within this transnational economy, with one mirroring and implying the other. A first step in a critical analysis of feminist transnationality therefore must examine its position within what I have been calling a “global multiculturalism,”2 or what Kobena Mercer calls, unambiguously, “multiculti-commodification of ‘diªerence’ in U.S.-centered global capitalism.”3 By global multiculturalism, I mean the process in which national cultures of the globe are often reduced to ethnic cultures in the political economy of transnational representation. Hence, the domestic, American-style multiculturalism takes on a global form and sometimes functions as the model for understanding other national cultures. The world of nations and national cultures appears increasingly to have become the world of ethnicities and ethnic cultures in the new global regime of multiculturalism. Insofar as Hung Liu as an artist practices a kind of feminist transnationality as implied within the logic of both national (as a Chinese immigrant in the United States) and global multiculturalisms (as someone who flaunts Chinese cultural capital in the global terrain), we need to ask questions about what happens after the normalization of multiculturalism in both contexts. When diversity is the predominant term of value in these multicultural contexts, which manifest a more complex management of culture and ethnicity, we need to look for possibilities and complicities in unpredictable places. We may well ask the question, When criticism as a mode of representation becomes obligatory, predictable, or fulfills A Feminist Transnationality
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a certain expectation for a minority, ethnic, or national cultural worker, can criticism itself be complicit? If my discussion of Ang Lee’s flexible subjectivity (as a Taiwanese and a Taiwanese American simultaneously) in the context of the transnationalizaton of the popular film market has shown that promises of diªerent scenarios of identity may in fact resuscitate many of the old binarisms and hierarchies constructed along national and gender lines, what can the so-called high art of Hung Liu promise? Can the negativity of high art—as that which negates popular culture and thus rejects and prevents the reification and instrumentalization of culture in a logic of negative dialectics made famous by Frankfurt school thinkers4—itself be commodified? Would it be surprising if the trump card of high art, that is, its autonomy, is itself precariously related to instrumentalization and commodification precisely by way of a pretense to autonomy? As was the case for analyzing Ang Lee’s work, the frames of my analysis will move back and forth between what are traditionally called ethnic studies and area studies. This is necessitated by Hung Liu’s work, which addresses both the condition of being an ethnic minority in the United States and the condition of being a national subject from China deeply invested in Chinese history and culture. This crossing over, or straddling, has of late become increasingly commonplace as more and more Chinese immigrant artists continue to draw from the vast resource that is “China” for their art rather than cutting it oª as the land and experience of the past as would have been more likely the case during the Cold War years. The specific globalizing context of China’s rising political and economic power is the conjuncture for this emerging transnationality where Chinese national culture is increasingly seen as a cultural asset rather than a liability. Tired of the usual fare of ethnic Chinese culture as food, attire, and mores of urban Chinatowns, the mainstream American viewer is also ready to venture into the more “authentic” Chinese culture in and from China, since China-knowledge is increasingly seen as crucial to continuous American economic advantage in the twenty-first century. That China is the largest market in the world is a powerful reason to enlarge one’s cultural knowledge about a venerable civilization. As to how this “authentic” Chinese culture becomes subjected to a representational economy that is nonetheless circumscribed by a politics of ethnicity and minoritization is the process of global multiculturalism. However, when this subjection becomes an enabling mechanism in the classic Foucaultian scenario of subjectivity, ]
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we might find that this logic of subjection can itself be strategically utilized to gain subjectivity for the immigrant artist. The question at stake is therefore a very diªerent one from those we usually expect: What if this process of subjection and subjectivization is anticipated prior to the event? Our postmodern historicity challenges us to think beyond tired structures of opposition here. To analyze, specifically, Hung Liu’s artwork and its politics of feminist transnationality in the context of globalizing multicultural formation, I propose two other operative concepts: assemblage and antagonism. I propose to read Hung Liu’s work from diªerent periods dealing with diªerent subject matters as constituting a metaphorical assemblage of identities. Second, together or separate, these identities pose various kinds of resistances, or antagonisms, against diªerent agents of power. Assemblage: The third edition of the American Heritage College Dictionary gives the following definitions of assemblage: “Assemblage: n. 1a. The act of assembling. b. The state of being assembled. 2. A collection of people or things; a gathering. 3. A fitting together of parts, as in a machine. 4. A sculptural composition of miscellaneous objects.” According to the first definition, assemblage has both voluntary and involuntary dimensions. This is useful in thinking about how identities can be actively formulated by the artist (through practices of identification), and yet at the same time how identities may be ineluctable constructs of historical imposition beyond one’s control (one is being identified as such). In the second definition, the idea of collection, of juxtaposition, and of gathering of people, things, and also fragments is emphasized. This gathering of things can constitute an organic whole, such as a machine, as in the third definition, or a three-dimensional sculptural art, gathering various objects together in a meaningful composition as in the fourth definition. In this case, then, identities can be understood as fragments (Hung Liu actually calls her art “identity fragments”), and their various relationships can be understood in terms of gatherings, mechanical organicism, or artful, self-conscious composition. Assemblage as metaphor provides a good working formula for understanding the complexity of identity formation as well as the multiplicity of identities and their interrelations. Furthermore, instead of a static conception of identity as multiplicity and hybridity— or to use art terms, of montage and collage—assemblage has a more active dimension. For instance, the form of assemblage, as sculptural composition of miscellaneous objects, can be distinguished from both the montage and collage. Montage comes from the French term monter, meaning “to mount,” and refers A Feminist Transnationality
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to a two-dimensional art; collage comes from the French word coller, meaning “to paste,” and is also mainly two-dimensional and only occasionally uses low relief; assemblage comes from the French word assembler, meaning “to collect,” and is a mixed-media construction that is always three-dimensional. It can be freestanding or mounted onto a panel and framed.5 The three-dimensional properties of assemblage allow us to conceptualize identity fragments as having both temporal and spatial dimensions, hence not only the presence of history but also the spatial, geographical contexts of the formation, configuration, and production of identities. I suggest that the totality of Hung Liu’s oil and mixed-media paintings also enact an assemblage, each painting a historical and spatial fragment, constructing and enacting diªerent narratives of identity. Antagonism: Using Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouªe’s notion of antagonism, with which they refer to the expression of “forms of resistance,” such as feminist resistance toward patriarchy, lesbigay resistance to heterosexual hegemony, minority resistance to racism, and others such as urban, ecological, antiauthoritarian, anti-institutional struggles,6 I view Hung Liu’s work as an assemblage of identities that express multiple antagonisms against diªerent agents of power in diªerent contexts. Hence, in one painting she may criticize Chinese patriarchy’s oppression of Chinese women, in another painting she may criticize the dominant American culture’s minoritization of Chinese immigrants, and in yet another painting she may criticize the Western exoticization of Chinese women. These diªerent antagonisms, sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping and intersecting, sometimes even contradictory, are made possible by the assemblage of identities her works construct, moving freely within a vast resource of Chinese culture and history, particularly in its encounter with the West and its recent history of Cultural Revolution, and to a lesser extent, Chinese American culture and history. Hung Liu was born in 1948 and came to the United States in 1984, with the accidental historical dates of 48 and 84 in a perfect mirror reversal. Very accomplished and by all measures considered a successful artist, Hung Liu has held numerous individual and group exhibitions and has been the subject of many interviews, articles, catalogs, and videos. As a matter of practice, Hung Liu works with photographs to problematize the authenticity of photographic representation of reality (a metaphor for her critical approach to her training in socialist realism in China, since she was taught that art can only be drawn from real life, not another representation) and to deal with the eªects of memory, time, and history, ]
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as well as a multitude of other issues. She projects photographs onto a canvas using a slide projector, then paints the photograph onto the canvas, making her own revisions and modifications to the image along the way. Then she often adds sculptural relief objects or frames to the piece and drips linseed oil over the finished piece for specific eªects. These works all tend to be of monumental size. Broadly, I will divide a decade of her work (from the late 1980s to the late 1990s) in terms of their objects of antagonism into four categories or identity fragments in order to more fully analyze the paradoxes of feminist transnationality. IDENTITY FRAGMENT 1: FEMINIST ANTAGONISM AGAINST CHINESE PATRIARCHY Hung Liu based a series of paintings on photographs of late nineteenth century prostitutes contained in a book that she discovered in the Beijing Film Archive. Supposedly, a book such as this one served as a catalogue of available prostitutes for customers, in this case, the more high-class courtesans. With these paintings, Hung Liu makes unambiguous statements about the commodification, eroticization, and objectification of women in Chinese society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, thereby stating a clear antagonism against Chinese patriarchy. In view of a politics of feminist transnationality as well as the seductive surfaces of these images, these portraits suggest a much more complicated structure of desire across China and the United States, however. Since Liu’s paintings are meant for exhibition and consumption in the United States, the Western gaze is anticipated even prior to the Chinese gaze and this anticipation necessarily triangulates the structure of desire and makes ambiguous the question of female agency. With Olympia (1992, 50 × 85 × 11, figure 7) and Olympia II (1992, 34 × 86 × 7, plate 1), an unequivocal feminist reading can be readily oªered: Here the women are not only the objects of gaze but also the literal objects of commodification, since they are originally oªered as sexual goods in the flesh market. Liu reinforces this interpretation by placing artificial flowers on a shelf in the former, suggesting a metonymical relationship between the woman and the flowers, sharing the same purpose as display. Similarly, in the second assemblage, a shelf in the same design holds up ornamental vases as well as an intricately carved wood window panel. The vases and the carved wood panel both serve decorative functions, while the empty bowls A Feminist Transnationality
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
7
Hung Liu, Olympia (1992, 50 × 85 × 11). Courtesy of the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
(found also in Olympia) under the vases are Liu’s frequently used code for the Chinese patriarchal conception of women as empty or valueless.7 The unambiguous subtext to these paintings is Manet’s famous painting by the same name that was a sensation when it was first shown in Paris. Instead of depicting passive, eye-avoiding female nudes, Manet painted a woman who looked back directly at her gazer. Likewise, in this and subsequent paintings with the same theme, Hung Liu’s prostitutes all gaze back, reputedly coached to do so by their photographers. Hung Liu has remarked on their gazing back as suggesting the possibility of agency in the vein of Manet.8 In this basic structure of gaze, the object of the gaze (Chinese prostitutes) gazes back and even preempts the gaze by the gazer (Chinese male customers), turns him into an object, whose voyeurism is then theoretically unsettled. This is the most predictable level of reading of this series, which we may call the first level of interpretation for which the object of a feminist antagonism is Chinese patriarchy. What about the anticipated gaze of the West? The artist’s silence about this ]
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gaze is intriguing, insofar as this gaze is what determines the paintings’ marketability, collectibility, and their status as art in the United States, where the artist is situated. We may evoke here Gayatri Spivak’s trenchant critique of colonial gender dynamics, where white men may be seen as saviors of native women, hence the ironic formula that “white men are saving brown women from brown men.”9 More than anything else, this poses an ethical ambiguity of a Third World or transnational feminist whose goal of overturning native patriarchy may become complicit with white male colonial patriarchy. For Hung Liu to be silent about the anticipated Western gaze and its implications, therefore, can be troubling. This silence absolves the Orientalist viewer from worrying about his or her voyeuristic pleasure derived from gazing at these Chinese Olympias in their exotic and sexual allure; the object of criticism is Chinese patriarchy, not the Orientalist viewer. Having been placed outside the hermeneutic circle, and thus without the burden of critique or the burden of rescue, the Orientalist can suspend any self-reflexive judgment, thus giving the pleasure principle its reign during the experience of viewing. As Algerian scholar Malek Alloula has shown in a diªerent context, the prostitute gazing back in colonial photography can reinforce, not undermine, Orientalist narratives of the sexually promiscuous women.10 The fact that the prostitutes were originally directed by the photographers to gaze into the camera corroborates this. The selling point here is the prostitute who gazes daringly, encoding transgression as erotic appeal. This puts into doubt whether such a gaze of the Orientalized woman, whether it be looked at by Chinese patriarchy or the West, can escape the circularity of the masculinist and Orientalist economy of desire. Even though Hung Liu intends to reinscribe the masculinist economy of desire in the Chinese context, the question is whether reinscription can be automatically determined as a form of critique. With this reinscription being more or less stereotypically liberal feminist in orientation, we ask instead whether reinscription reinforces the original by extending the life of the original in the act of translation. By reproducing the image of the courtesan in the Western context, Hung Liu has retained the Oriental allure and seductive materiality of the image, whose viewers have been increased by this act of translation. On the one hand, the two basic layers of discourses here—the photographic objectification and commodification of the Chinese courtesan, and Hung Liu’s copying and translation of the photograph—remain complimentary layers that do not cancel each other out. There is an overlapping or a duplication of male desire from China to the A Feminist Transnationality
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United States. Here a putative feminist intent may just be a tired gesture, long ago anticipated by the most basic theory of gaze, retaining no ambiguity for genuinely critical possibilities. The erotic allure of these prostitutes for the Chinese male customers partly arises, furthermore, from their Western accoutrements. With the upholstered couches upon which they lie and the cultural meanings of photography in the last turn-of-the-century China as a specifically Western product, these photographs are themselves Western mediated diagrams of desire for Chinese men. It was common practice, for instance, for certain high-class prostitutes to wear Western clothes and to show oª their use of Western technology (such as the telephone), thereby eliciting transgressive desire.11 A typical Cantonese song from turn-of-the century San Francisco Chinatown written from the perspective of a prostitute illustrates this nicely: Yes, it tickles my funny bone to tell you; The fashion now is Western. We in this business of pleasing men must keep up with the trend. Our dresses must be new and in style, Even if we have to sell and pawn. We’ll buy all the clothes we want. Doll ourselves up like beautiful American-borns; Surely the men will find us very pleasant.12
Recall that in colonial India, Westernized women were condemned by male nationalist narratives as being like prostitutes.13 Similarly, both Westernized Chinese immigrant women and American-born, second-generation Chinese American women were criticized by their male immigrant community as acting like prostitutes in turn-of-the-century San Francisco Chinatown.14 Native patriarchy under threat, whether under colonialism or minoritization, oftentimes reacted similarly to those women who transgressed the boundaries of native culture. The converse of that—that prostitutes were expected to be Westernized—spells out the double logic of male desire with two divergent expectations for wives/daughters and prostitutes. As figures of transgression, prostitutes can dress their part; their Westernization adds to their erotic capital. It is a process of selective endorsement of Westernization to which even the Chinese men themselves secretly or openly aspire. Taken to the transnational context, or more specifically, the context of the ]
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American art market and viewership, the relationship among gender, desire, and Westernization is further mediated. Su‹cient similarity in the body of the exotic— or hybridity of a nonthreatening sort—can replicate the same logic of desire for the Western male viewer. She is Chinese and yet is surrounded by some familiar Western objects. Distance between the object of gaze and the Western subject of gaze is momentarily bridged through such an act of recognition of familiar objects. This recognition is historically specific, but also translates easily across time and space. The fact that these paintings are colorful and visually pleasing works of art helps underscore this translatability. When sexism and Orientalism have all supposedly been dealt with from decades of rigorous critiques, a stereotypical antisexist or anti-Orientalist position can easily become a marketing strategy or an empty gesture that serves as an alibi for purposes that might resolidify Orientalism. By not asking the viewer too much beyond an expected critique of sexism and Orientalism, the paintings become glossy surfaces upon which we witness the collusion of male desire on both sides of the Pacific. Although the images of these women may be made faint by the dripping eªects of linseed oil, which Hung Liu used to mark the passage of time, the nonetheless glossy, colorful, ornate, exotic, and stunning images of these women in their complete ornamental regalia seduce their viewers to peep into the hidden spaces of Chinese femininity in courtesan quarters and the imperial harem, aªording them the pleasure of voyeurism. These women’s gazing back, as mentioned above, is back at the Chinese patriarchy within the diagetic frame of the works, not the American viewers, who then can assume an innocent pleasure of a renewed sort of Orientalism freed from the fear of accusations of sexism or racialized eroticism. Here the structure of gaze absolves the Western gazer, whose chief experience is pleasure and voyeurism, one that is paradoxically legitimized by Hung Liu’s feminism. A new Orientalist viewer, male or female, who is superficially feminist, is thus successfully constructed outside the frame. IDENTITY FRAGMENT 2: LIBERAL ANTAGONISM AGAINST THE MAOIST STATE In a series of paintings and assemblages created between 1993 and 1995, Hung Liu articulated a clear intent of critique against Maoism and the Maoist state (1949–76) A Feminist Transnationality
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from a more or less liberal and feminist perspective. This involves a liberal perspective on Maoist politics and a feminist perspective on the particular form of gender suppression in Maoist China, with the two reinforcing each other. Representative of this set of works, Swan Song (1993, 61 × 91 5/8 × 3, plate 2), consists of two panels of musical scores from the Cultural Revolution model opera The Red Lantern, entitled A Proletarian Fights All His Life for the People’s Liberation. In the middle are two ballet dancers from the ballet version of the model opera The Red Detachment of Women. Here the song lyrics and the androgynous dancers emphasize the primacy of class struggle and the repression of femininity. Hung Liu has mentioned in interviews that she considers the Maoist state to be authoritarian, in which class has taken over individual identity such as the gender identity of the dancers. Allegedly liberating women from traditional patriarchy, the Maoist state instead inculcated them into a Maoist patriarchy in which the gender of women is repressed, and familial and romantic love is displaced by class love. Mayfair Yang has, in this regard, called this procedure of gender suppression in the name of gender equality that hides a male norm “gender erasure.”15 Upon closer inspection of Swan Song, one notices small inserted circles depicting a pair of bound feet and dainty hands, two symbols of hyperfemininity celebrated by pre-Mao, traditional patriarchy. If traditional patriarchy valorized and fetishized bound feet and dainty hands, Maoist patriarchy fetishized masculine women whose feminine features were erased. This is clearly a reactive reversal and thus replicates the logic of oppression by taking it to the other extreme: under traditional patriarchy women can only be feminine; under Mao, women must suppress their femininity. These are two diªerent, but nonetheless equally problematic, regimes of domination. The woman’s bound feet may have been “liberated” in Mao’s China,16 but the woman has become more like a man devoid of gender subjectivity. In an earlier painting entitled Golden Lotus/Red Shoe (1990), an overgendered foot-bound woman is similarly juxtaposed with a degendered woman revolutionary to similar eªect. Just as the contrast is dramatic, the underlying critique is provocative. Liu extends this critique into a cross-cultural one in Reddest Red Sun (1993) where, onto the printed score of My Spirit Storms the Heavens (also from The Red Lantern) was superimposed a Victorian lady carrying a parasol. Here Maoist discipline of sexuality through its displacement by revolutionary discourse is literally coincided and overlapped with Victorian prudishness and denial of sexuality, ]
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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Hung Liu, Father’s Day (1994, 54 × 72). Courtesy of the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
thereby departicularizing the patriarchal management of women as a prevalent condition across the cultural, geographical, and ideological divides between Maoist China and Victorian England. In the way in which these two works are di‹cult to read without a knowledge of Maoist gender politics, they maintain the need for a degree of labor in the act of interpretation. In other words, they are not as readily consumable as the first set of paintings of prostitutes, and they are also not as translatable into an obligatory and predictable feminist critique. Hung Liu added autobiographical elements to her critique of Maoism in Father’s Day (1994, 54 × 72, figure 8), Grandma (1993, 101 1/2 × 60, figure 9) and AvantGarde (1993, 116 × 43, figure 10). In the first of these three paintings, Hung Liu begins with a photograph of her first meeting with her father. Hung Liu’s father was in the Guomindang military and was imprisoned after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China for the rest of his life. Hung Liu’s mother had to divorce him in order not to be persecuted by association. Hung Liu never saw her father when she was growing up, and decades later, when she was in the States, A Feminist Transnationality
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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Hung Liu, Grandma (1993, 101 1/2 × 60). Courtesy of the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
she discovered that he was still alive in a labor camp. She negotiated his release, and this is the painting of herself holding her fragile father, a strong protest against political persecution. The door frame carving on the upper right denoting objecthood and decorative function here suggests a diªerent function from those in the prostitute paintings: A fragment tossed around by fickle political and ideological changes, her father is like a forgotten object, a tiny mark used only to decorate the annals of history, if at all. Here Liu uses the cutout method, which eliminates background and focuses the viewer’s attention on the persons thus emphatically presented. This method adds a strong emotive quality to the work, which hopes to move the viewer. Cutout figures are usually the domain of propagandistic hagiography, hence Liu’s intentional use of this method in this and many other works registers a formal intent to critique the ideological use of art. In Grandmother, Liu again reinscribes the ]
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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Hung Liu, Avant-Garde (1993, 116 × 43). Courtesy of the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
cutout form to celebrate an ordinary person, her grandmother. The sculptural quality of the cutout brings special attention to the wrinkled hands of the grandmother, which visually signify the hardships she has endured. For both works, cutouts eliminate the immediate context or background of the images presented and thus make them transportable to other contexts. The portability thus implied adds a uniA Feminist Transnationality
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versal dimension to the oppression of ordinary people, as something that could happen anywhere. It is the use of the cutout form in the third of these works, Avant-Garde, based on a photograph of Liu as a young woman in military uniform, that brings out her ambiguous stance on Maoist gender politics. If the cutout figure is celebratory, as in the logic of the two works analyzed above, the militarized figure here suggests a degree of agency that transcends the capitalist gender binarism between the masculine and the feminine. Can there be agency in degendered womanhood? This is a question that we can fruitfully ask of Maoist China, where the gender norm hid a masculinist premise but where women were legally and otherwise more equal to men than in capitalist societies. If recognizably essentialized Chinese culture can serve as cultural capital for the artist in the prostitute paintings, it may be fruitful to ask whether Maoism or Chinese political history can also serve as cultural capital. In the spate of trauma narratives set in Maoist China and written in English by Chinese immigrants, it has become obvious that this particular form of historical trauma renders itself to easy commodification.17 One cannot but be reminded of Frank Chin’s lament that ethnic autobiographies are a genre for sellouts as only the minoritized will confess.18 Though highly problematic in its masculinist premise when Chin prescribes what ethnic writing should be, Chin’s critique might also contain a grain of truth. Why else is there such a prevalence of memoirs and autobiographies if the market cannot sustain them, and why not as many in other genres? Hong Kong writer Wong Bik-wan has this to say about these writers: “Those Chinese who write in English write about the Cultural Revolution, big persecutions, footbinding, fengshui, searching for [cultural] roots, like ancient spirits and ghosts in a cave of horror inside a cheap entertainment park. Very cheap, very fake.”19 Without mincing her words, Wong accuses these writers of a showy victimology that “by displaying their wounds and suªering, they ask, ‘How would you help me?’”20 This is not to say that trauma under Maoism cannot be written about or represented visually, but that it is in the how of the representation that one’s ethical stance can be determined. The narratives that clearly cater to either the paranoia about China or the “China threat” for purposes of financial gain are to be distinguished from the more complex and ambiguous narratives that show multiple perspectives on a complex phenomenon. Some of Hung Liu’s paintings about Maoism may in this sense be seen as ethical constructs that maintain a degree of ]
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ambiguity even while other works of hers may appeal to a liberal feminist universalism through hyperfeminized and hypervisualized Chinese womanhood. IDENTITY FRAGMENT 3: ANTAGONISM OF A MINORITY SUBJECT Of all of Hung Liu’s works, this set of paintings dating from 1988 to the mid1990s has received the most favorable attention in studies of multicultural art.21 Explicitly positioned as an immigrant and a minority subject in the United States, Hung Liu registers the process of immigration as a process of minoritization with all its attendant implications of subjectivization in the Foucaultian fashion of subjection, which in the U.S. context refers to a history of racialized exclusion and stereotyping. Rather than flaunting Chinese cultural essentialism as cultural capital, in these works that are mostly created simultaneously with, and some slightly earlier than, the previous two sets of works, she focuses on her minority status and situates it in terms of the history of Chinese immigration to the United States. She examines the history of Chinese immigrants who were detained at Angel Island via a painted photograph from that era (Customs, 1996), the fantasy of the Gold Mountain by the early immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century in an installation made up of two hundred thousand fortune cookies in the shape of a mountain left to rot in the exhibition hall ( Jiu Jin Shan, 1994), the trade route between Baltimore and China in an exhibition focused on Baltimore’s role as America’s Canton, and various racist stereotypes of the Chinese people in the United States. The much-reprinted and talked-about painting Resident Alien (1988, 90 × 60, figure 11), shows a parody of Liu’s green card. Although she was born in 1948, she marks her date of birth as 1984, the year she came to the United States. The new date of birth in a sense marks her rebirth in the United States, where she has repeatedly announced in numerous interviews that she found artistic freedom and liberation; for her, 1984 marked “the birth of an independent artist after reaching the States.”22 But the moment we note the conjunction between the liberating potential of her immigration and her criticism of the Chinese state’s repression of artistic freedom, we are confronted with her new name, “Fortune Cookie,” an American invention, a cliché about Chinese culture, a trivialization of Chinese tradition, and a racial stereotype. She is not only collapsed into a stereotype, she A Feminist Transnationality
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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Hung Liu, Resident Alien (1988, 90 × 60). Courtesy of the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
is also marked as “alien.” The naturalization and immigration agency and its green cards represent the U.S. state, that which circumscribed the potential freedom from Maoist repression. Three identities collide: her Chinese identity, the American identity she would like to claim, and the American identity she is assigned. The painting is also uncannily Orwellian; George Orwell wrote his novel 1984 in 1948. To further debunk the fortune cookie stereotype, Liu created the Cookie Queen (1995, 67 × 48). This cutout painting was first shown in the exhibition in Baltimore mentioned above, commemorating its bustling China trade in the nineteenth century. It was flanked by a painting of jazz singer Billie Holiday on one side and baseball legend Babe Ruth on the other. Holiday and Ruth are of course famous figures known to many, while the woman worker in the fortune cookie factory depicted here is anonymous. “Her identity—indeed, her fortune in life—is unknown to us, since Americans who go to Chinese restaurants have virtually no awareness of the workers who stuª glad tidings into fortune cookies.”23 By the sheer act of juxtaposition and its ostentatious incongruity, the painting puts the nameless woman on an equal plane with the two celebrity figures, who are all equally memorialized in large cutouts. In similarly themed works such as Chinaman (1995, 75 × 36) and Laundry Lady (1995, 72 × 38), Liu provides constructive representations of racialized stereotypes. The title Chinaman refers to the racist ]
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epithet used to denigrate Chinese men since the nineteenth century. By painting an ordinary lion dancer in monumental size, by unconventionally showing his face in an exalted gesture (hence he is no longer just an instrument that hides behind the mask and moves the exotic lion to dance), and by presenting him as a cutout figure, Liu ascribes heroic qualities to the racist stereotype of the “Chinaman.” Recall that Maxine Hong Kingston revised the term Chinamen into China Men in her book of the same title as an act of restoration of the manhood and dignity of those whose “M” was dwarfed in Chinamen. Hers was an arduous historical reconstruction as well as narrative representation of the history of Chinese men in all their multifarious and important contributions to the United States in order to reject the narrativizing of their history as emasculation. Hung Liu may be seen as following her footsteps here. IDENTITY FRAGMENT 4: ANTAGONISM AGAINST THE WESTERN GAZE Hung Liu created a series of paintings based on photographs about China and Chinese people taken by Western travelers, from a collection entitled The Face of China as Seen by Photographers and Travelers, 1860–1912.24 This set of paintings oªers a diªerent structure of gaze than those about prostitutes as Liu’s reinscription is supposedly of the Western gaze on Chinese objects. In the paintings about prostitutes, a Chinese immigrant artist looks at Chinese men looking at Chinese prostitutes and anticipates the gaze of the Western viewer and art buyer; in these paintings, a Chinese immigrant woman artist looks at Western men looking at Chinese men and women and equally anticipates the Western gaze. In either case, we need to posit the shared, seeming external Western gaze inside the frame, its anticipation structuring the visual economy of the apparent and already multilayered gazing. The right panel in the diptych Souvenir (1990, 48 × 64 × 8, figure 13) shows the image of a few well-suited Western men posing in front of a Chinese prisoner locked in a wooden cage in a photograph shot in September 1904 in Shanghai. According to the exhibition catalog, the cage was a form of execution for criminals: “Major criminals were sometimes left to die publicly as an example to the innocent. A ‘cage’ was constructed so that the inmate could either stand on tiptoe to relieve the pressure around his neck or finally suspend himself until he is A Feminist Transnationality
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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Original photograph depicting execution in old Shanghai, September 1904, from The Face of China as Seen by Photographers and Travelers, 1860–1912 (New York: Aperture, 1978), 89.
strangled.”25 The clean and well-dressed Westerners are in stark contrast with the prisoner and the few Chinese men shown partially on the edges of the frame. The facial expressions of most of these white men are rather hard to read, but the man second from the right wears a distinct grin under a well-shaped moustache. This man also gazes into the camera, self-consciously posing for the photograph. This posing accentuates the function of the caged prisoner as a spectacle, a “souvenir,” as Hung Liu’s entitlement of this nameless photograph implies, for the Westerners to be brought back home. Hung Liu’s mimicry of this photograph into a painting suggests two simultaneous dynamics. On the one hand, there is the obvious critique of the voyeuristic gaze of the intended Western viewers of the photograph as well as the gaze of the Western men inside the photograph. These Western men had first gazed at the prisoner, posed with him, then anticipated the photography to be a record of ]
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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Hung Liu, Souvenir (1990, 48 × 64 × 8). Courtesy of the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
their witness of Chinese cruelty to be seen by other Western viewers. The gazes here are quite uniform in the sense that they are all positioned to turn China into the embodiment of otherness and diªerence. The few partial images of the Chinese men in the photograph, obviously showing curiosity at the photographer and not at the prisoner, suggest their own indiªerence to the prisoner as well. The dynamic here is reminiscent of that of the infamous photograph of Chinese onlookers gleefully watching a Chinese revolutionary being beheaded by a Japanese soldier that Lu Xun so viscerally criticized as a quintessential representation of characteristic Chinese apathy and ignorance in the early twentieth century. Hung Liu’s critique does not seem to have centered so much on Chinese apathy as on the Western gaze as a modernizing and colonizing one. On the other hand, the second interpretation takes into account Hung Liu’s anticipation of the first dynamic being received and gazed at by American viewers of her painting based on the photograph. In other words, the question here is A Feminist Transnationality
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the coincidence among all three layers of Western gazes: those within the photograph, those looking at the photograph, and those looking at Liu’s reinscription of the photograph in the painting. For those critical viewers who are more adept at decoding Hung Liu’s intention, the three layers of Western gaze would gaze back at them with a weighty ethical and moral question about their own positionality as the voyeur. For others, the three layers of gaze can easily collapse into the same voyeuristic gaze, constituting a triple form of violation of the gazed-at object from three diªerent historical moments. The more Western gazes the photograph accumulates over the decades through its exhibition, circulation, and publication, the more powerful and solidified that voyeurism becomes. Farther and farther away from 1904, the image is more and more capable of becoming, for the Western viewer, the embodiment of Chinese cruelty and apathy. Its primitivism is reinforced by the passing of time. This voyeurism in turn inflicts wounds upon contemporary Chinese pride, which is exploding at the seams as China begins to ascend as a global power. The wounds easily become displaced as justifications for patriotic pride, which articulates itself through the vilification and vindication of the West’s “demonization of China.”26 Liu’s reinscription, therefore, may yet be caught in such an oppressive discursive and imagistic logic of otherness and nationalism and paradoxically extend its life. The left panel of Souvenir is imbricated in a similar logic as the prostitute paintings from the first identity fragment. Here you have an image from Chinese erotica, popularly circulated in Western print over the last century, a classic example of the erotic Orient. Hung Liu placed a three-dimensional box and an empty bowl on the box to block the view of the erotic focal point. Ostensibly antiOrientalist in intention (refusing to show what is most desired for viewing), the panel paradoxically also sustains the eroticization of the Orient, making it more suggestive, more hidden, hence even more desirable. This replicates the logic of desire of a striptease, in which the public is made voyeurs only for the duration it takes for the strippers to shed clothing. Roland Barthes has famously shown how the viewer’s desire is aroused and maintained for the duration of the process of stripping, with its completion bringing forth an anticlimactic desexualization or de-eroticization.27 The box that hides the essential parts from view therefore can function as the last item of clothing that stays on the stripper to sustain the desire of the voyeurs. A critical intention in the end may resuscitate an Orientalist
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eroticism. This is what I mean by how an anti-Orientalist gesture can slip into a reconfirmation of Orientalism. A more stereotypical image of wounds is of course the bound feet as the emblem of Chinese women’s oppression. Representing bound feet for Western view is like airing dirty laundry from the perspective of the Chinese nationalists; while for Hong Kong critic Wong Bik-wan, it is akin to succumbing to the logic of Western consumption, as the passage cited earlier shows. In a work with no name, Untitled (1991, 25 1/4 × 14 1/8 × 8), Hung Liu based the image of a bound-foot woman with her deformed feet exposed and displayed on a photograph taken by a Westerner. The protocol of decorum would have ordinarily prevented the woman from exposing her malformed feet, so this exposition was a rare instance of a “behindthe-scenes” image of Chinese womanhood. From an Orientalist perspective, bound feet represent both erotic fascination and perversion of the Chinese male, hence the epitome of China’s backwardness in its inhuman treatment of women. Exposing the fetish, the Western photographer as Orientalist attains voyeuristic pleasure on the one hand, and attains the moral high ground on the other. By using her stock feminist images of a decorative glass plant and an empty bowl, Hung Liu’s perspective seems to collapse for a moment with the Western photographer’s critique of Chinese patriarchy. A closer look at the Chinese discourse and practice of foot-binding, which started around the tenth century, however, may challenge the facile equation between bound feet and male domination. Historian Dorothy Ko’s study of footbinding has shown that foot-binding cannot be reduced to “a core of absolute and timeless meanings” and that the equation was very much a discourse constructed by Western missionaries in China in the nineteenth century, which in turn influenced reform-minded Chinese.28 Prior to the nineteenth century, there were varying discourses about foot-binding, with opposing and approving voices, even with the Qing court banning it in the early years of its rule. There was never an imperial edict or rule imposing foot-binding on women at any time in Chinese history. Without going so far as to establish a blanket agency for foot-binding, which would be false, it may not be far-fetched to say that as a form of social practice, foot-binding itself may have granted women some form of small-scale agency, just as high-heel shoes may enhance certain women’s sense of beauty and well-being. Both the Western photographer focusing on the deformation of the
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bound feed and Hung Liu repeating this focus through an act of reinscription grant the bound feet a stock symbolic meaning. The multiple meanings of footbinding within the Chinese context are thus simplified and made to cohere into one meaning: the oppression of Chinese women by Chinese men. While the gaze of the Western photographer is criticized by Liu for its voyeuristic peeping into the inner sphere of Chinese culture but then subtly reinstated by the logic of the gaze, the gaze of the Westerner who looks at the artwork is again implied to be innocent. In the layering of these Western gazes, we find more of a coherence than a dissonance, where Liu’s reinscription becomes a reinforced inscription of the same. if i have been successful, I have made a case about an assemblage of identity fragments in Hung Liu’s work strategically articulated as multiple and shifting antagonisms against four agents of power. On one level, both Hung Liu’s national subject position (as a Chinese national) and minority subject position (as a minority in the United States) can be seen as resistant positions against objectification and stereotypes. The intersecting point of these identities, subject positions, and antagonisms is what I would call the potential of a feminist transnationality. Such feminist transnationality makes possible taking multiple subject positions against multiple power agents, which reflects the increased complexity of contemporary experience of immigration as well as the scattering and multiplication of hegemonies that overdetermine the lifework of a transnational artist. When art buyers and gallery goers visit the galleries, one may say that there are at least two levels of appreciation or reception. One is the visual, which refers to the surface look of the work: looking at most of Hung Liu’s work from the 1990s, the visuals are strikingly Oriental. For some viewers, this is su‹cient ground for their enjoyment of her works, which suggests a practice of self-Orientalization even though the artist may have a critical intent. The second level is the conceptual or the textual, that is, Hung Liu’s explanations of her intent in creating such works, giving her works a critical edge that art critics and academics are very glad to see. For both sets of viewers, then, Hung Liu has something to oªer. Her paintings sell extremely well—all of her paintings from the 1996 Last Dynasty exhibition were sold even before the show opened—and they have also garnered critical acclaim from such distinguished art critics as Norman Bryson. Here, then, is a diªerent kind of flexibility in comparison with that of Ang Lee, discussed in ]
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chapter 1. It is a kind of flexibility that works on diªerent levels simultaneously to draw in the viewers, be they the more critically initiated or the more visually oriented. Liu’s transnationally situated feminist subjectivity ironically makes this transaction among her work, the art market, and the critical discourse about her work possible. Gayatri Spivak has lamented in a very timely essay that, to her, the epistemics of transnationality as embodied in diasporic feminist work is highly problematic. She quotes Jean Franco approvingly when the latter notes: “speaking as a woman within a pluralistic society may actually reinstitute, in a disguised form, the same relationship of privilege that has separated the intelligentsia from the subaltern classes.”29 Hence Spivak’s poignant question: What about those groups that cannot become diasporic? I now come full circle in delineating the economy and the epistemics of feminist transnationality as seen through Hung Liu’s work: the two imply each other in a dance that occludes class as a category of production, accumulation, and representation. Furthermore, I have shown that critique for the sake of critique is not always already ethical. When terms of resistance and critique themselves become scripted events, they can be deployed for other strategic purposes. The content of the political changes according to the times, and so must its tactics; to insist on a stereotypical anti-Orientalist critique is to risk falling back into Orientalism. The tendency toward self-ethnography in multicultural American art or immigrant Chinese art, at its worst extreme, can become a combination of victimology and self-Orientalization. Hal Foster satirically criticized certain American art of the 1990s as belonging to a “cult of abjection,” where abjection is fetishized to the extent that it may reconfirm a given abjection.30 He further noted the pitfalls of the artist as ethnographer, where “the quasi-anthropological role set up for the artist can promote a presuming as much as a questioning of ethnographic authority, an evasion as often as an extension of institutional critique.”31 Through a diªerent route, with a diªerent accent, this chapter has hopefully called attention to one of the many transnational complicities that we live with today. Sinophone visual culture situated transnationally must reckon with its resistant and complicit implications across diªerent contexts and against diªerent agents of power.
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The prime function incumbent on the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated. When the primitive territorial machine proved inadequate to the task, the despotic machine set up a kind of overcoding system. But the capitalist machine . . . finds itself in a totally new situation: it is faced with the task of decoding and deterritorializing the flows. —Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983)
3
The Geopolitics of Desire In the mid-1990s, increasing economic integration of Taiwan, colonial Hong Kong, and China spurred, in both popular and academic arenas, their imaginary fusion into a single entity called “Greater China.”1 Scholars explored the cultural manifestations and consequences of this integration, especially in light of the developments in mass media such as popular music and film,2 where coproductions and cultural “joint-ventures” (hezi) were becoming increasingly commonplace. On the one hand, given the need for strategic market penetration and expansion beyond national boundaries, such coproductions tended to render ambiguous which “state” they were speaking for or against. On the other hand, the availability of electronic mediation greatly facilitated the tra‹c of popular cultural productions among these sites. The combination of these two factors—political ambiguity and easy access to massmediated cultural productions—further spurred the consideration of the potential emergence of a public sphere in this region outside the direct intervention of the “states” ]
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involved. The crucial question, then, which continues to be relevant for the twentyfirst century is this: was culture, like economy, becoming more and more integrated in these sites, so that a “transnational Chinese culture” (alternatively, “panChinese culture” or “global Chinese culture”) was being created, particularly since they already shared a putatively similar cultural heritage, languages, and customs, as some would claim?3 This chapter triangulates the question of identity in media representation among Taiwan, colonial Hong Kong, and China in the mid1990s and examines it through the prism of gendered transnational articulation of desire. Here is a triangulated look at the anxieties under the threat of missiles sent oª by China on Taiwan (discussed in chapter 4) and the threat of containment by China for late colonial Hong Kong (discussed in chapter 5) in gendered form. The chapter posits that there is no identity negotiation that is not at the same time a gendered negotiation. In highly volatile situations, the greatest fears and desires as well as the most fantastic projections of confidence are always articulated in gendered terms. Little has been said about how gender inflected the perceived economic and cultural integration in the region, and conversely, how such an integration eªected a specific kind of gender economy. My inquiry in this chapter therefore concerns the relationship between gender, mass media, and the question of a pan-Chinese public sphere. As I see it, late-twentieth-century capitalism in mass-mediated cultural productions across the China-Hong Kong-Taiwan (at the time euphemistically dubbed zhong-gang-tai )4 region operated through two contradictory gestures on the plane of gender: mass media targeted for consumption throughout this region strategically suppressed native patriarchal and nationalist sentiments in order to maximize market expansion, while media aimed at local audiences tended to resuscitate and reconsolidate native patriarchies and nationalist/nativist sentiments. Inscriptions of gender in the latter case, particularly in regards to mainland gendered subjects in Taiwan and Hong Kong media, were never divorced from political tensions that had been mounting in the region. In fact, it was the site of gender representation that attracted the heaviest concentration of political anxieties; their cultural correlates were found in the increasing calls for a cultural nativism in Taiwan, as well as in Hong Kong cultural workers’ pre-1997 earnest attempt to carve out a unique identity against China. The increased migration of mainland Chinese women to Taiwan and Hong Kong in those years played a significant role in a complex trajectory of anxieties intimately enmeshed with the The Geopolitics of Desire
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volatile political and economic relations in the region, and the representations of Chinese women in mass media (newspaper, television, and film) were thereby profuse with patriarchal injunctions against these women’s threat and contamination (in the case of Taiwan’s “mainland sister”) and fantasies of their containment and assimilation (in the case of Hong Kong’s “mainland cousin”). From analyzing these anxieties in the representation of mainland Chinese women in mass media in Taiwan and Hong Kong, I suggest that the perceived economic integration was by no means a fait accompli, nor did it translate to cultural and political integration. The disjunctions and contestations in the cultural and political arenas challenge the facile narrative of a coherent pan-Chinese capitalism that operated entirely according to the logic of capital and thwart easy assertions of the emergence of a pan-Chinese culture in this region. More specifically, I suggest that the interweaving of political, economic, and cultural anxieties in the figure of the mainland woman consistently precluded the emergence of a gendered public sphere in these sites and systematically undercut the “transnationalizing” tendencies that the situation seemingly promised. Here we are confronted with a much more complex question, and indeed an entirely new question, going beyond the prevailing paradigm of the contradictory relationship between gender and nationalism, where the women involved were often revealed to be further oppressed by their Third World nationalist patriarchies under colonial or neocolonial control.5 In these earlier discussions on gender and nationalism, the boundary of each discourse has been generally delimited to the geopolitical nation-state and its violation at the hands of unwelcome invaders, hence woman becomes the third term in the binaric, Manichean struggle between the male colonizer and the male colonized.6 The mediation of gender across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, however, was in reality a transnational and multiangular social phenomena created through the migration of media and people, but its discursive constructions were characteristically “national” in sentiment. Yet this “national” interpretation is itself highly ambiguous: Hong Kong was fated to become more and more closely integrated into China after 1997 (despite the policy of “One Country, Two Systems”) and Taiwan was and continues to be under direct threat of forceful reunification with China, which makes the designation “national” more of an approximation than an accurate rendering of intense nativist feelings felt by the majority of Taiwan’s populace and now a decreasing number of people in Hong Kong. If one posits ]
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that the ambiguous interplay between the transnational and the national characterizes the new social formation in the late capitalist world in general, where the transnational flow of goods, commodities, and peoples has achieved a high degree of denationalization and deterritorialization, the specific gender representations in the context of China-Taiwan-Hong Kong interrelations in the mid-1990s exemplify an opposite eªort to nationalize or territorialize politics and culture due to the perceived political, cultural, and economic threats posed by transnational migration. In the end, the notion of “Greater China” itself was revealed to be heavily China-centric, since the perspectives from other Sinophone communities, especially Taiwan, were largely opposed to integration, whether social, cultural, or political.7 It will become apparent in the following analysis that native feminists in Taiwan and Hong Kong simply tolerated and sometimes strategically evoked the “national” when dealing with the issues regarding Chinese women. This was because the migration of Chinese women into their midst, as well as rampant adultery of Taiwan and Hong Kong businessmen working in China, had seriously compromised and threatened the interests of native women. In such a context, Taiwan and Hong Kong feminists appeared allied with the larger cultural and economic nativist movements in their societies. If they had been silent in the face of patriarchal disparagement of Chinese women in popular media, however, these feminists did not condone the same patriarchy’s further oppression of native women through its members’ extramarital relationships with Chinese women. If nationalism was strategically tolerated so as to sharpen the focus on native women as the real victims, the erstwhile twin of nationalism—patriarchy—was nevertheless denounced as the agent of abuse. Feminisms in contemporary Taiwan and Hong Kong thus moved away from the dichotomous model of “women versus the nation,” in which the nation is equated with patriarchy, and therefore antipatriarchal voices were always either dismissed or brandished as antinational and traitorous. It was this paradigm of women versus the nation that had earlier told women to wait for national liberation before women’s liberation could be accomplished.8 By disembedding patriarchy from the nation, the presumptions of patriarchy can be more clearly delineated, deconstructed, and resisted. The multiangulation of gender relations across the region by a complex of historically specific issues then oªers a new paradigm for studying gender in a changing Third World, parts of which are fast approaching the First World in terms The Geopolitics of Desire
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of economic status, and projects a new geopolitics of desire in an age of blurred national boundaries. In light of growing interest in transnational feminism, this chapter also intends to show how transcending national boundaries in transnational organization can encounter insurmountable di‹culties in situations where questions of political and cultural identity remain volatile. The simple fact is that feminists are beings in the social, and gender issues are fundamentally constitutive of identity (whether political or cultural), even when masculinist underpinnings of capitalogic appear to be the dominant frame of reference. There is no innocent transnational feminism that can dissociate itself willfully from geopolitics, and there is no geopolitics that is not gendered. Hence, a feminist transnationality must be interrogated rigorously whether across the Pacific (here and in chapter 2) or across the Taiwan Strait. The extent of (im)possibility of a public sphere in the region therefore must also circumscribe the conditions of possibility for a transnational feminism. BELEAGUERED COMMUNITIES Chinese New Year, 1996. The second trial in the murder of a Chinese woman dragged on in Orange County Supreme Court, and Southern California’s Sinophone community continued to be reminded of the tragedy of transgressive relationships between the Chinese and the Taiwanese. As with the first trial that had ended in a hung jury, local newspapers related the daily events in court on the front page of the local news section. A crime of passion—the murdered woman is the Chinese mistress of a Taiwanese businessman and the accused murderer is his wife. The story began when the businessman, P’eng Tseng-chi, left his wife and children in Taiwan to open a factory in China to expand his business and there found himself a mistress, Ji Ranbing. He eventually moved Ji Ranbing and their newborn baby to an apartment in Southern California, not far away from where his two children by his lawful wife lived and went to school as “little overseas students” (xiao liuxuesheng ).9 Lin Li-yün, the wife, allegedly encountered Ji Ranbing during one of her visits to Southern California. She had been aware of Ji’s existence for several years and was alleged to have gruesomely murdered both Ji and her baby son. If one does not take into account the complicated political, cultural, and eco]
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nomic transactions across the region, the story reads just like another instance of the moral failings of a patriarch ruining the lives of two women and their children, and a classic case of the wife’s internalization of patriarchal values and displacement of her anger over her husband’s adultery onto the mistress and the symbol of the mistress’s power, the male child. The Sinophone community in Southern California, split between the Chinese and Taiwanese, was, however, uniformly reticent regarding the husband P’eng’s wrongdoing. P’eng’s public declaration of love for his murdered mistress in the local newspapers provided the Chinese in the community with moral ammunition to defend Ji’s adultery as an act of genuine love, allowing them to publicly sympathize with her and to oªer assistance to her tearstricken father and sister, who came to Southern California to attend her funeral. P’eng therefore could not be accused by the Chinese: to accuse him for his moral lapses would degrade the murdered victim and her family, with whom the Chinese immigrants needed to sympathize in solidarity. On the other hand, P’eng could not be accused by the Taiwanese immigrants either, who feared that it would deepen the discord between the Chinese and the Taiwanese in an already contentious situation. It is important to note that, due to linguistic similarity, new Chinese immigrants often settled in heavily Taiwanese areas such as Monterey Park, thus constituting an uneasy Sinophone community of some sort.10 The Taiwanese showed their solidarity instead by rallying around the wife, Lin, and later when she was pronounced guilty, by establishing the Friends of Lin Li-yün Association on Mother’s Day in 1996 and continuing their support by visiting Lin periodically in the prison, seeking the governor’s pardon, and providing legal and psychological counseling to her and her family.11 If in old China male polygamy had been sanctioned by the seamless operation of patriarchal power, in the Sinophone community in Southern California, adultery was beyond reproach because of the fissures among the various groups of immigrants who embodied the political, cultural, and economic tensions in their native places. These tensions complicate the roles and functions of gender, and disallow the emergence of a translocal voice of antipatriarchy. If, however, the Sinophone community in Southern California can be tentatively called a community, be it a split one, in contradistinction to other racial groups, the same could not be said of Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong. The crisis situation in their interrelationships in the mid- and late 1990s renders the epThe Geopolitics of Desire
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ithet “Greater China” an indication of putative ethnic similarity and economic codependency, which disguises intense animosities. In the mid-1990s and to this day, China has continued to renew its threats to conquer Taiwan in the name of “reunification,” whose most ostentatious manifestation was the March 1996 missile crisis, and has threatened and indeed increasingly curtailed freedom in the media and basic democratic rights of Hong Kong’s citizenry. The grand rhetoric of “reunification” that prohibited “territorial division” threatens both Hong Kong and Taiwan, whose fates were linked not only in their shared subjection to Chinese hegemony, but also because Hong Kong’s “return” to mainland rule had been seen as a model and testing ground for the planned takeover of Taiwan. The rhetoric of “antiterritorial division” loomed as the grand narrative for the containment of Taiwan, while Hong Kong’s “return” functioned as the authentication of China’s ultimate power over Taiwan: “it was only a matter of time.” How did gender become configured in those times of crisis and potential violence on the eve of 1997? Under a thin facade of reportage realism, newspaper, magazine, and film representations of Chinese women in Taiwan and Hong Kong were fraught with multiple overdeterminations that “mainland Chinese women” as a category became overlaid with meanings beyond the biological and economic determinations ordinarily apparent. Although these were the bodies that served as prostitutes and wives in Taiwan and Hong Kong, as mistresses and surrogate mothers for Taiwan and Hong Kong businessmen in coastal cities in China (that prosperous margin that is more than “China”),12 and accordingly their representation became heavily “bodied,” they carried potent political and cultural meanings in their signification. It is the uneasy tension and mutually constituting relationship between the bodied (as index to women’s oppression as commodified and exploited bodies) and the socialized (as index to political and cultural complexes) that I see as central to the examination of gender issues here. Indeed, the bodied becomes so embroiled in the socialized that the latter threatens to displace the question of women’s bodily exploitation. Reading media representations of mainland Chinese women therefore requires a double attention to the categories “mainland China” and “women,” although they inevitably intersect. In other words, using “mainland China” as a primary signifier requires a thorough contextualization in the specific configuration of relationships within the region in the mid-1990s, but foregrounding “gender” also requires a reference to the transnational paradigm of “tra‹c in women” and the ]
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tra‹c of women across boundaries.13 This “transnational” dimension of the tra‹c in women (smuggling and abduction) and tra‹c of women (willing migration) within the confused network of the zhong-gang- tai triangle helps to foreground the commodification, exchange, and extortion of Chinese women as bodies, but the conflictual trajectories of their “national” histories immediately undermine that “transnational” reading and replace the bodied reading with a socialized reading of cultural and political antimonies. But more than mutually contradictory, the “transnational” and the “national” are also ambiguously constituted vis-à-vis each other because of the memory of their former unity and a putatively shared cultural heritage. This memory was deployed by all three sides: by the Chinese government as a rhetoric of containment, by the then Guomindang government in Taiwan to validate its “Chinese” culture as more authentic than that of communist China,14 and by erstwhile Hong Kong nationalists (procommunist or not) resisting British colonial domination and many Hong Kongers’ conciliatory reception of Chinese rule after 1997. With the military threat from China, this memory and sharedness was increasingly refuted by Taiwan, yet it lingers on in various forms such as in the strategic assertions of Taiwan’s cultural superiority over China. For Hong Kong, “becoming Chinese” on July 1, 1997, required a recuperation of this sharedness with all the hoopla of ritualistic and carnivalesque celebration, as will be discussed in chapter 5, even while liberal democrats have put up frequent protests against the Chinese rule. Strategizing Hong Kong’s emergent yet threatened-to-be-lost cultural identity and Taiwan’s struggle for international recognition as an independent nation-state requires a complex but clear delineation of the “national” and the “transnational” in this region that capitalizes on both its constituents’ sameness and diªerence in multiple, contradictory ways. So the boundaries Chinese women traversed were not the linguistic ones that often trace national boundaries: those who went to Taiwan often could speak a semblance of the Taiwanese language, Minnan, because a similar language was spoken in China’s Fujian province, and those who went to Hong Kong often spoke a variation of the same language of its populace, Cantonese, also the language of Guangdong province. For the independence-oriented intellectuals in Taiwan, to hear the Taiwanese-inflected Mandarin spoken by Chinese prostitutes rounded up by the police and interviewed on television was more than unnerving: the diªerence necessary to maintain and police the boundaries of national identity appeared to be nullified in this case. The threat to Taiwan’s independence was in this sense The Geopolitics of Desire
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the threat of similarity: if a large number of illegal immigrants from China succeeded in crossing the Taiwan Strait, China need not resort to military means to conquer Taiwan. Without the convenient marker of language or ethnic diªerence (being majority ethnic Han in both countries), Hong Kong and Taiwan cultural imaginaries must turn elsewhere for the recognition, production, and consolidation of diªerence. It is within this specific context that I endeavor to decode the representations of Chinese women in Taiwan and Hong Kong media in the mid1990s and locate a new geopolitics of desire. The migration and tra‹c of Chinese women to Taiwan and Hong Kong, furthermore, has transpacific consequences, as is shown in the case of murdered Chinese mistress Ji Ranbing. Taiwan, pre1997 Hong Kong, and Southern California thereby constituted a distinct Sinophone zone with an ambiguous cultural and political relationship to China.
SEXUALIZING THE “MAINLAND SISTER” In the imagined community of the new nation, women are admitted only with reservation and only as sex. —Rey Chow, “The Politics of Admittance” (1995)
The conjunctural elements that constituted the historical moment of the mid1990s in which the specific semantic field of the “mainland [Chinese] sister” (ta-lu mei/dalumei) in Taiwan was generated may include the following: the early 1990s had witnessed increased o‹cial and uno‹cial contacts between Taiwan and China and an unprecedented rise in bilateral trade, yet the storm of rage expressed by the Chinese government over Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui’s uno‹cial visit to the United States in June 1995 threatened a total breakdown of the painstakingly fostered relationship. Even before Lee’s visit, however, anxiety over Taiwan’s relationship with China ran deep in popular and o‹cial discourses alike. This can be illustrated by the extent to which the sensationalist book August 1995, which predicted China’s invasion of Taiwan in August 1995, gripped a paranoid Taiwan readership. And when August 1995 actually rolled around, political analysts and newspaper columnists conjectured about the possibility of actual invasion based on the book’s scenario.15 By 1996, however, with China’s military exercises opposite the Taiwan coast conspicuously asserting China’s will to conquer Taiwan, the scenario ]
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of invasion, no longer confined to the realm of imagination and the market, triggered a massive exodus of Taiwan foreign currency and an immigration frenzy and necessitated the Taiwan government’s intervention in the stock market for fear that a drastic fall would irrevocably damage business confidence. Although the late 1980s and early 1990s had seen a mushrooming of Taiwan independence-oriented cultural production, the political crystallization of which was the establishment of the Democratic Progressive Party, the rhetoric of independence had been losing popular support because of the overwhelming threat by the Chinese government that an assertion of independence would be tantamount to an invitation to invasion.16 Late 1980s and early 1990s confidence that Taiwan was economically more advanced than China, that Taiwan could teach modernization techniques to China, that Taiwan could make money by conquering China’s virgin market and exploiting its inexpensive labor, and that Taiwan was culturally more modern and sophisticated than “backward” China, were instead replaced by a deep sense of ambivalence toward all transactions with China: Was Taiwan’s economy becoming too dependent on China? Would Taiwan businesses lose their investments in China if tensions continued to mount? On a smaller scale, could Taiwan businessmen in China still act the rich compatriots asserting their economic superiority when China itself was increasingly becoming richer? To put it diªerently, as China’s market economy modernized, what markers of culture could be deployed to show Taiwan’s superiority? Or were there any realms left with which Taiwan could comfort itself vis-à-vis China’s political hegemony or resist that hegemony, when economic gaps were gradually being bridged, ironically in part because of the eªorts of Taiwan businesses? Increased legal and illegal immigration of the Chinese to Taiwan did not decrease hostility but instead heightened Taiwan’s anxiety of contamination and fear of takeover by the Chinese. The migration was necessitated by Taiwan’s lack of labor resources and the di‹cult marriage market for native males and was fueled by the supposedly “gold-digging” (taojin) aspirations of some Chinese men and women. In the mid-1990s, they went to Taiwan legally and illegally in droves: laborers were recruited to work on ships and construction sites, women were smuggled over by Taiwanese “snake heads” (shetou—human smugglers) for prostitution, and marriage services organized trips to China and helped with the eventual immigration of Chinese brides. Related to the migration of Chinese men and women to Taiwan was also the prevalent phenomenon of Taiwanese businessmen The Geopolitics of Desire
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in China taking Chinese mistresses (the Southern California murder trial being an example of this) and the practice of husbands involved in an infertile marriage finding surrogate mothers in China. These surrogate mothers, as expected, often caused marriage crises for the married couples, as they sometimes remained mistresses to the men. It was roughly within the intersection of these social junctures that the “mainland sister,” the dalumei, came into being as a media construction in the mid-1990s. Who was this dalumei in Taiwan? Popularized by sensational stories of sexual exploitation in newspapers, the dalumei was a woman who in most cases worked as a prostitute, willingly or otherwise, and who in some cases successfully disguised as a native and worked as a singer, waitress, bar hostess, or beautician. The word mainland (dalu) suggested economic backwardness and hence the quest for monetary gain; the term little sister (mei) suggests the means by which the quest was conducted—sexuality and youth. Mei in classical Sinitic parlance is often used to designate the female lover, and when applied to a young woman in an unflattering context, unambiguously refers to the woman’s low social status and exploitability. The two prime signifiers of the dalumei are money and sex—her desire for money making her a readily available sex object that provided moral justification for her exploiters (“she wants it herself ”). As such, she was diªerent from “mainland women” (dalu nuzi or dalu nuren) whom Taiwanese businessmen took as mistresses or who married Taiwanese and became “mainland wives” (dalu taitai). But there was no epistemological clarity between the terms dalumei, dalu nuzi, and dalu taitai, as the latter two could easily be reduced to dalumei if the enunciator at any moment wished to denigrate the Chinese woman he or she encountered. So when a dalu nuzi was found to be residing in Taiwan illegally, she was immediately called dalumei; when a dalu nuzi was seen as undeserving of an arranged marriage with a native husband, she was reduced to a dalumei. But if dalumei prostitutes were found and rescued by the native police from their indentured sexual labor, they were bestowed the honorary title of dalu nuzi so that the moral authority and benevolence of the police could be subtly asserted.17 The dalumei in newspaper and magazine representations was most often a flat character whose singular obsession, “searching for gold,” seemed to lead her to any activity that would fulfill that goal. Newspapers sometimes carried sensational stories of her sexual abuse, which curiously made her even more seductive. The paradox is due to a kind of performative contradiction: newspaper coverage ]
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that was meant to arouse people’s concern over the problem ended up turning the reports of dalumei into tantalizing tales of sex and money. The stories were consistently about their involuntary and voluntary engagement in the sex business, their labor given explicit numerical monetary values. It was customary, for instance, to report how much the smuggling fee was, how the dalumei paid for it or was forced to pay for it, and what was happening to the dalumei at present in terms of her financial status. A small headline for a news item on dalumei in September 1994 read: “Receiving 350 Customers—the Price for Coming to Taiwan.” The article detailed that the fee for smuggling two dalumei into Taiwan via Thailand with false passports was serving 350 customers each, which, at NT$1,000 per customer, translated into NT$350,000 (U.S.$14,000). The two prostitutes paid oª their smuggling fees in less than five months and were since able to keep 40 percent of each transaction for themselves up until they were caught.18 While earlier accounts of dalumei exploited for sexual labor expressed a certain concern for their well-being,19 in representations after the 1995 fallout with China, even forced sexual labor was depicted with a tinge of ironic humor. A February 3, 1996, news item depicted how three dalumei were saved by the police just when they were being forced into prostitution, and noted that one of them had had the “adventure” of having had breast implants. The obvious jab here was at the dalumei who pretended that they did not realize their impending fate to be prostitutes. Why else would a dalumei get breast implants if not with the intention to become a prostitute? The absence of moral concern in the article was striking, as dalumei became not the object of sympathy (which would have confirmed Taiwan’s moral superiority), but the object of derision. This was because, while earlier stories concentrated on how inhuman the smugglers had been in deceiving the dalumei into indentured prostitution, post-1995 stories tended to tell of how these dalumei willingly came to become prostitutes under a contract with their smugglers to pay oª their smuggling fee through their sex work. The moral sympathy or support of the society was therefore unnecessary or superfluous. Rather, the fact that they could now come to Taiwan without paying the smuggling fee in advance showed how vulnerable Taiwan’s border was to their infiltration. They could actually come for free and make the money to pay the smuggling fee afterward. Concern for the welfare of the dalumei was here clearly replaced by alarm at the ever-clever and “corrupt” dalumei who were “contaminating” Taiwan. The popular Taiwanese news magazine China Times Weekly carried at least The Geopolitics of Desire
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two special reports on the dalumei question. The first of these appeared in January 1993 and dealt not with the dalumei at home, but with the dalumei in China, conflating Chinese prostitutes and Chinese mistresses of Taiwanese businessmen. While the semantic field of dalumei in Taiwan was saturated with illicit sex and money, the dalumei in China was, on the contrary, characterized by an insatiable greed for money, luxury, and material goods. The article, tellingly entitled “Dalumei Love to Kill Taiwanese Men,” describes three stages in the relationship between dalumei and Taiwanese businessmen in a pseudoanalytic and pseudohistorical manner. The reporter defines the first stage as occurring between 1988 and 1990, when Taiwan businesses started to expand into China. This was when Taiwanese businessmen were lured by the ready availability of beauties in China, and the Chinese women were equally impressed by the “tenderness” of Taiwanese men. As opposed to having Caucasian and black lovers, walking down the street with Taiwanese men did not trigger much attention or prejudice from the local population. Unlike Hong Kong lovers, who tended to speak little Mandarin, and Japanese lovers, whose male chauvinism was unacceptable, Taiwanese men spoke Mandarin and were, most importantly, tender. Racially and linguistically compatible, the two sides found perfect romantic matches in each other. This was the period of easy conquest for Taiwanese men: they showed their tenderness, bestowed some money and small gifts of jewelry, and the women were easily seduced. In the second phase, 1990–91, it became harder for Taiwanese men because those previously willing mistresses were no longer satisfied with a few hundred yuan of foreign exchange currency or a few dozen pairs of stockings, but demanded substantial amounts of gold and money.20 In the third phase, dalumei became even more expensive to keep. By 1992, monthly expenses for keeping a dalumei had risen from U.S.$1,000 to U.S.$2,000. She also typically demanded a purchased apartment (around U.S.$200,000). But the Taiwanese businessmen still preferred having a dalumei over having a mistress in Taiwan because the latter was still more expensive (about U.S.$3,200 a month) and entailed a greater risk of discovery by the wife. The article ends with the following remarks addressed to Taiwan businessmen: “Let me ask you: Do you like to be showy and exaggerate your wealth? Do you slap your face to make it appear plump? Do you dye your hair to seduce women? I advise you to conduct a self-examination, because today’s mainland beauties are no longer so easily taken.”21 The reporter gives another warning: court ]
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the dalumei with your money and you are the one who will suªer, because she will demand more and more from you. There is a reason why the Chinese call you a “simpleton compatriot” (daibao) instead of a “Taiwan compatriot” (taibao) as a homophonic pun on the latter word, he notes, and warns that “increasingly smarter dalumei are happy to eat up the simpleton compatriots.” While the pseudohistory of the relationship between Taiwanese businessmen and mainland Chinese women, replete with financial statistics, read like a “man-to-man” mistress guide or sexual adventure guide, the warnings uttered by the report presented a reverse scenario of exploitation that subalternized the Taiwanese businessmen. It called for a controlled exercise of financial power to better manipulate the women and avoid being manipulated in turn. A second special report appeared in the December 1995 issue of China Times Weekly. It included some new information regarding the dalumei and their activities in general and included an interview with three of the fifty-seven dalumei then held at the women’s detention center in the city of Hsin-chu in northern Taiwan. It revealed the dalumei’s wide spectrum of social backgrounds but emphasized their shared desire for money as the prime motivator for their migration to Taiwan, as exemplified by the newly coined saying “The old Gold Mountain is in the United States, but the new Gold Mountain is in Taiwan!”22 The three dalumei interviewed were presented as having not the least bit of shyness or shame: they bragged about their success making money and vowed to try to return to Taiwan after deportation. The threat of dalumei was therefore the threat of massive migration: besides the fifty-seven detainees, the article noted that no one “dared” figure out how many dalumei were actually in Taiwan. The article ended with the story of a dalumei connected with high government o‹cials in China, noting that the Chinese government had been known to employ dalumei as spies to work in bars and restaurants in Chinese coastal cities frequented by Taiwanese businessmen, and concluded that some dalumei in Taiwan might be communist agents sent by the Chinese government.23 Dalumei as money-chaser was now replaced by the projection of national security concerns as China began to conduct its ostentatious military exercises targeted at Taiwan. Dalumei represented as a sexualized body hungry for economic gain, hence exploitable and prone to the sexual conquest of Taiwanese men, reflected a fantasy of Taiwan’s economic power, translated into sexual power. When this power was threatened by dalumei’s clever maneuvers, Taiwanese businessmen were The Geopolitics of Desire
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
14
A dalumei image in Taiwan media.
reminded of their status as “simpleton compatriots,” and the dalumei increasingly came to embody threat. She was not merely a threat to Taiwanese businessmen’s pocketbooks, but a generalized threat to Taiwan capital and industrial advantage as Taiwan was becoming more and more dependent on Chinese labor and market. She was even a threat to Taiwan’s national security. If the Taiwanese government had earlier considered the entry of Taiwan businesses in southern China as a strategy of “connecting with the South and approaching the North”24—Taiwan capital as capturing southern China and loosening control from Beijing—now Taiwan investment in China was increasingly perceived to be vulnerable to the whims of the communist government and became a liability. The rumor that Taiwanese business tycoon Wang Yung-ch’ing planned to build a large-scale chemical factory in China instead of in Taiwan sent nervous government o‹cials scurrying to Wang’s door, and when Wang publicly announced in early 1997 that he had already begun construction in China, Taiwanese o‹cials were extremely embarrassed and had to announce that if his actions were found to be illegal, Wang would be punished. The desire and fear in Taiwan’s economic and political relationships with China uncannily paralleled the media representations of the dalumei. The dalumei, a gendered embodiment of dalu (mainland), incarnated for the readership the economic threat of usurping and exhausting Taiwan capital through her seductiveness and the political threat of migration, infiltration, and invasion. The call to Taiwanese businessmen to exercise self-control was now underscored by a heightened sense of urgency because of its national implications: Stop being seduced! Stop being duped! Stop making yourself more vulnerable! Elided in all these heavily troped representations of dalumei, however, was not only the actual physical maltreatment of mainland Chinese women, but also the fate of native women in Taiwan. The situation of native women was of great concern for local feminists, because the availability of the dalumei undoubtedly threatened native women’s desire for monogamy and equality, not to mention economic security. More precisely, native patriarchy could take full advantage of the availability of the dalumei to further consolidate its arbitrary domination over native women. The story of a Taiwanese woman who killed her children and committed suicide after her husband’s aªair with a Chinese mistress led to complete neglect of his family was not just a story of the increasing peril felt across the Taiwan Strait, but also a story of a modern-day Medea. So when native feminists marched on the streets in 1995 against teenage prostitution in Taiwan, they did The Geopolitics of Desire
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not include dalumei prostitutes in their agenda: the real subalterns might well have seemed to them not the willingly exploited dalumei but the native women who had had to endure their husbands’ infidelity. This explains why Taiwanese feminists were reluctant to take up the issue of dalumei, if at all, prompting Lee Yuanchen, a leading local feminist leader, to say, “The dalumei issue is a blind spot in our feminism.”25 Hence the unabashedly patriarchal tone of the media representations of Chinese women—as desirable and easily exploitable bodies and then as embodiments of threat—were unchallenged by local feminists. The responses to the Chinese murder trial in Southern California were thus conditioned: Lin Liyün, the Taiwanese wife, was seen as the victim by Taiwanese women. Her alleged murder of the Chinese mistress might well symbolize for them the collective revenge of the Taiwanese wives. The most eloquent testimony to this local-oriented feminist endeavor to help the wives of adulterous Taiwanese husbands was a book-length study of the phenomenon by a famous feminist lawyer named Chiu Chang, who coauthored it with Lin T’sui-fen. The book is entitled One Country, Two Wives, a parodic reference to the Chinese Communist Party’s slogan of “One Country, Two Systems” used for Hong Kong. In this book of legal analyses of many representative cases and their consequences for local wives, Qiu and Lin not only oªer biting criticism of the adulterous husband P’eng Tseng-chi in the Southern California murder case, but also suggest to the wives that instead of killing the mistress, the smarter solution would have been to castrate the husband. They reason that killing the mistress had resulted in a very di‹cult legal situation for Lin the wife (who was later sentenced to life imprisonment), but castration, according to Taiwan laws, is merely considered an “injury” for which the greatest punishment is only two years in prison. Likewise, they oªer legal counsel on such issues as property possession, divorce, and child custody, condemning patriarchal Taiwan laws and the corrupt husbands these laws protect. In this book, those Chinese women who willingly complied with Taiwanese men’s demands were depicted as usurpers, gold diggers, and opportunists, thereby provoking some measure of nationalist sentiment, but the main target of criticism was consistently Taiwanese patriarchy. Theirs was an adamantly local feminist voice that, while drawing subtly on nationalist sentiments to fight against the perceived infiltration of the Other women, vociferously condemned patriarchy from the perspective of the local wives’ “double loss,” the loss of both husbands and money.26 ]
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Despite the local focus of this feminism, however, it clearly did not cohere to single nation-state-based discussions of the relationships between gender and nationalism as mutually contradictory. Instead, there was a strategic appropriation of nationalist sentiments in order to raise the feminist consciousness of local women. The battle here was between the forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization from a gendered perspective; this battle must play itself out in local-specific feminist politics that resist transcontext theorizations of gender. This does not imply that this adamantly local feminism was therefore unable to dialogue with other feminisms across diªerent geopolitical spaces. Rather, it suggests how no single feminist position can account for the ideological simultaneity of various feminist positions arising from diªerent contexts, that feminist struggles should not and could not be articulated in universalistic terms of transparent translatability across diªerent locations.
FEMINIZING THE “MAINLAND COUSIN” It’s vital to have possession of this memory, to control it, administer it, tell it what it must contain. —Michel Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory” (1975)
The typology of Chinese women in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s was more variegated due mainly to a long history of immigration from China to Hong Kong, their easier access to Hong Kong, and their presence in varying strata of Hong Kong society. Hong Kong society mainly consists of earlier Han immigrants from China, and there was considerable prejudice against those “new immigrants” (sunyeemun) who were considered “Chinese” rather than “Hong Kongers.”27 It was to this group of mostly lower-strata individuals that mainland women belonged, although occasionally there were successful entrepreneurial and professional new immigrant women who became visible in society. In Hong Kong, there were dalumei prostitutes as well, whose appellations were often based on their places of origin: Tinjoenmei for those from Tianjin, Wunanmui for those from Hunan Province, bugmui for those from northern China in general, and so forth. In 1995 alone, an unprecedented number of more than one thousand illegal mainland prostitutes were caught by the police.28 The Geopolitics of Desire
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But the more urgent issue, as in the case of Taiwan, was the prevalence of mainland mistresses for Hong Kong businessmen. The large-scale adultery captured media attention in late 1994 and early 1995, when statistics of Hong Kong businessmen having mistresses in China—the so-called keeping a concubine/ mistress (baoyeenai) phenomenon—was revealed. It was reported that Hong Kong men had collectively sired about three hundred thousand illegitimate babies with their yeenai/ernai in China, about 5 percent of the entire Hong Kong population of 6 million, with the entire bordering city of Shenzhen in the Chinese Special Economic Zone becoming a “village of yeenai,” and with China ironically dubbed the “yeenai-providing sphere.”29 These yeenai had been easy prey for adulterous Hong Kong businessmen, one feminist journalist in Hong Kong taunted, because they were “inexpensive and of beautiful quality” as well as compliant to the demands of Hong Kong businessmen in exchange for financial gain, unlike native Hong Kong women, who needed pampering and demanded equality.30 A betrayed Hong Kong mother of three was rescued from an attempted suicide, another woman killed her adulterous husband, yet another castrated her husband, and several other incidents of tragedy were publicized.31 In late 1994, a group of angry Hong Kong wives protested to the Hong Kong government to demand the curtailing of rampant adultery between their husbands and mainland women,32 and there began debates and proposals to criminalize the baoyeenai phenomenon through new legislation. The opposing parties to this call for criminalization came up with the shocking proposal to legalize the yeenai with the argument that Hong Kong businessmen needed to have their sexual desire satisfied while sojourning for long periods for business purposes.33 The situation for local feminists in Hong Kong was perhaps even more urgent than for Taiwan feminists due to the sheer quantity of such incidents and the overwhelming number of illegitimate children who would very likely have the right of legal residence in Hong Kong. For native women in general, their struggle for equality was severely undermined by the overwhelming surplus of women available for Hong Kong men, who no longer needed to succumb to native women’s demands since earlier gains in gender equality were due in part to the shortage of women and the necessity for native men to compete for them.34 Native wives also faced the fate of losing both the money and the husband, as did Taiwanese wives, and their shared fate with Taiwanese wives did not go unnoticed.35 The first book on women’s services and women’s groups in Hong Kong noted how the main ]
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agenda of one of the community centers for women was to oªer support for the wives whose husbands work in China. The Hong Kong feminist perspective, like that of the Taiwan feminist, was to see the baoyeenai phenomenon as a social problem that victimized native women.36 Feminism in both contexts had to be vigilantly local, an impassioned attempt to defy the compromise of feminist ideals resulting from the transnational migration of Chinese men and women across borders. Beyond the obvious similarity between the conditions of native women in Taiwan and Hong Kong, however, I am also interested in delineating a peculiar category of mainland women in Hong Kong’s popular imaginary, the biutse in Cantonese or biaojie in Mandarin. This highly ideological category did not exist in Taiwan, but its explication oªers crucial vantage points in understanding how ideological issues were gendered in the mid-1990s and, more critically, how this category became the playing field of a certain nativist urgency to define a Hong Kong cultural identity destined to gradually become extinct with the retrocession. Taiwan has been flaunting its democratization as a way to repudiate the communist system both symbolically and pragmatically, with its erstwhile Marxist-leaning intellectuals having largely lost their calling in the society due to the association that Marxism equals sympathy with China.37 But for Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, ideology was of imminent importance, since it was obviously situated between a globalized capitalism and a communist system that continued to impose an ideological stranglehold. The ideological category of the biutse was a communist cadre whose name literally means “older female cousin.” While her male counterpart, the biugo (older male cousin), might be positively innocent, old-fashioned, or engaged in immoral behavior such as robbery and bribery, the biutse also tended to denote a set of mostly negative characteristics: backwardness, unfashionableness, lack of proper etiquettes and accoutrements, and an inclination to use bribery and connections.38 Both terms probably originate in the term biusuk (maternal uncle), used in the Cultural Revolution model opera The Red Lantern as a code name for underground communists during the anti-Japanese war in China.39 When circulated in Hong Kong, biusuk fittingly served as a metonym for the generational diªerence in the relationship between the “motherland” and its putative “child,” Hong Kong. In the pre-1997 climate of Hong Kong, during which the “return” to the “motherland” was construed by some as a transition from British colonialism to “ancestorland colonialism” (zuguo zhimindi) or a process of The Geopolitics of Desire
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“recolonization” (zai zhimin), the implications for the relationship with “maternal” relatives became increasingly problematic. To contextualize my analysis of the representation of biutse, I present in the following a necessarily broad description of the historical junctures of Hong Kong in the mid-1990s in terms of politics, economy, and demographics, followed by a more sustained inquiry into the cultural scene. It is no exaggeration to say that the primary obsession of the Hong Kong populace in the mid-1990s was the approach of the 1997 retrocession to China. The June 4, 1989, massacre in Tiananmen Square had mobilized Hong Kong’s democratic forces against the communist regime and injected a sense of urgency into their eªorts to democratize before the arrival of communist rule. The legislative election of September 1995 registered an overwhelming success for the prodemocratic forces. Economically, there was a curious boom contributed to by rising real estate prices and a prosperous stock market (partially fueled by the infusion of “red capital” from China). The demographic changes were apparent as Mandarin was more frequently heard on the streets of Hong Kong. New Chinese immigrants were also becoming more and more visible, since they could acquire the so-called round trip certificates (shuangchengzheng ) or smuggle themselves into Hong Kong relatively easily. Conversely, due to the imminence of “return,” the previously thoroughly commercialized cultural arena, especially the mass media, became increasingly obsessed with delineating Hong Kong’s unique cultural identity vis-à-vis China in the years leading to 1997.40 The mass media’s desire to construct a Hong Kong identity reflected and paralleled the desire of the populace as seen in the result of a public poll taken in February 1995. Thirty-six percent of the respondents claimed they were “Hong Kongers,” 32 percent “Hong Kong Chinese,” and only 20 percent “Chinese” and 12 percent “British Chinese.”41 The percentage of Hong Kong residents who more or less claimed a Hong Kong identity amounted to almost 70 percent, if we consider “Chinese” in “Hong Kong Chinese” as merely an ethnic designation (even though “Chinese” is not an ethnicity, as I have shown in the introduction). Concomitantly, there was an upsurge in a kind of identity discourse that strategically evoked British colonial history as a constitutive element of Hong Kong identity in order to distinguish it from China. Rey Chow, a prominent Hong Kong diasporic intellectual in the United States, for instance, saw Hong Kong’s coloniality as the better of two evils and defined British colonialism as “a form of opportunity, in which the daily experience of oppression is synchronized with a ]
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self-conscious search for freedom in alternative forms.” So even though British colonialism had been a form of violence, it was one that was “lived as an alternative to greater violence elsewhere,” “elsewhere” undoubtedly referring to China.42 In a diªerent article, Chow defined Hong Kong’s emergent cultural production as “impure” and presented a vision of an “alternative” culture or community in a “third space” between British and Chinese cultural systems.43 She carefully avoided the term hybridity as popularized by Homi Bhabha,44 as that which celebrated the obliteration of the violence of colonial history, and instead insisted on the notion of impurity, with which she emphasized both the oppression and agency of the colonized in a situation of successive colonialisms. A diªerent formulation of Hong Kong identity, as posited by Quentin Lee, saw hybridity as the means to deconstruct “the illusion of cultural purity” envisioned by both Chinese nationalism and Hong Kong Occidentalism (i.e., worship of the Occident), thereby disenabling domination from both directions.45 Lee here treated hybridity and impurity as one and the same. Such an impurity/hybridity discourse was criticized by others, however, who saw it as intertwined with the English gaze, since it was British colonialism that had also selectively legitimated Hong Kong’s hybridized cultural production.46 The other potential danger in the impurity/hybridity discourse is this: if the essential diªerence between China and Hong Kong is the former’s purity and the latter’s impurity, what prevents China’s contemporary cultural elements from becoming part of the impurity of Hong Kong after 1997? Could not contemporary Chinese cultural elements be incorporated in such a way that Hong Kong’s impurity becomes another justification for an innocuous multiculturalism? In the absence of “nativist” paradigms of culture, any assertions of the unique constitution of a Hong Kong identity is bound to be at best tenuous, if not problematic. This is because the option of imagining a “national” identity (as in Taiwan) has never been available for Hong Kong. As the return to the “motherland” is described as domination by yet another colonizer, the return promised a kind of “postcoloniality” that only mocks the implications of the prefix “post,”47 because decolonization does not mean liberation or independence. The more futile the search for a unique cultural identity, however, the greater the urgency and desire. Nick Browne’s description of the temporal mode of 1990s Hong Kong cinema as “future anterior” to suggest the “complexity of an impending return that threatens to be a future undoing of its past The Geopolitics of Desire
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achievement” underscores the paradoxes in the search for a cultural identity.48 This paradoxical search for a cultural identity that is premised upon its very impossibility or futility may be understood in terms of Susan Stewart’s discussion of nostalgia. I quote Stewart at length here: Nostalgia is a sadness without an object, a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological. The past it seeks has never existed except as a narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. Hostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality. This point of desire which the nostalgic seeks is in fact the absence that is the very generating mechanism of desire.49
The search for a narrative of Hong Kong identity was, like nostalgia, paradoxically premised upon its absence; ultimately it was a utopian dream that generated longing precisely because of its impossibility. Hence the temporal mode of this desire was the “future-past,” or “future-anterior”: the prospect of the future engendered an anxiety over the loss of the past because that loss was guaranteed. Hence the desire to find an object, a souvenir, as the memory marker of a culture. Hong Kong films in the 1990s leading up to 1997 were in this sense fantastic souvenirs of a culture that was not perceived as an autonomous entity and an attempt to appease the anxieties of the nostalgic.50 The production of about half a dozen films about the biutse in Hong Kong cinema may be understood as the souvenirs of a past, hence the “essences” of Hong Kong culture became a prime focus of representation through their contrast with those of China, represented by the biutse. But the films did more than nostalgically evoke unique Hong Kong cultural elements, for they also projected possible future narratives beyond 1997. These films range from farce, comedy, and romantic drama to pornography, but a particular series of four movies made by director Alfred Cheung titled Her Fatal Ways (biutse nayhoye, literally, “mainland cousin, bravo!”; see color plate 3), produced between 1990 and 1994, provide ideal sites for examining the political and cultural negotiations these films project onto Hong Kong’s relationship with China precisely because they are hyperbolic, farcical, and ]
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bombastic.51 In the films, the biutse is the narrative figure whose changing relationship with Hong Kong symbolizes those possible scenarios of Hong Kong’s past and future, albeit in somewhat crudely mimetic fashion as the genre of farce dictates. To borrow a Freudian trope here, these film enactments can be likened to the child’s “fort-da” games, enacting the disappearance and appearance of Hong Kong in an attempt to use symbols (films) to control its absence and further make sense of its impending future.52 This sense of control is further communicated by the genre of the films—farce—which displaces anxiety with laughter. The pleasure thus gained is an exercise of power and control, even though it may only last for the duration of each film. The biutse herself is an amalgam of comic eªects in the four-part movie. Played by Hong Kong actress Cheng Yu Ling, she is a masculine, gun-wielding, kung-fu master, party cadre, policewoman who crosses the border to Hong Kong to track down mainland criminal elements. A typical, degendered “iron lady” (tie niangzi, who stands at the ideological forefront), Shuonan (literally “great male”) lives and breathes communist ideology. She walks a wide, masculine gait, speaks in a loud voice of authority, and spews o‹cial party rhetoric, and, as to be expected of a party cadre, all signs of femininity and sexuality are erased. The comical eªects are achieved by what may be called the “ideological malapropisms” of her behavior and language in the diªerent context of Hong Kong. Here, her ideologically correct behavior and language are eminently misplaced, and they become comedy material for the audience to laugh at. But there is a further twist: Shuonan is shown to become more and more self-conscious about her masculine and uncouth behavior and language, which have up until this point been exclusively dictated by communist ideology, and she gradually awakens to her own deeply repressed, feminine desires. At times, Shuonan herself consciously applies dry, clichéd ideological rhetoric to deal with awkward situations that might otherwise force her to betray her own innermost desires and wishes. The split between the ideological self and the private self is thereby constructed along clear lines. The suppressed, private self is discovered soon after she enters seductive, urban, capitalist Hong Kong, and is gradually released. It is through her transformation that we see an explicit confirmation of the culture of Hong Kong. This process of transformation is most explicitly depicted in part 1 of the series, since this is when the biutse first comes to Hong Kong. For a party cadre who is not supposed to harbor any “bourgeois” desires, she quickly, and of course The Geopolitics of Desire
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secretly, desires to become feminine—applies lipstick, wears dresses, and falls in love. In an unguarded moment when she is with a Hong Kong policeman played by the supremely handsome and likable Tony Leung, she exclaims at the beauty of the colorful neon lights seen from the upper deck of a double-decker bus. Her exclamation confirms the superiority of Hong Kong culture because it is spoken by a staunch communist party cadre who has heretofore been very careful to hide her fascination. The confirmation also comes from its contrast with an earlier scene in which she lectured on the art of spitting and spit right out the bus window and into the mouth of a passing motorcyclist on her way to Hong Kong. Her transformation from an uncouth cadre with no taste or sensibility to a woman longing for beauty and love (and the change of transportation from a primitive bus to a double-decker bus, the crowning symbol of urban Hong Kong) is as dramatic as the confirmation of Hong Kong’s cultural superiority. The film consistently posits the universal validity of beauty and pleasure in the “bourgeois capitalist” mode and identifies those elements that constitute Hong Kong’s culture as superior or universal. Abstract qualities of humaneness, civility, subtlety, and emotional concern for others are wedded to material manifestations of capitalism: state-ofthe-art technology, bustling urban scenes, products that speak to individual desire (lipstick, cable television, and fashionable clothes), and above all the “rule-bylaw” legal system represented by the Hong Kong police. These qualities then add up to an inventory of Hong Kong culture, set in opposition to China and Chineseness as represented by the biutse. As the films progress, the biutse becomes increasingly comfortable displaying her feminine self. In each of the four movies, Shuonan falls in love with a Hong Kong man, even though her falling in love is in some ways devastating since it subverts what she is supposed to represent for China. By the end of the last of the four movies, there is a definite prospect of Shuonan marrying a man in Hong Kong, since now she has decided to remain in Hong Kong as a permanent resident. So the evolution of the four movies is also a progression toward the completion of Shuonan’s journey: from crossing the border back and forth, Shuonan settles down in Hong Kong and vows to be “more Hong Kong than Hong Kongers.” The Chinese policewoman who lectured on the art of spitting on the bus to Hong Kong, who sang with such a high-pitched, revolutionary, operatic voice that shattered glasses in a karaoke bar, who ate with her “left” hand so as to be ideologically correct, whose gaudy makeup made her look like a “red women soldier” (hongse ni]
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angzi jun) from the Cultural Revolution model opera with the same name, now readily absorbs and displays bourgeois values and becomes another Hong Kong woman among many. Her appearance changes accordingly: her thick, dark-rimmed glasses and long straight hair are continuously modified in the four films into thinrimmed glasses and slightly wavy hair; her baggy shirts and pants are replaced by attractive, form-fitting shirts and skirts; her loud, masculine voice softens into a gentle, feminine one; and her wide, dramatic gait gives way to sensual steps. With the prospect of marrying a local man, her “Hong Kong-ization” can be said to be complete. What Hong Kong does to her is to arouse in her the “universal” longings of a woman and regenders her into a true, feminine self. Beyond “modernizing” the biutse into a feminine, bourgeois capitalist, and thereby confirming the universalizing and humanizing capacities of Hong Kong’s capitalist culture, the films also explicitly engage in discussions of 1997. Made in 1990, the first of the films rarely invokes 1997, and when it does, the threat is not yet directly felt. So in the last scene of the movie, when Shuonan says good-bye to her first Hong Kong lover at the border, she hands him a note on which she has written: “After 1997 maybe we can cooperate again.” By part 3 (1992), we see the entire staª of the Hong Kong political bureau confessing to a high mainland o‹cial, Qian Li,53 who is visiting Hong Kong. They tell him the sins they committed against China and seek forgiveness, for fear of retaliation after 1997. In the fourth installment (1994), 1997 becomes a consuming obsession and fear for the Hong Kong characters involved. Another mainland woman, Xiao Ru, is strategically seduced by a half-British, half-Chinese policeman, Oliver, because Xiao Ru is the daughter of the Chinese general who will be in command of the People’s Liberation Army to be stationed in Hong Kong after 1997. Seducing her would translate into having influence over the general’s decisions regarding Hong Kong, and this is seen to directly aªect Hong Kong stock prices and other financial conditions. In fact, her seduction is a conspiracy of the entire police department to ensure Hong Kong’s financial future and the policemen’s own financial security. The typical last scene at the border is now painfully explicit. We see Oliver “using connections” (kao guanxi) to ensure his future in the manner of a Chinese mainlander navigating a corrupt system. He says to Xiao Ru’s father, “Mr. General, this is my identification card; please remember me. I will remain in Hong Kong after 1997.” Despite its farcical overtones, an ominous sense of reality looms. Together, the films projected a set of negotiations with “China,” even as the The Geopolitics of Desire
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
15
Interview of Qian Li from part 4 of Her Fatal Ways.
latter was consistently made the object of laughter. Shuonan’s romantic encounters in Hong Kong actually involved men of diªerent races—she falls in love with two Hong Kong Han males in the first two films, but by the third film, it is a biracial (half British, half Han), and the fourth film, a Scot. And it was only with the Scot that her love was fully reciprocated and a union was expected. To venture an allegorical reading here, the union of the Scot (who ironically represents the colonial government) and the Chinese mimicked the political cooperation between the British and the Chinese governments who had decided Hong Kong’s fate without the participation of the Hong Kong people themselves. In a similar manner, the man who seduced Xiao Ru is half British, suggesting the occlusion of Hong Kongers, whose fate was beyond their control. In contrast, the fact that the biutse was infinitely seducible by Hong Kong men and readily replaced her mainland culture with Hong Kong culture also presented a narrative of assimilation. “Modern,” “cultured,” and capitalist Hong Kong, it was suggested, could “civilize” the ]
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backward Chinese and thereby neutralize the eªects of the 1997 takeover. At the very least, the capitalist seductions of the city could “soften” the “hard” mainlanders to such a degree that perhaps 1997 would not be as traumatic as expected. This optimism regarding Hong Kong culture’s power of assimilation was at the time validated by the immense influence Hong Kong mass media had exerted in southern China. As director Alfred Cheung pointed out in an interview, Hong Kong television was transforming the ideology of 60 million people in southern China, and the reach and influence of this “Hong Kong cultural zone” was reaching farther and farther north.54 In the language of the Hong Kong Cultural Studies Collective, this formidable force of Hong Kong mass culture was the “Northward Imaginary” (beijin xiangxiang ), whose advance could not be stopped.55 The feminization of the biutse in Her Fatal Ways, then, embodied this optimism, and in this narrative, curiously, time was on the side of Hong Kong. The apprehension about 1997 could then be displaced by projecting a vision into a farther future, when China will become more and more capitalistic in the Hong Kong mold and may eventually eschew monolithic communist rule. What went unsaid in this optimism, of course, was the potential vulnerability of such assertions of cultural power (derived from the universalizing power of Hong Kong capitalism) in the face of blatant exercises of political power. Taiwan’s clashes with China could be seen as proof for this. The projection of Hong Kong’s cultural power therefore could well be another fantasy equally fracturable in the face of China’s political authority, and its assimilating potential quite exaggerated. What came to be dubbed as “Hong Kong Cultural Imperialism” was criticized not only by ultraconservative, state-sponsored nationalist leftists in China, but also by the so-called Chinese postcolonial critics (or the Chinese New Left) whose compulsory critique of all nonnative forms of culture made them equally, though differently from the ultraleftists, weary of Hong Kong mass culture’s incursion on China. The immense creative energy emanating from a population of 1.4 billion now wields more power to assimilate Hong Kong mass culture into its fold rather than the other way around. Seen in this light, the projection of the feminizing supremacy of Hong Kong mass culture in the mid-1990s can be construed as a fantastic imagination of power and agency and a form of displacement of the fear of the impending retrocession to China. While Taiwan media resorted to nationalist sentiments to reject the lures of Chinese women and thereby asserted Taiwan’s moral supremacy and economic leverage, Hong Kong media’s recourse to The Geopolitics of Desire
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a feminizing capitalism as the means to carve out a cultural identity was in the end quite futile when China itself has been vigorously advancing on the route of a flexible, market-oriented “socialism with Chinese characteristics” in the postMao, post-Deng, or the so-called postsocialist years. One consequence of global capitalism in the twenty-first century is precisely that its new centers of activity, of which China is the primary example, will have much leverage in determining all aspects of human activity through its boundless and borderless reach to diªerent corners of the world. Capitalism’s feminizing power is not for use by Hong Kong alone, but by all. GENDER AND PUBLIC SPHERE If Taiwan media representations of the dalumei can be largely decoded as manifestations of the fear of contamination, the Hong Kong films analyzed above imagine a narrative of assimilation and domestication in order to neutralize China’s threat. The divergent encodings of mainland Chinese women are suggestive of the diªerent degrees of autonomy available for Taiwan and Hong Kong in the mid-1990s. Whether or not the availability of autonomy might be ultimately an illusion for Taiwan, Hong Kong’s lack of autonomy was irreversible due to its impending retrocession in 1997. In light of such antithetical underpinnings in the representation of Chinese women in Taiwan and Hong Kong mass media, the mass media’s potential for the construction of a pan-Chinese public sphere in the ChinaTaiwan-Hong Kong region was not only unlikely but also impossible. This is despite the professed optimism seen in various cultural circles in the early 1990s and the fact that coproductions of movies continue to be made into the twenty-first century.56 Classic discussions of the public sphere in the tradition of Jürgen Habermas saw its relationship with mass media to be an oppositional one,57 whereas reconsideration of this relationship generally fell into two modes: the celebration of the deterritorializing potential of mass media and its capability to form a transnational public sphere, and the similarly celebratory perception of mass media as the site of peripheral cultures manufacturing alternative identities against domination. Arjun Appadurai’s notion of mediascape and Miriam Hansen’s discussion of the deterritorialization of public sphere based on the transnational flow of electronic media are examples of the former mode; Bruce Robbins’s discussion of mass media ]
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
1
Hung Liu, Olympia II (1992, 34 × 86 × 7). Courtesy of the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
2
Hung Liu, Swan Song. Courtesy of the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
3
Publicity photo of Her Fatal Ways depicting ideologically coded characters, from left: an anticommunist Guomindang remnant, the biutse, a Hong Kong royal policeman, and the filmmaker Alfred Cheung. Photo provided by Alfred Cheung.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
4
Detail of cover of The Practice of Chineseness by Yuk-yuen Lan. Photograph by the author.
5
Display in Shanghai Tang store, from The Practice of Chineseness, p. 41.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
6
Wu Mali. Epitaph (1997), sandblast glasses with inscription and video. Used with permission of the artist.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
7
Wu Mali’s Stories of Women from Hsin-chuang (1997), cloth woven with words and patterns, video. Photography by Chung-hsing Lin; used with permission of the artist.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
8
Detail of words woven into cloth from Stories of Women from Hsin-chuang.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
9
Wu Mali, Formosa Club (1998), interior space; wooden board, pink sponge, neon light. Photography by Ching-tang Liu; used with permission of the artist.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
10
Wu Mali, The Library, at the Palazzo Delle Prigiaoni, Biennale Venezia (1995), shredded books, perplex containers, golden labels, metal bookshelves. Photography by Chung-hsing Lin; used with permission of the artist.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
11
Detail from The Library, the Bible placed in the middle of the room.
[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
12
Wu Mali, Sweeties of the Century (1999), child photos of celebrities respectively from left to right, then top to bottom: Aung San Suu Kyi, Mohandas Gandhi, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Rachel Carson, Bertrand Russell, Margaret Thatcher, Oscar Wilde, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Adolf Hitler, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Nam June Paik, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mikhail Gorbachev, Oprah Winfrey, Marcel Duchamp, Václav Havel, John Lennon, Lee Teng-hui, Gertrude Stein, Rainer Maria Rilke, Frida Kahlo, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lin Hwai-min, T.S. Eliot, Haile Selassie, Walt Disney, the Dalai Lama, Princess Diana, Simone de Beauvoir, H.M. King Bhumibol.
as the potential site for disenfranchised minorities or marginalized collectivities to articulate their cultural identities is an example of the latter.58 China scholars have also debated the question of the public sphere, asking whether there was a public sphere in imperial China on the pages of Modern China in 1993 and whether certain locations can be found in today’s transnational landscape for a Chinese public sphere. Tu Wei-ming’s conception of “cultural China” as the realm of common awareness of all Chinese peoples beyond geopolitical boundaries was then identified as the possible site of a Chinese public sphere.59 In relation to mass media, Mayfair Yang charted the transnationalizing tendencies in Chinese identity formation in China in the age of diaspora and free-flowing mass media.60 In both the conceptions of cultural China and transnational China, the authority of hegemonic statism is undermined by virtue of the scope and dynamics of these conceptions. While Yang locates the agency of antistatism in the urban Chinese populace in China, Tu would locate sites external to geopolitical China, that is, Sinophone communities, as the most vital areas of cultural China. Even though the term zhong-gang-tai existed as a possible name for the intimacy of the three places, its constitution as a possible public sphere was highly problematic and continues to be so. The three terms of the name—China, Hong Kong, Taiwan—have fractured each other in multiple ways. There was also the absence of the basic premises of “communication” and “rational-critical discourse” as required by the Habermasian paradigm, even if one allows for historical diªerences between Habermas’s Germany and the region in question as the departing point of theorization. Assertions of China’s political power over Taiwan and Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, fueled by the reorganization of power due at the time to the impending death of Deng Xiaoping and its unpredictable consequences, were made vigorously and conspicuously. Taiwan and Hong Kong therefore resorted to asserting economic and cultural power as a means to resist China’s political power, but such forms of resistance, as bombastic and regressive as they might have been, were fraught with a sense of fatalism and apprehension. To the extent that mass media in Taiwan and Hong Kong aªorded moments of fantastic narrativization of power, one can perhaps ascertain the potential of mass media as a form of resistance. However, in the overlapping of “state” powers of China, Taiwan, and the colonial government in Hong Kong, as well as in China’s ever-tightening policy over Taiwan’s claims to independence and its post-1997 policies of containment of Hong Kong, the room for generating truly alternative identities that would be The Geopolitics of Desire
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recognized as such in the international arena remains limited. If “Greater China” as an entity was largely an economic trope, the prevalence of oppositional dynamics in mass media’s gender representation exposed the impossibility of imagining it as a culturally or politically integratable entity. Hence, representations of mainland Chinese women in mass media emphasized their cultural diªerence from the women of Taiwan and Hong Kong and are filled with patriarchal as well as capitalist injunctions and eroticizations. In the end, these women were ironically made to become linking agents for the patriarchal “kinship system” in the region— Taiwan and Hong Kong men did have unions with Chinese women either legally or illegally—but their “linking” function triggered the fear of contamination in the case of dalumei, and in the case of the biutse, the fantasy of assimilation. Such a situation also portends the untenability of a gendered public sphere across these places. Although Taiwanese feminist groups incorporated aspects of Chinese culture to empower themselves and imagine solidarities,61 the towering imperative of Taiwan’s national well-being disallowed and will continue to prevent the engagement to become any kind of universal feminist critique of women’s oppression.62 Understandably concerned with local women’s welfare, Taiwan and Hong Kong feminist groups alike chose to focus their eªorts on local wives as victims of the patriarchal domination of their lustful and adulterous husbands. These are not women who are waiting for their nation to be liberated before they can assert themselves as agents of history as in old theorizations of Third World women versus nationalism. These are not women who cross national boundaries searching for an ideal of a transnational feminism that can serve as attractive material for transnational feminist theorizing. Rather, these women deploy their national and transnational allegiances pragmatically and locally to define the meaning of their own politics. The imagined construction of a feminist public sphere among certain select feminists in these areas would then have to be an obviously classed aªair for those who can aªord to be feminist universalists. Ultimately it is the critical imbalance of political power that disallows the emergence of a public sphere, gendered or not, in the Taiwan-Hong Kong-Taiwan triangle. The Sinophone and local sensibilities of Taiwan culture will continue to be weary of China and Chineseness, and this weariness will continue to be gendered.
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An ambiguity, then, is not satisfying in itself, nor is it, considered as a device on its own, a thing to be attempted; it must in each case arise from, and be justified by, the peculiar requirements of the situation. —William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1947)
4
The Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity ■
On a rainy day in the side lobby of a four-star hotel in Beijing, a group of about twenty men dressed in T-shirts with “Woodpeckers from Taiwan” printed on their backs are practicing their choir songs for the International Choir Festival.
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The Taiwan Hotel, located in the upscale Goldfish Lane in the heart of Beijing, is notorious for being “luan” (messy), meaning that it is rife with prostitution and other kinds of problems. The hotel rooms are also much dingier and cheaper than those of neighboring hotels—the Palace Hotel and the Peace Hotel.
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A Taiwan artist who has given up on the Taiwan art market moves to Shanghai and spearheads a movement to turn old colonial warehouses along the Suzhou river into art studios for a “Su He” (Suzhou River) district, after New York’s SoHo.
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Another Taiwan artist laments that there is no future for art in Taiwan. The center for art in Asia is now unquestionably Shanghai.
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In the meantime, some of the most successful soap operas on Taiwan television showcase mainland Chinese actresses and actors, and the local film market is dead, except for occasional transpacific or trans–Taiwan Strait coproductions such as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or the French- or Japanese-funded art house films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang.
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There were reputedly 1 million Taiwanese living and working in China by 2002, up to six hundred thousand of whom resided in Shanghai. To be successful in China, one Taiwan business magazine suggests that the Taiwanese have to give up their sense of Taiwanese superiority. Another magazine suggests that the Chinese are simply using the Taiwanese for the duration of their usefulness, but then will move on and leave the Taiwanese behind once China becomes economically more advanced.
I begin this chapter with a series of anecdotal observations as a way to comment on Taiwan’s haphazard, fragmentary, disorganized, and unstable state of cultural and economic relations with China, which underscores the di‹cult question of identity for Taiwan. Amid calls to bid “farewell to China,” as well as considerable success in reconstructing local history and culture in Taiwan in its particularity, the question of identity in Taiwan continues to be intimately imbricated with China. This imbrication is the locality of the Sinophone in its struggle to become “Taiwanese.” This struggle is a linguistic one to the extent that what in China’s Fujian province is a topolect is very similar to one of the o‹cial languages in Taiwan, the Minnan, which is to replace the Guomindang’s designated “national language,” the Guoyu. Guoyu, which is Mandarin, is also similar to China’s o‹cial language, Hanyu. The diªerence between Hanyu and Guoyu, in practice, is similar to the diªerence between British English and American English in the specific sense that Guoyu is the standard language of those diasporic Han Chinese who left China in the late 1940s and immigrated to Taiwan (the so-called provincial outsiders, waisheng’ren, in Taiwan). Guoyu has since, like American English, developed its own vocabularies, accents, and expressions diªerent from China’s o‹cial Hanyu, which has been baptized by socialist ideology. But Guoyu was in some sense a
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colonial language in Taiwan, as it was imposed by the exiled Guomindang government on the local Taiwanese people, who were mainly speakers of Minnan and Japanese until the late 1940s. As forceful imposition, the standardization and valorization of Guoyu over the years of Guomindang rule until 1987 involved the relegating of Minnan speakers to second-class citizenship. For instance, Victor Mair has ironically noted that for the Taiwanese speaking Guoyu is a lesson in “how to forget your mother tongue and remember your national language.”1 If Sinophone is the transitional term that negotiates between what is Guoyu and what is Minnan, it excludes aboriginal languages that trace completely different linguistic trajectories. The extent to which aboriginal cultures became sinicized over the centuries clearly posits the Sinophone as a product of colonial imposition, just as the Francophone is to native peoples in North Africa and elsewhere. Whether Taiwanese or Sinophone, the question of identity in Taiwan, in other words, must always be a question of multiple identities, ethnicities, languages, and cultures. What prevents the strengthening of a multicultural identity in Taiwan, however, has been an overwhelming “obsession with China,”2 not so much due to cultural allegiance to China but due to China’s looming threat of military invasion. The fact that negotiations between Chineseness and Taiwaneseness are continuously replayed in visual, literary, and other forms of culture must be understood both as a response to China’s threat over Taiwan’s bid for sovereignty and as the desire to construct a unique identity against China. If we can, for heuristic purposes, divide the question of identity into the registers of identifications within the realms of politics, culture, and economics, we will see factors of ambiguity and paradox appearing to overwhelm local desires for clarity and particularity. The chief political paradox is that Taiwan’s political and national identity acquired unprecedented particularity articulated against China in Taiwan’s social imaginary at the beginning of the twenty-first century after a decade of governance by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), but this particularity as a discourse constructed within Taiwan runs into immediate di‹culty in the international context. The international community, led by the United States, has persistently deployed a policy of ambiguity over Taiwan-China relations, adhering to China’s “One China” policy but simultaneously maintaining a sympathetic stance toward Taiwan as its de facto protectorate. American o‹cial policy of ambiguity has not given much room for Taiwan to maneuver its
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political declaration of “independence,” even though it is supposedly protected from Chinese aggression by the trilateral defense system set up among Japan, the United States, and Taiwan. For the last two decades of the twentieth century, this state of ambiguity was increasingly seen to be dangerous by the Taiwan leadership, hence the occasional outbursts of political rhetoric claiming Taiwan’s separate national status such as the pronouncements of the two Taiwanese presidents: Lee Teng-hui’s “Theory of Two Countries” and Chen Shui-bian’s “Each Side a Separate Country.” These outbursts of declarations clamor for clarity and particularity, asserting Taiwan’s autonomy and trying to attract international attention to Taiwan’s plight. If they were eªective means of battling ambiguity, these declarations also provoked strong reactions from China, leading to both the missile crisis and the passing of the anticessation law by China’s People’s Congress in 2005, the latter unilaterally legalizing the use of military force against Taiwan in the event of Taiwan’s “declaration of independence.” China’s eªective international diplomatic blockade on Taiwan has also led to Taiwan’s extremely marginalized position in international politics. In the realm of politics, then, local desires run into direct conflict with international restrictions, mainly due to the contradictory American policy of promoting democracy in Taiwan (whose logical limit is the independence of Taiwan) and adhering to the “One China” policy (whose logical limit is China’s occupation of Taiwan). This contradiction is one crucial site of ambiguity. The economic determinations of Taiwan’s identity are also fraught with ambiguity. Confronting the ascending economic power of China, the Taiwanese suddenly woke up to find, after two decades of heavy investment in China, that their economy has become far too dependent on China. This is the location of the second paradox that informs the tension between the state of active instrumentalization of universality for economic purposes and the state of desiring particularity from China for political and cultural reasons. For economic gain on the one hand, the Taiwanese have capitalized on what may be called a Sinophone cultural universalism, that is, their cultural and linguistic similarity with the Chinese. From deploying Chinese labor for exporting purposes to the Western countries since the 1980s, which intelligently utilized China’s export quotas to the United States and other countries, to the more recent entry and expansion into the domestic Chinese market, which contributed in a significant way to the creation of a consumer market in China, Taiwanese capitalism found China to be the means to its ]
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continued economic expansion and prosperity. The added complexity that emerges from this economic drive, which strategically deployed cultural universalism, was that its capitalist character further denationalizes those Taiwanese who work and live in China to the extent that they themselves have become new immigrants in China. These Taiwanese immigrants cannot but settle in China and become a new kind of “Chinese” with complex and ambiguous allegiances. This economic universalism clearly undermines Taiwan nativists’ political claim of independence, as the economic sector in Taiwan finds its well-being increasingly entangled with China, and as more and more Taiwanese settle and live in China. The fear that Taiwan may not be able to sustain its own economy without China has led to the Taiwan government’s decade-old policies of control attempting to curtail Taiwanese investment outflow to China, such as the threat of imprisonment for those who invest without government approval announced in August 2002. In the cultural realm, ambiguous determinations of similarity and diªerence also inform the question of identity. Seen in the practices of the everyday in Taiwan, Sinophone culture is often confused with Chinese culture, hence those who continue to appreciate classical Chinese culture risk being identified simplistically as unificationists (tongpai), while Taiwan-centered cultural purists hasten to construct Taiwan’s unique cultural history based on its unique cultural geography, climatology, colonial history, and archaeology against China and Chineseness. Simplistic identity politics that had been too quick to categorize and repudiate each other either as unificationists or independentists (dupai) had torn through the fabric of Taiwan society to the extent that a new collective consciousness had to be invented in the last few years of the twentieth century to mend the rifts. This new collectivity of the “New Taiwanese,” meant to overcome the divisiveness of identity politics, celebrates multiculturalism, multilingualism, and multiethnicism. But the crowning of a Taiwan multiculturalism, like all multiculturalisms, hides internal hierarchies and inequities. Even if we suspend these hierarchies and inequities for a moment, the multicultural identity is yet to take root in Taiwan. The cultural consequences of political and economic “obsession with China” are the obsessive staging and performance of Taiwan’s cultural relationship with China in an eªort to search for and to codify new locations of cultural value. The meanings of “China” and “Chinese culture” have been multiple, contradictory, and unresolved for a long time, due mainly to Guomindang’s sinicization campaign through most of the second half of the twentieth century. In the Guomindang The Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity
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imaginary, Taiwan is the locale that preserved authentic Chinese culture in contrast to socialist China’s denunciation of Chinese culture during the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Guomindang’s self-presentation to the world was therefore in the mode of “competitive authenticity”: Taiwan’s “Chinese” culture is more authentic than China’s Chinese culture, because it inherited and protected the classical qualities of that culture overthrown by communism in China. In this sense, Guomindang-ruled Taiwan’s claim to authentic Chineseness was not unlike ChosQn Korea’s self-nomination as a “small China” (sojunghwa), the last bastion of Chinese civilization, against the Manchu-ruled Qing China. As a consequence of Guomindang policy, the terminological shift from calling oneself a “Chinese” person to a “Taiwanese” person has basically required a political revolution—the overthrow of the Guomindang regime—albeit through democratic means. The shift from “Chinese culture” (culture of China) to “Taiwanese culture” is then largely accomplished. But because “Taiwanese culture” is opposed to “Chinese culture,” there is a tendency to excise indiscriminatingly what is “Chinese” from all aspects of Taiwan culture. One clear example of this is the falling out of favor of the generation of Taiwan writers who were born in China and went to Taiwan in the late 1940s. These “provincial outsiders” have literally been purged from the literary canon for their politically incorrect nostalgia for China. This is the consequence of conflating “Chinese culture” (Zhongguo wenhua) with “Sino-culture” (zhonghua wenhua) or “Sinophone culture” (huayu wenhua). With the Sinophone, it is the local translation, revision, and reinvention of Chinese culture that is of importance, not Chinese culture in and of itself. There is no need to deny Taiwan’s cultural a‹nity to China, but then this a‹nity is not the determining factor of Taiwan’s culture; on the contrary, some may even claim that contemporary Taiwan culture is more Japanized and Americanized than otherwise. A comparative perspective would help us understand why this confusion over Chinese culture in China and Sinophone culture outside China is rather unique to Taiwan. Other diasporic Han communities and societies in Southeast Asia or North America have long historicized and theorized their “Chineseness” in terms of their diaspora and immigration, taking it as fact that their “Chineseness” is cultural to a limited extent of heritage, and that theirs is a local culture with no necessary relationship to contemporary Chinese culture from China. Chinese American culture, for instance, is largely defined against Chinese culture as American]
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born Chinese Americans rebel against their immigrant parents’ culture: generational diªerence is commonly transferred into cultural and linguistic diªerence. The word Chinese in the term Chinese American is theoretically a superfluous adjective that describes but does not determine the core noun of the term: American. The main agenda of the Asian American movement and the academic studies it spawned lies in the claim of Asian Americans on the American nation, not on Asia; on the English language, not on various languages from Asia. It is the first-generation immigrants who speak diªerent Sinitic languages that constitute the Sinophone community—when the language changes into English, the community becomes Asian American. As Asian American Studies tended to exclude Sinitic-language materials—a prominent example is the refusal to consider literature written in Hanyu about the immigrant experience into the Chinese American literary canon—the Sinophone becomes a necessary and useful category in the U.S. context. In Taiwan, the confusion over distinctions between Sino-culture or Sinophone culture and Chinese culture is, as suggested above, an unnatural consequence of the Guomindang ideology that Taiwan alone represented authentic Chinese culture, even though it was clear from the beginning that this was an impossibility. This is a textbook example of how ideology can be false consciousness bordering on hallucination. The legacy informs the fourth kind of paradox, which leaves the Taiwanese feeling ambiguous about Chinese culture and Chineseness, even after extensive and sustained analysis and theorization of Taiwan’s cultural diªerence from China throughout the 1980s and 1990s. To bid “farewell to China” has proved to be more di‹cult than anticipated. In sum, ambiguity surrounds Taiwan’s economic, cultural, and political relations with China to the extent that the notion of “Taiwan identity” as such must be flexible. If for late capitalism, flexibility is the chief mode of production and reproduction, which requires flexible subjects to conform and to lead,3 Taiwan’s impossible ambiguity makes it the inescapable condition of being, hence the title of this chapter. While flexibility for core capitalist countries earns them unprecedented profits, flexibility for a semiperipheral but not so insignificant economic entity such as Taiwan is a means of maintaining the limited degree of stability for economic, cultural, and political survival. Flexibility here is not so much a choice but a necessity: what must a Taiwan capitalist do in terms of cultural and political allegiance when economic survival depends on China? If amThe Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity
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biguity and flexibility are the best guarantee for security and prosperity, barring succumbing to Chinese demands of “unification,” the meaning and value of ambiguity and flexibility are contrary to their usual meanings and are extremely context-specific. How does one find clarity when ambiguity is the value of the day, when ambiguity guarantees, for the time being, safety? How many types of ambiguity, to ironically echo New Critic William Empson quoted at the beginning of this chapter, can the Taiwanese tolerate or invent, without continuously falling deeper and deeper into either identity crises or cultural chaos? In this chapter, I oªer a selective genealogy of the trope of “mainland China” (Chung-kuo ta-lu/Zhongguo dalu), or the “mainland” (dalu) for short, as it is represented in Taiwan’s cultural discourses at large and television travel programs in particular. The main setting for the travel programs is the 1990s, when these programs were aired in major television stations and traveling to China was beginning to gain wide popularity. These programs register the initial cultural, political, and economic rapprochements with China in the 1990s rendered in the visual medium, where we see how visuality functions as the ground for the negotiation of identities. Most importantly, they mark an important moment in the genealogy of Taiwan’s relationship with China and Chineseness. A SHORT HISTORY OF THE “MAINLAND” Since 1949 the “mainland,” or more literally, the “continent” (dalu) has had various meanings in the social and cultural imaginary of Taiwan. Mobilized for the Guomindang’s political, ideological and cultural self-legitimation and the management of people on Taiwan, the “mainland “ in o‹cial discourse and the popular media closely dictated by that discourse had been, until the mid-1980s, simultaneously the land of the utopian past, childhood, and nostalgia, to be “restored/ recovered”—guangfu—from the hands of the communists. As the land of the future, it was the object of longing and it also promised the hope of return. Nostalgia was wedded to the professed protection of traditional culture and expectation for political unification, both of which helped consolidate Guomindang’s rule on Taiwan. Hence, up until the early 1990s, from elementary school on, children were inculcated with such political rhetoric as “Counterattack the mainland!” ( fangong dalu), “The Three Principles of the People will save China!” (sanmin zhuyi zheng jiu Zhongguo), and “Save our mainland compatriots from the deepest water ]
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and hottest fire!” (zheng jiu dalu tongbao yu shuishen huore zhizhong ), and so forth, which they memorized in order to be politically correct. The “mainland” had been persistently and carefully guarded as the o‹cially designated object of the Guomindang’s desire, and through ideological inculcation, this was largely mimicked by the Taiwanese people without much questioning.4 Those who questioned—such as Taiwan communists during the white terror era of the 1950s and 1960s—were summarily imprisoned or killed. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the trope of the “mainland “ underwent radical transformations. Such changes reflected various parallel developments: the increased personal and commercial ties between Taiwan and China, especially after the o‹cial lifting of the ban on visiting China in 1987; the formation of a multiparty system heralded by the establishment of the Democratic Progressive Party in 1986; the popular call for the Guomindang to recognize its violence against and violation of people on Taiwan, specifically in reference to the massacre of February 28, 1947, and the Guomindang’s willingness to compensate the victims of the massacre; and the lifting of martial law in 1987, which paved way for the possibility of the public expression of plural cultures and ideologies. These various developments allowed for a more personal and concrete, rather than o‹cially sanctioned and imaginary, relationship with China. Such an opening in relations with China also posed new questions concerning self-identity, and the need to define this identity, hence encouraging the emergence of two related nativist agendas— one sponsored by the Lee Teng-hui and the DPP government aimed at resisting the political hegemony of China, the other propagated by Taiwan nativist cultural workers who envisioned cultural independence from China in what may be called a new Taiwanese cultural nativism. In the new discourse of Taiwanese cultural nativism, China was denied the role of cultural source and leader for Taiwan. Chinese culture and tradition as propagated by the Guomindang was repudiated as “Chinese cultural imperialism” and “central plain centrism” that seeks to marginalize and dominate the Taiwanese people, hence the need for a “counterdomination discourse” or “discourse of dissidence” ( fanzhipei lunshu).5 Such counterdomination discourse grounded itself in the ideology of “Taiwanese cultural autonomy” (Taiwan wenhua de zizhuxing ), “Taiwanese cultural independence” (wenhua de taidu lun), or Taiwan as an “autonomous cultural system” (zizhu wenhua tixi) as articulated by numerous leading intellectuals whose allegiance cuts across the traditional place-of-origin The Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity
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(sheng ji) and ethnicity (zhongzu) lines of cultural and political diªerence.6 In this scheme of things, “Taiwanese culture” referred to the “native culture” (bentu wenhua) of Taiwan, inclusive of all ethnicities and places of origin, its boundaries set by the geocultural space of Taiwan, which was to be clearly delineated from China and Chinese culture. Hence, a young second-generation mainlander (waisheng’ren) cultural critic proclaimed, as did many others: “We need to firmly clarify the territorial diªerence between China and Taiwan. . . . Chinese culture is no longer the mother culture of Taiwanese culture, but like American culture, is an ‘Other’s Culture.’”7 Eªorts had been made to rewrite Taiwanese history against the Guomindang’s willful neglect and omission; to reenvision Taiwanese culture based on its specific geographical, territorial, climatic, and other conditions; and to delineate the boundaries of Taiwaneseness vis-à-vis China. This was evidenced by a flourish of books appearing in special series such as the New Taiwan Series, the Taiwan Literature and History Series, and the Taiwan Citizen Series in the 1990s. These were only the series published by one especially committed publisher, Avant Garde Press (Qianwei), while other publishers such as the Independent Evening News (Zili wanbao) and popular publishers such as Crown (Huangguan) all put out prolific publications on the “new” subject of Taiwan. The flourish of discourse on Taiwanese cultural nativism had contradictory consequences, however, as it became increasingly entangled in the commercialization of culture and commodification of cultural products. The fad of cultural criticism in Taiwan in the 1990s, to which the new discourse of Taiwanese cultural nativism had significantly contributed, was undeniably also fanned by the packaging of books and magazines with provocative titles and flashy covers. The popular circulation of diplomat Ch’ien Fu’s father’s name, Ch’ien Ssu-liang, which can mean “Money Think Bright” if translated literally, had been coined to mean “to have money is to be bright” (youqian jiuliang ), illustrating the penetration of commercialization in Taiwan’s urban society, albeit through a kind of mediated dark humor. The fact that this had originally been the name of a renowned educator— an elite cultural leader—further exemplified the trenchant power of a popular imagination fixated on the rise and fall of the stock market.8 The other tangible threat to this new Taiwanese cultural nativism was the Guomindang’s incorporation and neutralization of its political opposition as it also sought to “nativize” (bentuhua) itself as a means of self-justification throughout ]
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the 1980s to the mid-1990s. The Guomindang’s nativization rhetoric was perceptively criticized by cultural nativists thusly: according to Li Chien-hung, the Guomindang proclaimed itself a “native regime” in an eªort to blur the boundaries between the native and the nonnative and thus to authenticate itself, while the underlying agenda was to incorporate “Taiwan nativism” (Taiwan bentu) into “China nativism” (Zhongguo bentu).9 Examples also included the Guomindang’s o‹cial sanctioning of a new history textbook for schoolchildren called The History of Taiwan (Taiwanshi), put into use in 1996, and the abolition of Sun Yetsan’s Three Principles of the People as a subject in the college entrance examination beginning in 1995. This was partly the Guomindang’s response to popular demand, partly a desire to “nativize” itself under the presidency of native Taiwanese Lee Teng-hui, and partly a subtle gesture repudiating the Beijing government’s military threat against any assertions of Taiwanese independence, whether cultural or political. Lee’s taunting of the mainland government as “bandits” (tufei) during his 1994 whirlwind multinational diplomatic tour, under the auspices of new diplomatic policies variously termed “flexible diplomacy” (tanxing waijiao) and “pragmatic diplomacy” (wushi waijiao), or ironically termed “vacation diplomacy” (dujia waijiao), and the Guomindang government’s highly publicized diplomatic eªorts to rejoin the United Nations as a nation, if not a nation-state, further showed Guomindang gradually shifting away from the political hegemony of China in the international scene at the time. Though repudiating Taiwanese cultural nativism as divisive and impractical, the Guomindang’s nativization campaign incorporated much of its agenda in a slightly diªerent form. The representation of mainland China in Taiwan’s media in the 1990s in such a complicated context was unavoidably a site of various projections aªected by the twin dictates of politics and economics. The fact that the three television stations on Taiwan were more or less under the direct jurisdiction of the government at the time—China TV (zhongshi) was owned and funded by the Guomindang, Taiwan TV (taishi) by the spectral entity called the provincial government, and CTV (huashi) by the Ministries of Defense and Education—defined the programming parameters, although these parameters often revealed themselves to be porous. The construction of “mainland China” in Taiwan’s media hence at once pointed to an impulse to commodify China in a mode similar to the operation of a transnational corporation, incorporating China’s primitiveness, nativeness, and raw cultural material for economic gain, while simultaneously charting the conThe Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity
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vergence of diverse cultural and political discourses. Taiwan began to look away from China as the cultural and geographical home and political other, and rather saw it as a source for mass consumption and economic opportunities—where Taiwanese businesses could “land” (denglu), “expand the market” (guangtuo dalu shichang ), and finally “invade and conquer” (qianggong ).10 The inflated, exaggerated military metaphors used by local magazines and newspapers echoed the Guomindang rhetoric of “counterattack the mainland” with an ironic twist.11 The bombastic rhetoric also reflected the confidence and bullishness resulting from a perception of Taiwan’s economic superiority in the early 1990s. This was, of course, a temporary confidence that was soon to be replaced by anxiety and ambiguity. Even though Guomindang rule was gradually becoming nativized under Lee Teng-hui, its political and ideological base remained solid during this time. Therefore, most any discussion of cultural forms in Taiwan had to be situated within a cultural economy that ineluctably negotiated with the gradually shifting political parameters of cultural expression set up by the Guomindang. Particularly when cultural expressions concerned China, as in the television travelogues on China, such negotiations can be said to be most pronounced. Whether these negotiations were positive (incorporative) or negative (resistant) vis-à-vis the Guomindang government, however, they were further embroiled within what can be called the postmodern, late capitalist condition of a cultural economy thoroughly saturated by commodification. Often a closer examination of what might easily be regarded as political or ideological in a cultural and visual work exposes a deep investment in a profit-oriented market economy. The interweaving tra‹c between commercial and political priorities became especially heavy in the representation of “mainland China” in Taiwan’s media. To be sure, economic drives have always undergirded much of Taiwan’s interest in China, as the Taiwanese by this time found the promise of inexpensive Chinese labor and the possibility of its enormous market to be immense. To begin, there was also quite a bit of confidence, albeit short-lived. This confidence was buttressed by Taiwan’s economic miracle, which reached its height in the mid1990s, and by over a decade of cultural nativization drives. Throughout the 1980s, there had been a sustained debate on Taiwan consciousness or Taiwan complex (Taiwan yishi or Taiwan jie) in opposition to China consciousness or China complex (Zhongguo yishi or Zhongguo jie).12 In 1987, Taiwan was also o‹cially granted the “postmodern” qualification by the most prominent of all American Marxist ]
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theorists of postmodernism and postmodernity, Fredric Jameson, after his visit there. In his frequently cited essay on Taiwan cinema, in specific reference to Edward Yang’s film The Terrorizer (Kongbu fenzi), Jameson claimed that Taiwan’s urban culture exhibits quintessential postmodern characteristics. Taiwan in 1987 was declared an “international urban society of late capitalism,” and thus a site that manifested how the economic had thoroughly penetrated all spheres of culture.13 Taiwan’s declaration of postmodernity proved that it was no longer a Third World country, and its curiosity toward prospects in China was buoyed by economic confidence. Media uses of the mainland China trope in the 1990s revealed a strong postmodern impulse in its persistent commodification of “mainland China” as image, as culture, and as a catalog of goods, and of “Chineseness” as marketable product. The urge for commodification in Taiwan’s cultural scene had the eªect of neutralizing even political agendas into forms of entertainment and oªered the space of media as a playground of multiple, though often contradictory, desires which could be said to have simultaneously reinforced a kind of commodity fetishism and foregrounded a kind of cultural complex.14 Television travel programs on China, censored by the Guomindang to varying degrees, negotiated with various agents including Guomindang-instituted ideology, the mainland government, Taiwan’s nativist contingency, and ultimately, the market. In the case of the more exclusively government-funded program Searching for the Strange on the Mainland (Dalu xunqi), Guomindang ideology cleverly resisted mainland China’s claim to cultural and political hegemony through a construction of a vague nativist stance, while skillfully repudiating Taiwanese cultural nativism’s claim that Taiwanese culture is diªerent from Chinese culture. In other words, it simultaneously constructed a unique identity for Taiwan as the inheritor and preserver of traditional Chinese culture, while carefully diªerentiating that identity from the one advocated by Taiwanese cultural nativists. “ETERNAL CHINA” IN THE 1990S The neutralization of ideological or political content by turning “mainland China” into a topic or source of entertainment was abundantly illustrated in the three major travel programs during this period—Searching for the Strange on the Mainland (dalu xunqi), Rivers and Mountains, Ten Thousand Li of Love ( Jiangshan wanli The Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity
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qing ), and Eight Thousand Li of Roads, Cloud, and Moon (Baqianli lu yun he yue). These programs took their viewers on episodic and fragmentary tours through the territory of China with varying narratives superimposed on the images of land, people, customs, and history. One striking similarity in these shows was a controlled absence of signs of the contemporary Chinese political and ideological scene in most of the episodes, exhibiting what Jameson referred to as “a kind of representational laundering of ideologically marked contents” in his discussion of Chinese film.15 In these programs as well, the marks of the Chinese socioeconomic system, that is, the traces of socialist economy in China at the time still patently visible, were often removed. The scenes and episodes were primarily of two large categories—ethnic minority cultures and customs, and the grand historical legacy of classical Chinese culture from pre-1949 China. In other words, signs that revealed China to be in the possession of the communists were skillfully eªaced, so that touring China became touring not communist China, but the pristine, essential “China” that had somehow escaped political and ideological contamination by the Chinese Communist Party.16 China here was not so much a nationstate, but a culture that had not changed much since the communist takeover, or for that matter, since time immemorial. Notice, for instance, that all three program titles successfully avoid mentioning China by its proper name as a nationstate, instead referring to China in naturalistic terms as the “mainland/continent,” “roads, cloud, and moon,” and “rivers and mountains.” Touring China was then symbolically laying claim on the territory of China, albeit in fragmentary form, via a correspondence between the present China (constructed as a continuation of traditional, cultural, geographical China) and China in the imagination of the Taiwan populace as the Guomindang had constructed it. The process of authenticating Taiwan’s claim on China involved displacing the Chinese Communist Party as a nonexistence (or as a problem presence in rare references to it) while foregrounding the classical qualities of Chinese landscape and customs, which were fragment by fragment reconstructed and reclaimed. “China” as such became a constellation or encyclopedia of cultural fragments, a collection of tourist spots, a storehouse of Chinese culture, while the encyclopedic knowledge was in turn transformed into seemingly manageable data. If China as a territory was claimed fragment by fragment through turning it into a collection of tourist spots, China as an encyclopedia, like a catalog of goods, was all the easier to manage, store, and of course, consume. ]
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
16
Collage of images from Searching for the Strange on the Mainland on a video CD version of the program.
The construction of such a timeless, eternal China in most episodes of Searching for the Strange on the Mainland was made possible by a series of strategies employed by the narrative voice and the camera lens. Narrated by Hsiung Lü-yang, a famous journalist, whose soft and gentle feminine voice elegantly enunciated the cadences of the classical poetic expressions used throughout the narration, the show consistently made a highly selective entry into China, to those parts full of exotic and classical beauty, as well as exotic customs. The qi (strange) in xunqi (searching for the strange) also most commonly means the exotic, as the qi in lieqi (exoticism). Literally, lieqi means hunting for the exotic, while xunqi means searching for the exotic—the two share an intimate semantic similarity. The four-part special series entitled Journey West a Thousand li (qianli xiyou) was a good case in point. Throughout this series, the roads and towns along the Silk Road were marked on the map of China in their ancient names before contemporary names were given. It was suggested that these minority villages had remained unchanged for The Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity
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“several hundred years,” living “their lives in a traditional manner,” the people and landscape locked in an ancient time and space. In a diªerent episode, the Yi minority people in Sichuan were similarly depicted as resistant to change, as they were “content with following their ancestors’ peaceful lifestyles” and uninterested in “modern civilization” outside their village. The depiction of parts of China as predeveloped, timeless, and pastoral have multiple implications. First, as part of historical authentication, such timelessness replicated the Guomindang version of Chinese history—that between 1949 and the present, nothing had really changed; China had resisted communist change and was still the way it had always been. The Guomindang’s residual nostalgia toward China as embodying its vision of Chinese culture and history was here confirmed in one episode after the next. This form of nostalgia had been the psychological justification for the Guomindang’s “recovering the mainland” ideology earlier. Second, it was undeniably one of the ways to foreground the modernity of the traveler-cum-anthropologist with a camera (the traveler often appeared in Western-style clothes carrying Western-style equipment, asking questions of the “natives” dressed in traditional ethnic attire), which both primitivized and exoticized China as an attractive tourist spot. The construction of China as living in a diªerent time from that of Taiwan was a typical practice of othering that Johannes Fabian famously called an “allochronic discourse,” in which the anthropologist’s object was placed in another time and was denied coevalness.17 The same allochronic discourse applies to the highly selective depiction of urban China, whose manifestations of technological modernity were strategically concealed. Spotlighted instead were: food items, handicrafts, and herbal medicines—items in a catalog of goods catering specifically to the traveler’s highly selective interests and needs. Such a denial of coevality through a procedure that concealed rather than revealed contemporary China was an improbable projection of Taiwanese agency, which was soon shown to be unstable. As more Taiwanese travel to China, run businesses and factories in China, and settle and live in China, it is contemporary China that they have to reckon with, specifically the prosperous coastal cities such as Shanghai and Xiamen. By placing China in the linear, modernization trajectory of modernity versus primitivism through the operation of a conventional exoticist nostalgia, these Taiwan travel programs have contributed to the construction of a discourse in Taiwan that saw Chinese modernity as a threat. Within this imagination, China’s development toward modernity would threaten Taiwan’s sense ]
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of technological and capitalist superiority, since that superiority was premised on a primitivized China. When Taiwan must confront, not just the “ethnic” or rural China along the Silk Road or remote areas, but a China where socialist-cum-capitalist modernization has been happening in great earnest and with great success, the Taiwanese vision of itself as more modern was bound to be made vulnerable and ultimately debunked. For China is not so much a latecomer to modernity, as modernization theory would have it, but has always already been part of global modernity. The limit of this China primitivism is precisely the closing-oª of alternative imaginations in Taiwan’s dealing with China other than the one on the modernization-based trajectory. When these travel programs were aired in the early 1990s, a cultural quiz program called Rivers and Mountains, Ten Thousand Li of Love also became very popular. Anchored by two famous talk-show hosts, each episode of the show invited two groups of entertainers and cultural figures to compete in a quiz show format. A huge illuminated map of China hung on the wall, which was flanked by two classical, architectural ornamental pillars and two score boards in the design of a traditional Chinese tiled roof. In the show, “China” was divided into categories of knowledge, such as history, customs, music, geography, allusions, humor, people, architecture, food, and so on. After category selections were made, video clippings pertaining to those categories were shown with questions given at the end. The participants were then asked to answer the questions as best, or as humorously, as they could. What was remarkable about this quiz show was that the participants were not chosen for their knowledge about China but for their “star” qualities. Their knowledge of China was soon revealed to be quite lacking, and the show’s quiz format uncomfortably referred back to all the textbook knowledge about China that the Guomindang government required of school-age children. Since the Taiwanese lived on Taiwan but studied Chinese history as its “national” history, Taiwan history as such had been displaced by an ideological education that demanded the Taiwanese ignore Taiwan and project all national longings onto China. Knowledge of Chinese history and culture had been very valuable—it had allowed the students to get good grades on major tests such as the college entrance examination. But in the context of the quiz show, whether or not the participants knew the correct answers did not matter, as the questions were often esoteric; the point was rather to allow the participants to surmise the answers in a humorous way. Often they revealed The Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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The set for Rivers and Mountains, Ten Thousand Li of Love; photograph provided by the program production company, Zhenyu Chuanbo.
themselves to be ignorant about China in general, but because they oªered funny answers, they enhanced the farcical thrust of the show. All in all, the show’s humor displaced the erstwhile sanctity of knowledge about China and instead suggested that being uninformed about China was not a shameful thing in and of itself. It seemed as if the pleasure here was paradoxically located in the participants’ inability to answer the questions. China here again was an encyclopedia, but the fragmentary knowledge about China was not used to claim China or to sell cultural nostalgia but to imply, indirectly, that it was okay not to know China. The fact that it takes a quiz show to imply ignorance as a form of agency was a double-edged sword. The dance here was between Guomindang’s imposition of China knowledge and ironic debunking of it, but the debunking itself also showed a kind of cultural schizophrenia at work. By dramatizing the examination of one’s ]
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knowledge of China, a masochistic recalling of that imposition was enacted; though ironically responded to, this examination was a repetition of the scene of traumatic ideological imposition. The laughter of the participants in the show and the audience was filled with ambivalence and uneasiness, as Taiwan had yet to claim its distinct identity from China vigorously in the early 1990s. These television programs served as a witness to the gradual moving away from Guomindang ideology of China-as-homeland to Taiwan-as-homeland, appropriately punctuated by nervous laughter and a sense of release. THE “INTIMATE ENEMY” IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY As we enter the twenty-first century, the scale of confidence for Taiwan vis-à-vis China has tipped significantly over to the other side. What is most ironic about the early twenty-first century state of things for Taiwan politically and economically is that “identity” as a form of particularity is becoming more and more a luxury. As mentioned above, Taiwan businesses have changed over the years from utilizing Chinese labor for Western market to full engagement with the Chinese market itself, which means that Taiwan businesses are in China for the long term, and many have become a new kind of Taiwan immigrant in China. The chief problem posed earlier to the Taiwanese families—Taiwan businessmen having mistresses in China (see chapter 3)—was premised on the short-term sojourning mentality of those businessmen. Now that they have entered the Chinese market maybe for good, they have either moved their entire families to China or have married local women, leading to the creation of various elementary and secondary schools specifically designed for the children of these businessmen, especially in Shanghai. Other Taiwanese businessmen prefer that their children attend local Shanghai schools to become more fully integrated in the local society. From being “overseas compatriots” who had money to spend and invest but wished to take the earnings back to Taiwan to support their families there, the Taiwanese in Shanghai have become more and more just like other locals, running their businesses and living their daily lives. When Yung-ho Soy Café (Yung-ho doujiang )—a “Taiwanese” specialty café that used to be available only in Taiwan—cropped up in major shopping areas along the Huaihai Road in Shanghai, Taiwan’s everyday culture had definitely arrived and become integrated with local life, just as the Taiwanese had sought to localize themselves by absorbing local culture. The Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity
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Economic opportunities opened up by China’s developing economy have resulted in increasing economic and cultural integration of the Taiwanese business community in China with the locals, which has led to a mushrooming of media representations of Taiwan immigrants in China, oªering information about business successes and failures in China. On the one hand, this has caused the “Taiwanization” of China’s urban popular and consumer culture, where an almost direct transplantation of Taiwan-style stores, restaurants, fashions, popular music, television shows, and popular novels is noticeable. On the other hand, China is increasingly seen as the place where one can revitalize one’s business that has been suªering from years of recession as well as market saturation in Taiwan. As much as the Taiwan government wishes to curtail the outflow of capital and business know-how to China, the recession-torn Taiwan businesses have entered the Chinese market in ever greater earnest. Business books, travelogues (large bookstores have up to an entire shelf of travel books on China), various stories of interaction with the Chinese, magazines about China published in Hong Kong and elsewhere, direct satellite reception of China’s major television stations (banned later on), the popularization of Chinese movie stars and singers—all these contribute to the increasing awareness among the Taiwanese that China has indeed become an “intimate enemy” about whom one feels many ambivalent feelings. Intimacy is a given due to economic necessities, business opportunities, and cultural similarities, but this intimacy is conditioned by the Chinese government’s constant threat of military invasion of Taiwan. Furthermore, discourses of Taiwan nativism constructed so fervently in the 1980s and 1990s may also be increasingly losing ground within Taiwan as the twenty-first century rolls on. This is due both to the Chinese threat (the fear that Taiwan nativism will lead to Taiwan independence, which in turn will cause China to invade Taiwan) and to its exclusivist character (Taiwan nativism was partly fired by its ressentiment regarding past injustices committed by the Guomindang and at times exhibited what some have called “Taiwanese nativist chauvinism”), which exacerbated identity politics within Taiwan among diªerent ethnic and identity groups. If a new form of nativism is politically necessary for Taiwan in terms of its relationship with China, this would have to be a new Taiwanese multiethnic and multicultural nativism. So far, however, there has not been a powerful articulation of this new multiethnic nativism, as intellectuals and politicians alike have seemed to be exhausted by contentious identity politics. What defines Taiwan’s ]
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cultural, political, and economic particularity is thus left ambiguous, perhaps with the qualifiers that it is more “modern,” “democratic,” and “developed.” These qualifiers are not geoculturally specific, and they exemplify a perceived need that for Taiwan to maintain any advantage over China, it has to be more global and more integrated into the global economy. The paradox here is that China is a rising economic power, and Taiwan is no match for its size and vitality. China will also catch up in the globalization game, perhaps with greater speed than Taiwan, although at the moment Taiwan businesses and popular culture seem to be playing the role of mediators. One is reminded of the role Japanese culture played in early twentieth-century colonial Taiwan, how it still mediates Western culture for Taiwan besides exporting its own cultural products, and one cannot but notice a system of mediation with gradations of cultural power. But many claim that Shanghai will replace Hong Kong and Tokyo as the economic mecca of all of Asia, and China’s future economic, political, and cultural influence over all of Asia and beyond is predicted to become more and more profound. Ambiguity appears to help prolong the status quo for Taiwan, but there is no such thing as an unchanging status quo; Taiwan’s intimate enemy has the potential to be either a good or a bad bedfellow, however many degrees and types of ambiguity one tries to sustain. Many Taiwanese wish to repudiate this intimacy with China, but also use it for economic gain. While the Taiwanese may want to see this condition of enmity and intimacy as a form of ambiguity which they can deploy for as long as they wish, it is this constructed intimacy that provides legitimation for the Chinese government’s harsh claim on Taiwan. The future development in the twenty-first century is inevitably further clarification of the status of the intimate enemy in the social, cultural, political, and economic imaginaries of Taiwan as Taiwan confronts China’s rising power. STRUGGLES OF THE SINOPHONE In the intimate relationship with China, Taiwan’s situation is not very diªerent from Ashis Nandy’s characterization of the colonial situation in India in his book The Intimate Enemy. Nandy’s main contention is that colonialism has transformed the category of “the West” from a geographical category to a psychological category for the natives to the extent that “the West” is “everywhere, within the West and outside; in structures and in minds.”18 Hence, scripted resistances to coloThe Incredible Heaviness of Ambiguity
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nialism often became “forms of homage to the victors,” their reactive logic caught within a Western-centric colonial dynamic. This is because colonialism was a shared culture for both the colonizer and the colonized, and the pressure to be the “obverse of the West” can bind the colonized “even more irrevocably to the West.”19 Nandy’s solution is multipronged: Indians can be free from having to be the antithesis or a counterplayer to the West; Indian culture as such is already hybrid with Western elements, hence rejection of the latter is rejection of part of Indian culture; the uniqueness of Indian culture lies in its ability to “live with cultural ambiguities,” which are used to “build psychological and even metaphysical defenses against cultural invasions.”20 As an island culture with multiple colonial experiences from the Europeans, the Chinese, and the Japanese, Taiwan culture as such is the site of a multiple colonial dynamic similar to the one we see in Nandy’s colonial and postcolonial India. If “Chinese” culture constitutes the main site of anxiety for the Taiwanese today, the cultural hybridity resultant from the other colonial pasts, especially the Dutch and the Japanese, is being unwittingly suppressed. As much as it can be posited that “China” is a psychological category for the Taiwanese, so must at least “Japan” the ex-colonizer be such a category, whose colonization occurred only half a century ago and whose influence continues to be significant. The Sinophone aspects of Taiwan culture cannot be extricated from the totality of culture as such in Taiwan, and neither can Japanophone aspects, as some older-generation Taiwanese continue to speak Japanese and contemporary urban culture is significantly influenced by what is going on in Tokyo. To paraphrase Nandy’s statement that “India is not non-West; it is India,”21 we may say that “Taiwan is not non-China; it is Taiwan,” or equally, “Taiwan is not non-Japan; it is Taiwan.” In view of the global reach of Western culture and Taiwan’s place within it, one may also say, “Taiwan is not non-West; it is Taiwan.” Nandy’s concerns about Indian culture after British colonialism emerge from a very diªerent context than that for Taiwan’s relationship with China, but the strange applicability of Nandy’s description to Taiwan indicates, by implication, the postcolonial condition of today’s Taiwan. The main diªerence is that while the British no longer pose any military threat to India, China continues to exert its right to use military means against Taiwan. The Indians may transfer the psychological category that is the West into self-empowering cultural capital in their capacity to live with cultural ambiguities; it is more di‹cult for the Taiwanese to ]
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transfer “China” into cultural capital, however. The Taiwanese must also live with political ambiguities every day, because these ambiguities are what, flimsily, appear to ensure survival and security in the foreseeable future. Hence, the incredible heaviness of ambiguity—the existential necessity of ambiguity which simultaneously undermines Taiwan’s bid for internationally recognized sovereignty. Taiwan’s Sinophone culture is the bearer of this ambiguity and the ground upon which such ambiguity is played out.
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People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the tag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. —Virginia Woolf, “Power of Cinema” (1926)
5
After National Allegory After the pomp and spectacle of the turnover ceremony on July 1, 1997, a strange calmness settled on Hong Kong. The rain had been pouring heavily, the People’s Liberation Army had marched in, and Chinese immigrant composer Tan Dun’s symphony had drenched the Hong Kongers with a combination of the Chinese imperial(ist) grandeur of fifth-century b.c. musical bells and postmodern cacophony. And then there had been the inevitable fireworks, the fireworks that, according to an exBritish Hong Kong soldier in Fruit Chan’s film The Longest Summer, would reputedly “write words on the sky.” Theories that posit that spectacle is a primary means of authenticating power appear to have found their textbook examples in the events of July 1, 1997. All the anxiety, neurosis, fear, and obsession over 1997 supposedly lost its target from that moment on. Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese rule, which to some is transference from one colonial power to another, was now a fait accompli. Whatever the worries—through the post– ]
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Tiananmen Massacre “escape from China” syndrome of immigration frenzy to the “backflow” (huiliu) of many of these immigrants to Hong Kong—now they should be put to rest, not in the sense that Hong Kong stayed the same since the turnover, but in the sense that worries were useless or unpragmatic since there was nothing one could do (after all, as far as the stereotype goes, who is more pragmatic than Hong Kongers?). The heyday of “Hong Kong Cultural Studies” (Xianggang wenhua yanjiu), or “Hongkongology” (Xianggang xue)—when Hong Kong scholars, artists, and critics had taken a parting glance at their local culture with a profound sense of mission and equally intense sense of loss over their “love at last sight” of Hong Kong in the years leading up to 1997—now seemed to have lost both its fervor and its reason for being.1 In Hong Kong–born Pakistani scholar Ackbar Abbas’s lyrical yet ironic rendering, this was the Hong Kong culture of “dis-appearance” that seemed to appear at the moment of its impending disappearance.2 If we may invoke Susan Stewart again, this parting glance replicated the psychological structure of nostalgia as a longing without an object, hence the nostalgic’s need to retain souvenirs of history in such forms as historiography, cultural criticism, archaeology, self-ethnography, and most notably for Hong Kong, film.3 It was nostalgia for the present that would be irretrievably lost. What then? What after both the fever for Hong Kong cultural studies and the spectacle of the turnover ceremony? What comes after nostalgia? How do we theorize the after? If the particular structure of nostalgia in the pre-1997 Hong Kong cultural imaginary can be tentatively called nostalgia for the colonial present amid fear of the impending future, the loss of this nostalgia suggests the inevitability of a diªerent temporal consciousness in the post-97 cultural imaginary. Fetishism of the present, whereby the most mundane of everyday practices becomes immediately imbued with historical and symbolic meaning, would have to be replaced with a diªerent temporal logic as the present will no longer be the site of nostalgia. This new time will have to contend with the time of the nostalgic, which can be best described as the temporality of the future-past and the predictable, linear time of the Chinese rule that has already arrived and will continue indefinitely into the future.4 Indeed, people marvel at how 1997 was so very anticlimactic: there was no bloodshed, no overt rebellion by the Hong Kongers, and no overt repression exercised by the Chinese government; rather, it was largely business as usual. It appears that since 1997 most people in Hong Kong have been more obsessed with the Asian financial crisis and the rise and fall of the dot.com frenzy rather than After National Allegory
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with resisting Chinese rule, except when the Chinese government makes obviously regressive moves against Hong Kongers such as the antisubversion law controversy and increased media censorship. What then happened to the cultural fever of Hongkongology within the local terrain after 1997? This is a question that we need to expand to the translocal terrain as well, as the fever of Hongkongology in pre-1997 Hong Kong was not innocent of “the West,” as it were. Hongkongology was itself directly and indirectly encouraged by the West eager to locate Hong Kong’s uniqueness against Chineseness, a lastditch eªort to hold on to the anti-China hysteria of the Cold War era and an expression of colonial nostalgia for one of the last remaining Western colonies in the world. This explains why there was so much funding available from the British colonial government for Hongkongology in the years leading up to 1997, thus helping to inaugurate a discipline that had earlier been looked on with colonial contempt. Not that there had been no local consciousness prior to the late colonial moment, but it had not been sanctioned by the colonial apparatus until those last years leading up to the end of colonialism. If Hong Kong cultural workers were fervent about preserving and documenting Hong Kong’s uniqueness, the colonial government had been just as, if not more, eager. How this economy of colonial nostalgia implicates our own location in the United States has to do with the familiar but troubling issue of national allegory. Even though Hong Kong was not a nation-state, the subtle expectations for narratives akin to national allegories was part and parcel to the project of Hongkongology outside Hong Kong, which totalized Hong Kong as the object of cultural studies with 1997 as the primal, primary frame of reference. Special issues of Hong Kong studies in scholarly journals and books about Hong Kong became prized academic commodities for a while, tracing a very diªerent economy from the longstanding popular interest in Hong Kong action films. While Hong Kong action films are becoming more and more mainstream in the sense of being assimilated and assimilating, with the success of Jackie Chan, Chow Yun-fat, and Jet Li in Hollywood in recent years and John Woo’s directorial achievements, Hong Kong cultural studies’ own limited mainstreaming in academia signifies a very diªerent logic of legitimation. Hong Kong action film has seemingly become more and more “universal,”5 but Hong Kong cultural studies is the site of proliferating particularities. Historical and cultural specificity is demanded of Hong Kong studies, hence literary and artistic works with “national” allegorical implications would ]
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better attain visibility. The familiar requirement of global multiculturalism, which dictates that Hong Kong be specific to itself and of itself, especially around the politically charged moments of 1997, dovetails with Hong Kong cultural workers’ and British colonials’ search for authentic Hongkongness. Hongkongness as such, then, is coproduced by the overlapping nostalgia of multiple agents: the Hong Kongers, the British colonials, and Western academia. I say nostalgia on the part of Western academia with a specific reference to Fredric Jameson’s notion of the national allegory that (in)famously posited that “all Third World texts are necessarily. . . . national allegories.”6 I see Jameson’s notion of national allegory as a product of nostalgia for that which America has lost but which can be located in what he calls the Third World. In a short response to Aijaz Ahmad’s passionate critique of his national allegory theory, Jameson himself acknowledged his theory as a way to point out “the loss of certain literary functions and intellectual commitments in the contemporary American scene,” such as the capacity to link the personal story with the “tale of the tribe” and the “political role of the cultural intellectual.”7 The loss of such functions and commitments then prompted Jameson to look elsewhere, the elsewhere being the imaginary Third World, where he finds in plentitude what has already disappeared in the West. It is a form of nostalgia for the self ’s past that identifies the Third World as that embodiment of the past, even though Jameson meant it to be a critique of the First World. The conjuncture of these multiple forms of nostalgia, with its rich constellation of implications, constitutes one discursive context within which we can analyze Hong Kong films from around 1997. If we posit that allegory is the form that captures the conjuncture of multiple nostalgias over a radically fractured terrain of time and space, then we need to ask what gets lost in the privileging of allegory. What about the surface of allegory that allows the layering of multiple, sometimes contradictory nostalgic desires? How does this surface function? What does it displace? Allegory, of course, is only one kind of meaning-producing form, and it is but one of the hermeneutical codes that we can take to the reading of texts. A clever reader can read, I would like to suggest, any text allegorically, as long as he or she labors to do so. The temporal gap between the literal and the allegorical meaning of a text is the field of interpretive labor. In the end, it is the politics of allegorical interpretation—who does it, who is forced to do it, who has the luxury not to do it, who has the burden to do it, and who has the privilege to do it— After National Allegory
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or the political economy of allegorical interpretation as a form of value-producing labor that the nostalgia of the First World theorist can become legible and be fruitfully critiqued.8 The big question returns to what is internal to the allegorical form. In our privileging of the allegorical meaning over the literal meaning, what fades or gets elided is precisely the literal levels of meaning. Is it possible that at the moment of allegorization, the actual “Hong Kong” disappears? What if, after peeling oª the glossy surfaces of allegory, overlaid by so many nostalgias, there is but the literal banality of everyday life? What if, after an initial construct of post-1997 Hong Kong as a postcoloniality after British colonialism, the postcoloniality never arrives? What comes after nostalgia, after national allegory, and after postcoloniality? In trying to answer these questions through an examination of selective filmic and cultural texts that take 1997 as the main frame of reference, I hope to illustrate the ambivalent site of the Sinophone in Hong Kong’s relationship to China and Chineseness. THE ALLEGORICAL TIME AND THE CITY-CUM-NATION Made in Hong Kong (xianggang zhizao, 1997), the first of Fruit Chan’s Hong Kong trilogy, is an almost straightforward allegorical narrative. On the most obvious level, it is a story about four teenagers who die one after another in 1997 as China’s takeover of Hong Kong looms more than ominously in the background. Although allegory in the film cannot be so readily identified as a national construct—as Hong Kong is not a nation-state with an army of its own or those who are willing to die for it as is required of a national imagined community—the coincidence between personal and collective narratives within the film expresses a longing that approximates the national. In other words, it is allegory as an urban vision in search of an imagined community that is not national in political constitution but exhibits characteristics similar to those of a communal imagination like that of the nation. Made in Hong Kong was shot in the fall of 1996 in di‹cult conditions: with a shoestring budget of HK$500,000 (equivalent to about U.S.$70,000), working only with unpaid amateur actors and actresses, and using castaway fragments of blank film gathered from two diªerent film studios. Released in 1997, this independent film garnered twenty-nine film awards domestically and internationally ]
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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Susan atop a building in Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong.
within one year (including the best picture and best director awards from the Hong Kong Golden Oak Awards), and it was perhaps the most talked-about film in that year of no significance and alarming quietness in the local cultural scene after the pomp of the turnover ceremony. The movie begins with three unrelated scenes. The first one is of a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl named Susan standing on a high platform, jumping to her death, blood oozing from her body and stretching into lines that look like tree roots. This strange rhizomatic design is formed to exalt not the flexible citizen in a fluid late-capitalist world but the exact opposite, someone who is deeply rooted in the local, from which there is no escape.9 Then the camera moves to a scene in which an unknown person splashes red paint onto an apartment wall. Inside the apartment lives a teenager and her mother. The teenager is Ping, who suªers from terminal liver cancer. The next scene cuts to a basketball court where we see the chief protagonist, Moon (named thus because he was conceived on the day of the Autumn Moon Festival), playing basketball with his friends, when Sylvester, his retarded sidekick, approaches with bruises and bumps on his face. Susan, Ping, Moon, and Sylvester are the four main characters in the movie, and the movie follows their stories in a disjointed form. Susan’s death is the premonition of the death of all three of the other characters, who approach their doom one by one, whether by suicide, terminal disease, or gang violence. In between is a heart-wrenching love story between Moon and Ping, Moon’s abandonment by his mother, various scenes of gang violence, youths beAfter National Allegory
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ing betrayed by the society controlled by adults, and symbolic references to fatherhood in association with both Britain and China. Moon’s father earlier abandoned the family for a mainland mistress, a classic example of the threat of China to Hong Kong as a profound penetration into the most private space of Hong Kong, the family, as I have discussed in chapter 3. Both Ping and Moon are fatherless (Ping’s father left to evade heavy debt, and Ping and her mother are left to the abuse of violent debt collectors), while the retarded Sylvester’s parentage is unknown. Abandoned by their fathers, these teenagers are drifting in a dangerous environment in late colonial Hong Kong. Moon attempts to kill his father for the abandonment and betrayal of the family but is shocked to inaction when he witnesses a young schoolboy, like a doppelganger, cutting oª his father’s arm with a butcher’s knife in a public toilet. In the end, Moon shoots instead his surrogate father figure, the gang leader Wing, who betrayed Moon and his friend Sylvester. Moon exposes Wing’s false promises: “I remember you said that the world is now ruled by the youth. Let me show you [what it means]!” as fire explodes from his gun. Who is the new father who will assume the role now again vacated? The movie ends with this voiceover from the People’s radio broadcast as the camera pans out to a distant view of Hong Kong: This is your world, and also the adults’. By the end of the day, it is still yours. You young people are full of vitality. You are at the peak of your power like the morning sun. We have placed all our hopes on you. You are listening to People’s Radio in Hong Kong. What we have quoted was a speech given by Chairman Mao to the leaders of the youth. Let’s repeat and study the message in putonghua.10
The film exposes the gap between the rhetoric of fatherly protection of the youth by the British, by the underworld gangsters who shuttle between China and Hong Kong, and by the Chinese state represented by the radio broadcast, and the reality of abandonment and destruction. An introspective Moon in his many interior monologues voices this sentiment several times, in one of which, he says: “Everyone has a story, not just myself. Sylvester, Ping, and Susan . . . the kid who knifed his father in the public toilet. Most adults are gutless and irresponsible. Whenever things turn wrong, they will either hide or run away. They are useless. Sometimes I really want to pluck out their hearts and see what color they are. Most probably they will look like shit.” This Hong Kong-as-teenager and colonial-powers-as-father symbolism is a ]
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potent expression of the status of Hong Kongers as a generation of youths who are predestined to undergo a violent process of initiation. Even the lawless gangsters merely replicate the lies that supposedly “legal” fathers tell to the teenagers; biological, surrogate, and symbolic fathers all live the same lie.11 As the teenagers seek alternative meanings in love (Moon to Ping), friendship (Moon to Sylvester), performances of heroism (acting cool) and supermasculinity (wielding guns, knives, and screwdrivers), the only other thing the teenagers are left to do is to implode, because their powers of destruction are limited to powers of self-destruction. In the end, love and friendship are too vulnerable to the violence of the world of fathers, and heroism and supermasculinity hasten their death. Standing atop a public housing structure, Moon thinks to himself about suicide: “I can’t believe I would come to this. Now I can understand why Susan committed suicide. This is the only alternative to the dead end situation. You simply take a jump. There is nothing scary about it. Death really does not require a lot of courage. Well, it may sound easy. But it’s a diªerent matter when you have to really do it.” With this, he underscores the courage that Susan had shown in jumping to her death due to her unrequited love for her P.E. coach. He decides not to jump, and instead, he later shoots himself in the head while sitting next to the fresh grave of Ping, who had by then died of cancer. The pain of paternal abandonment ends in death because in death Moon can no longer be tortured by it. Conversely, the containment by patriarchy also ends in death; Moon is no longer alive to be instrumentalized by either Britain, the underworld of gangsters, or China. Death nullifies both abandonment and containment, thereby exceeding the paradigmatic temporality of successive colonialisms; rather, it spells out another temporality. This is a temporality that is symbolically anchored neither in the past nor in the future, and it does not partake in a perception of the present as a continuation from the past to the future. This temporality, which is not anchored in history defined by either Britain or China, is also cinematically calibrated in the visual structure of the film. The film moves among various points of the past, present, and future fluidly without temporal markers or explanations. For instance, the suicide of Susan starts the film but the sequence is completely jumbled in numerous flashbacks as well as in Moon’s dreams where Susan comes to haunt him. Like a dream sequence, we repeatedly see Susan at various points of time before and after the actual jumping. The repetition adds symbolic weight to her suicide as a premonition to the narrative that After National Allegory
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follows, but the film’s management of temporality as a ghostly presence that hovers around the characters like Susan herself points to what I think is the articulation of a diªerent conception of time. Moon says, “But the world is moving too fast. So fast that just when you want to adapt yourself to it, it’s another brand new world.” Linear catching up simply will not do. This nonhistorical time is exemplified in a poignant scene in the movie when Moon takes a murder assignment from the gangsters in order to help Ping pay oª her father’s debt. He is supposed to kill two Chinese men atop Victoria Peak. Here you have an obvious othering of the Chinese as future occupiers of Hong Kong, enjoying the bird’s-eye view of Hong Kong aªorded by the vantage point of a significant site of colonial geography from British colonialism. The high ground of British colonialism, Victoria Peak, is symbolically taken possession of by the Chinese. In this sequence, time moves eªortlessly between both historical time and imaginary time, where Moon’s imaginary, successful completion of the assignment is jumbled without apparent logic with the actual, failed attempt. The before, after, and during of the shooting (or not shooting) are rendered in a nonchronological fashion with flashbacks within flashbacks or foreshadowing within foreshadowing. If the two middle-aged Chinese men who are the targets of the attack were meant to symbolize the future to come— one of them says to the other that after 1997 he should come to Hong Kong and open up a business in the heart of the city—Moon’s imaginary killing of them represents a fantasy of categorical rejection of the Chinese future. All this is accompanied by camera work that captures Moon in the music and gesture of a John Woo–style gangster hero, where, ironically, instead of a trench coat he is wearing fashionable red canvas shoes, jeans, sunglasses, and a Walkman. In the imaginary sequence, Moon flaunts his gun like a gangster hero against the invading Chinese in heroic exuberance and self-righteousness and completes his job calmly. But the actual narrative is otherwise: he points the gun at the Chinese but fails to shoot. The Chinese men scatter when given the crucial time due to his hesitations, and he runs down the tramway from Victoria Peak in panic. Clearly, this film is not one of the nostalgic films that dominated the Hong Kong film scene before 1997. There is no nostalgia to speak of, as the present moment in late colonial Hong Kong—the reality of public housing projects and wayward youth—does not at all constitute a romantic site of longing and belonging. Rather, it repudiates both the nostalgic mode (for which the past and the soon]
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Moon in the shooting scene atop Victoria Peak in Made in Hong Kong.
to-be-lost present are valorized) and the historical mode (for which the future is inevitable) by constructing an alternative time that is private and nonlinear and ultimately refuses to be defined by authorized or authoritative temporality. If this movie can be called an allegory, then its allegorical subject is time itself. It is about the negation of colonial-inflected temporality of nostalgia and Chinese temporality of history (“the future belongs to China”), and the displacement of these temporalities by a diªerent one that exceeds and escapes definition in normative language. Through this temporality, an ambiguous sense of Hong Kong cultural identity is articulated in the form of double refusal: refusing the temporality of colonial nostalgia as well as Chinese takeover. This is what is “made in Hong Kong.” Time in film is most malleable to creative manipulation, hence film is the perfect arena for the construction of a diªerent temporality. A national allegorical reading of the film then concludes that Chan’s manipulation of time in the narrative is an act of appropriating, confiscating, and usurping meanings of the city from the hands of both the British and the Chinese, who have imposed their various colonialist and nationalist narratives. In other words, here allegory can be seen as a guerilla tactic, an act of subversion, a final defiant gesture. The fact that this film was chosen as best picture in the Hong Kong Golden Oak Awards and garnered various other awards across Europe and Asia in 1997 is not a historical accident. The national allegorical implications of the film were After National Allegory
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anticipated by various agents even before such a film was to be made: to capitulate without struggle to the retrocession of Hong Kong to China would be deemed dishonorable, if not downright passive. The audiences across national boundaries needed a national allegory from Hong Kong in the year 1997, which contributed to the film’s enormous critical acclaim. But there is another potential interpretation of the sequence just analyzed. The shooting is in fact but a business transaction, a murder assignment, a contract killing that will bring Moon sorely needed funds to bail out Ping’s family debt, not a symbolic, anticolonial act buttressed by nationalist sentiments. The failure to shoot brings out the irony here even more, for if we read the act as anticolonial, it suggests the failure or impossibility of the anticolonial act on the one hand, and the commodified nature of the anticolonial act on the other. The sequence may not be national allegory in the end; rather, it frustrates the viewers’ desire for national allegory, thus exposing the reading of allegory as an interpretive labor invested, as it were, with the interpreter’s particular obsession or articulatory position within the regime of recognition of nonWestern cultural products. The indescribable, jumbled temporality of the sequence further unseats the authority of the nostalgic, whose temporality of the future-past is legible only if we assume the linearity of time as the normative. The nostalgic’s desire for national allegory is a “longing without an object,” to quote Susan Stewart again, thus “Hong Kong” as the nostalgic’s souvenir as such does not exist, nor can it be reduced to a souvenir from the past. THE ALLEGORICAL AND THE MUNDANE Fruit Chan’s next film in the Hong Kong trilogy, The Longest Summer ( Jinnian yanhua tebie duo, 1998), is another ostensibly allegorical and political film that begins its narrative in March 1997 and ends with the turnover ceremony in July and immediately after. It articulates the double refusal discussed above in most concrete terms as seen through the lives of five ex-British soldiers of the Hong Kong Military Service Corps, after they are disbanded at the end of colonialism. The British colonial government’s promise of job training, employment, and housing to these veterans turned out to be empty, and they were struggling to make ends meet doing odd jobs on the street, working as a bank guard, a subway assistant, a driver, or selling military paraphernalia. The refusal toward China is also articu]
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lated in several scenes, one involving a disco where the supposedly mainland Chinese male announcer yells over the microphone to the Hong Kongers dancing: “You, the people of Hong Kong who live in the depths of water and heat of fire [shuishen huore zhi zhong ]: you will be entering a new era in a few days!” This rhetoric of rescue that frames China’s nationalist narratives of Hong Kong is necessarily incongruent, but this incongruence was exacerbated by the wrongness of the occasion—a disco party. It also rings hollow as the consequences of the 1997 turnover did not at all improve the life stations of the veterans and other working-class characters in the film. Rescue and promise are the terms of China’s containment, to which the veterans turn a deaf ear. The movie follows the five veterans, but the most significant character of the five is Ga Yin, whose sense of morality and righteousness is constantly threatened by the way Hong Kong society is changing after the 1997 turnover. He has a younger brother, Ga Suen, a young gangster who kills without blinking an eye. Ga Suen is played by the same actor, Sam Lee, who played Moon in the previous movie. Now that Ga Yin is an unemployed veteran, his parents keep taunting him and comparing him to the younger, gangster brother who brings in income for the household to help pay the mortgage as well as other expenses. Ga Yin, trying to hold on to his sense of morality, is deeply troubled by the change: “When I was a kid, my parents taught me to be honorable. Now they just want me to make fast money and not have any sense of loyalty. Money is everything. Not only is Hong Kong changing, the people closest to us are also changing.” There is a deep sense of demoralization that Chinese Hong Kong is fast dipping into the immoral zone, where even the law-abiding veterans become increasingly attracted to gangster activities and even end up planning a bank robbery. Ga Yin becomes profoundly confused in this new world of immorality, admiring his younger brother on the one hand, and feeling that he should save him from immoral acts on the other. The bank robbery is an important scene. With the bank guard buddy Bobby, another veteran, as the inside contact, the four veterans and Ga Suen plan out the robbery thoroughly, which even involves a refresher course in military training in a camp. At the appointed time, they arrive at the bank only to see a bunch of other robbers leaving the bank with the booty. These are teenage gangsters, who are faster than they are, who have real guns instead of fake ones, and who kill without mercy. In contrast to the teenagers, the veterans are much too out of tune with time even to be e‹cient and eªective bank robbers. In contrast to Made in Hong Kong, where After National Allegory
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The bank robbery in The Longest Summer.
the youth is positioned in opposition to the adults, here it is the adults, especially those who were the most honest and law-abiding ones, such as the veterans and Ga Yin’s parents, who have fallen into the world of amorality, within which they are no match for the youthful gangsters. The film depicts the time right before the handover ceremony with a fin-de-siècle sense of doom. On the day of the ceremony, amid rain and fireworks, an undertone of violence permeates. At the end of the film, Ga Suen and two of the veterans are dead. Ga Yin undergoes a mental breakdown and mistakes a young gangster for his brother and violently tortures and shoots him. A bullet pierces through the young gangster’s cheeks, and Ga Yin is also shot by the gangster’s cohorts. It is the gangster’s holed cheeks, as a foreshadowing, that appear in the beginning sequence of the movie. Literally, 1997 has left a big hole in his being, a scar so visible that it can in no way escape notice. This is the national allegorical reading of the film, which Fruit Chan provides very conscientiously, mirroring violence on individual lives with the larger, unspoken violence of the invading Chinese, being fully aware that references to 1997 are important for the presentation of his film. But Fruit Chan undermines that ]
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reading simultaneously. The hole in the cheeks, in the poignant beginning sequence of the film on the subway, is also the hole through which a curious kid looks as if looking through a telescope or binoculars. A violent scar can be as mundane as that. The hole is also juxtaposed with the subway tunnel in a montage, evoking a sense of irony. If the hole is the site of trauma, this trauma is seemingly also overcome by an ironic sense of mundaneness; the kid looks at the retreating scenery through the vantage point of the hole. After Ga Yin recovers from his bullet wound, he becomes a laborer and appears to be content with his ordinary life. When approached by an old acquaintance who left Hong Kong during the most traumatic days of 1997 and just returned, he says that he does not know her. Whether it is true amnesia or he is merely pretending, the film does not tell us. But from the grin that slowly emerges on his face after she leaves, the film suggests that he is making a choice not to be associated with the past but to immerse himself in the ordinary, mundane existence of the everyday in the present, just as the hole in the youngster’s cheeks is but another extraordinary visual image that evokes the curiosity of a child but ultimately exists as another mundane detail. He refuses nostalgia. The sequence capturing the procession of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on July 1, 1997, is another eloquent example that frustrates the national allegorical reading of the film. In the midst of heightened security concerns that Hong Kongers would react violently to the PLA’s entry to the city, the Hong Kong police set up an intensive surveillance and security system to contain potential violence and conflict. Chan depicts in close-up shots the high nervousness of these policemen, who are fully anticipating some sort of revolt from the Hong Kongers. At one nervous moment, a policeman spots a plainly clothed bystander carrying what appears to be a bomb. Half a dozen policemen land on the man to grab the bomb away from him and to detonate it in a safe area. When the bomb is thrown over, however, nothing explodes, and we see but a smashed watermelon. The bomb is a watermelon. What is ironized here is the exaggerated anticipation of violence, which overreads what is mundane and commonplace as political. The desire to project national allegorical overreading to the PLA’s entry to Hong Kong is that of the nostalgic, who can be scholars, intellectuals, or politicians in Hong Kong, Britain, U.S. academia, and elsewhere. To the ordinary folks of Hong Kong, such as the bystander, it was simply another event, which did not have to stop him from carrying a watermelon home. Moving away from a Manichean mode of politics, the film’s refusal of Britain After National Allegory
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and China does not result in a reactive logic that binds the Hong Kongers in a binaric structure of power struggle. Refusing Britain does not mean fighting a violent war with Britain; refusing China does not mean fighting a violent war with China. The refusal of Britain and China is therefore also the refusal to be imbricated within the binaric structure of action and reaction. This nonreactive imagination thereby also refuses the national allegorical interpretive impulses of the First World theorist who wishes to see Hong Kong texts as “necessarily” “national allegories” with obligatory references to the violence of 1997 on both collective and individual levels. Another important scene illustrates the nonreactive mode vis-à-vis China and Chineseness eloquently. Sometime in the middle of the movie, Ga Suen, Ga Yin, and his buddies are on a double-decker bus. They see a couple of passengers looking like country bumpkins, and they deduce that these country bumpkins must be Chinese from China in a typical narrative of capitalist or modernist superiority. Just when Ga Suen is about to harass them, the two passengers start talking in local Cantonese about the stock market. Recognition of the otherness of the Chinese turns out to be misrecognition; there are no other others here. This is a foreshadowing of what is to follow soon afterward. Ga Suen has just stolen sunglasses from a convenience store for the veterans, and each one has put a pair on with the price tags still hanging from the frames. As veterans, they are understandably unfashionable-looking, and with their shy showcasing of sunglasses, they themselves are mistaken by a group of bossy uniformed schoolgirls to be mainland Chinese. Ga Suen stands up as if in anger, but instead of proving that he is a Hong Konger, hence the wrong target of prejudice, he pretends to speak putonghua and demands one of the schoolgirls to respond in putonghua. When she can’t, he picks her up in his arms and throws her out the window from the upper deck of the bus where they were. All the schoolgirls, instead of getting angry, start clapping hands and consider Ga Suen to be really cool, even asking for an autograph. Here, hypersensitivity to the mainland Chinese as the other is displaced with humor (albeit a gendered one), as Ga Suen ironically performs “mainlandness” or Chineseness. This performance deflates the seriousness of the prejudice against the Chinese and at the same time opens up the possibility for Hong Kongers to be “Chinese” in an ironic way. This is the mundane aspect of everyday existence, where heroism is a performative act that transcends issues of authenticity or falsehood. In both instances of misrecognition, it is the locals who are mistaken by ]
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other locals to be mainland Chinese in the general atmosphere of paranoia (fear of China’s domination) and prejudice (distaste toward China’s assumed lack of modernity). This is what I mean by the politics of the mundane in Chan’s films that escapes the binaric and Manichean logic in Hong Kong’s relationship with China and Chineseness, and places a closure on nostalgia produced by the Manichean logic of domination and resistance in the masternarrative of successive colonialisms in Hong Kong. Instead of a categorical rejection of Chineseness, there is an ironic refashioning of Chineseness. Irony deflates the high seriousness and tragic outcomes of the life stories of the veterans and Ga Suen and provides a form of comic relief, a relief that at the same time unsettles the allegorizing impulse of the interpreter. Chan’s film, then, performs a double-voiced act, one that actively endorses and allows for national allegorical readings through an act of self-commodification (Chan is fully aware of the value of political film in the art house market) and one that ironizes that endorsement with mundane details and practices of the everyday. The demand of national allegories by the First World theorist is responded to with an ironic form of submission that at the same time strikes back at the theorist with a sly but utterly creative maneuver. The trauma of 1997 as national allegory becomes a strategy that allows the film’s entry into the global circuit of audiences eager for such narratives, while an underlying, mundane narrative of 1997 undercuts such eagerness with a sideway glance that Mikhail Bakhtin had theorized so convincingly a long time ago. To Fredric Jameson, Fruit Chan is not another Aijaz Ahmad, who criticized Jameson’s theory point by point and exposed the totalistic and reductionist logic behind it.12 Ahmad’s may have been a strong critique of Jameson while Chan’s a weak one, but Chan’s is a strong rewriting of national allegory narrative from a perspective without the luxury of clear-cut national, anticolonial, and postcolonial grounds of discourse. This rewriting strikes back at the theorist with an ironic smirk, recognizing national allegory as an enabling condition for Hong Kong cinema while at the same time exposing its limitations with an ironic double-voicedness. It fakes submission by turning to the direction of hailing with humorous self-reflexivity, recognizing its power but responding to it with a sardonic twist. In the last of the trilogy, released two years after 1997, Little Cheung (1999), Fruit Chan extends his attention to the mundaneness of the everyday to children and the aged in working-class Hong Kong. Combined, the three films provide After National Allegory
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Cameras positioned at the children’s eye level in small back alleyways of working-class Hong Kong in Little Cheung.
generational slices of the working-class life of teenagers, middle-aged veterans, the neglected children, and the old. These are four demographic groups whose perspectives and outlooks are seldom, if ever, the basis for any masternarratives of Hong Kong as a colony or a postcolony. With cameras positioned at the eye level of school-age children, Little Cheung sees the world from their perspectives, for whom the mundaneness of everyday life rarely includes issues of postcoloniality involving either the British or the Chinese. Rather, one of the focal points of the narrative concerns a Filipino maid and the plight of those like her in Hong Kong. They are the new members of Hong Kong society, who may be variously mistreated by their employers, but sometimes serve as emotional anchors for broken and alienated families. At the end of the movie, while the working-class communities of Hong Kong tear each other apart through waves of violence, the Filipinos gather in a large square for a religious celebration, suggesting a powerful collectivity, an alternative community that stays together under classed oppression by the Hong Kongers. Otherwise, the only respite for working-class children such as Little Cheung, who are emotionally and materially deprived, besides being abused by gangsters on the streets, is the comfort from each other and whatever ingenuity that they can come up with. Few scenes in the movie have the peacefulness of the harbor, ]
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where the children bicycle to and share a moment of respite; few scenes are as mischievous as Little Cheung’s revenge on a gangster by surreptitiously dropping a bloody tampon into his cup of tea. The island of Hong Kong and its skyline may be infused with large symbolic meanings as scholars have hastened to analyze, but to the children, they merely constitute a beautiful background with which their lives do not seem to connect or intersect. The majority of the movie is shot in narrow alleyways with a low perspective; the camera does not look up to the skyline. If the skyline is the Hong Kong that will be recorded in history with the competing narratives of colonialism and postcolonialism, the narrow alleyways are where mundane life happens, whose logic escapes or exceeds the masternarratives of the nation, national allegory, and postcoloniality. REFASHIONING HONGKONGNESS Other cultural genres deal with similar issues, and in the rest of the chapter, I will focus on a book of design and fashion as well as an archeological exhibition: two realms where the act of fashioning Hongkongness occurs literally in terms of fashion and in terms of the archeological search for the origin of authentic Hong Kongers. Yuk-yuen Lan’s book of design, The Practice of Chineseness, as the title suggests, is a book of instructions on how Hong Kongers may practice Chineseness in Hong Kong (see color plate 4). In this book filled with visual images and scholarly analysis of design and sign systems of Hong Kong popular culture, Lan proposes a “nouveau Chineseness” that explodes classicism and authenticity in favor of the fictitious, the ironic, the pastiche, the mix, and the playful kind of nostalgia, to the extent that the usage of Chineseness can become “active and carefree within historical perimeters.”13 Lan analyzes this nouveau Chineseness with a detailed case study of the Shanghai Tang store and its products, where Chineseness is an imitated and revised heritage, such as cheongsams in unorthodox and gaudy colors of yellow, green, and orange. Conversely, these things, ranging from cheongsams, the decor of the store, and so forth, become the material embodiments of Hong Kong identity in their inauthentic and faddish Chineseness that is consumption-oriented, just as the miniature Sony Walkman, in its exemplification of the “small is beautiful” aesthetic principle of Japanese culture, may emAfter National Allegory
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body Japanese cultural identity (see color plate 5).14 The Hong Kong cultural identity thus understood then includes a sense of Chineseness as a consumable, freefloating, dehistoricized, and decontextualized sign that can be ironically refashioned for Hong Kong use. Lan also mentions a simultaneous eªort in the search for Hong Kong cultural identity as the museumization of Hong Kong history, archaeology, and culture in such museums as the Hong Kong Museum of History and the Regional Council Heritage Museum. In these museums, Hong Kong becomes the subject matter of research, exhibition, and ethnography. Here the search is for a kind of Hong Kong authenticity; thus it is very much akin to the pre-1997 project of Hongkongology. I think it is precisely this tendency to valorize Hongkongology (in search of a Hong Kong version of authenticity) as an automatic locus of resistance to Chinese rule that a three-year art installation project called “Lo Ting” subtly critiques. If the authenticity of Chineseness can be exploded, why not the authenticity of Hongkongness? There have been a series of three consecutive installations of the Lo Ting exhibit in 1997, 1998, and 1999. The first exhibition was part of a group exhibition called “Museum 97: History, Community, Individual” at Hong Kong Arts Center from June 23 to July 12, 1997, enveloping the fateful date of July 1, the o‹cial date of Hong Kong’s “return” to China. The Lo Ting exhibition belonged to the “Prehistoric Hong Kong Museum” section of the group project. The basic story of the Lo Ting, as summarized in the exhibition catalog goes like this: A long time ago there was a fish called Lo living around the Lantau island area. After absorbing spiritual energy of the universe, they became human. The sea god envied their success and they were cursed to live forever a rootless life. They remained half human half fish until the famous monk Pei Tao [Beidu chanshi] positioned many spiritual rocks all over the region to release them from the curse during the early part of the 4th century. They became fully human on the condition that they should never go beyond their own territory. In many history books these people are called “Lo Ting.” At around 400 a.d., a “Lo Ting” named Lo Dun led a rebellion against the oppressive regime of Jun dynasty [Eastern Jin dynasty] and moved North as far as Guangzhou. However, leaving their own territory, his soldiers turned back to half human half fish and were unable to fight. Lo Dun was killed and his followers fled back to Lantau Island and its surrounding
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areas, living in extreme poverty. For those Lo Ting who stayed, they remained human and were ancestors of the Tanka [danzu] people. In 1197 a massacre happened at Lantau island, where the Shun [Song dynasty] soldiers, in an attempt to take over the salt production industry, practically killed all the Lo Ting and most of the Tanka people there. However, there were still a few Lo Ting who survived and today fishermen still come across them at the remote islands around Hong Kong.15
The main image for this exhibition is that of a woodcut print with an inscription written from the perspective of a Taiwan person—the artist Hou Chun-ming—in classical Hanyu. It reads: In 1997, clouds were white and dogs were blue, and people were uneasy and anxious. There was one Hong Konger who was afraid that with 1997 there would no longer be freedom of speech. He taped up his mouth and tied his own hands and feet as a protest and wandered around the streets. People were worried that he would enrage 1997 and bring about greater catastrophe, thus they pushed him into the ocean together. He did not die and his rotten body transformed into a Lo Ting, wandering in the surroundings around the islands and would not leave. His cries were like those of an infant.
The theory is posited that since Hong Kongers are the descendents of the Lo Ting, they are far removed from the Han Chinese in China. To make this point even more explicit, theirs is not just ethnic diªerence, but a divergence in species. In the second exhibition, the narrative of Lo Ting gains greater complexity and scholarly scrutiny, incorporating charges against the first exhibition as fake. In the third exhibition, archaeology is made performative: one sees all the procedures and mechanisms of archaeological work and museumization of artifacts. The exhibition included television interviews with a presumed authority on archaeology, an eyewitness account, photographs of archaeological digs, artifacts discovered from these digs, illustrations and descriptions of various moments of the Lo Ting history, and even a life-size model of the Lo Ting, all of which stage Hongkongness as in a mise-en-scène. The life-size model ironically echoes the images of reversed mermaids (fish’s upper body and human lower body) in the paintings of Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, especially a 1934 oil painting entitled The Collective Invention. What indeed is the Lo Ting but a collective invention of Hong Kong After National Allegory
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Hou Chun-ming’s woodcut print of a Lo Ting from the 1997 exhibition.
artists? In the exhibition, the sense of irony is further stretched when a poster announces that Lo Ting sightings are included in the daily tour of Hong Kong for tourists sponsored by the tourist bureau in as likely a manner as the whale watching in the Pacific Northwest. The implications of these exhibitions are many, and these implications themselves would need to be historicized within their respective moments of staging. With the first exhibition, we may see a desperate attempt at finding a prehistory of Hongkongness, which led to the extreme case of fabrication and mythmaking by the main creator of the exhibition, Oscar Ho. Here, the narrative can be read as a competitive one against the nationalist narratives of the Chinese government, for whom the history of Hong Kong only starts from 1842, the end of the Opium War. In its fakeness, it mocks the high seriousness of the Chinese narrative and exposes the latter’s historiography to be China-centric. The second ex]
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René Magritte’s The Collective Invention (1934, oil on canvas, 35 × 113 cm). Reproduced by permission of C. Herscovici, Brussels/Artists Rights Society, New York.
hibition was held during the first anniversary of the handover ( June 20 to July 14, 1998), an obvious political gesture that suggests how mainland China continued to be the target of its critical performance. The third exhibition, however, did not occur during the following anniversary, but from late August to midSeptember in 1999. The choice of dates seems significant; here the target may not be so much Chineseness as Hongkongness. In the context of post-97 rethinking of the agendas of constructing and preserving Hong Kong cultural identity, the 1999 Lo Ting exhibition seems to partake of the self-reflexive trend. The last of the Lo Ting exhibitions is clearly a form of self-irony, which pokes fun at the search for an authentic origin of absolute diªerence from China. It suggests instead that such ontology of an authentic Hong Kong cultural identity can only be false or fake. What began as a reflection on Chineseness became a self-reflexive and ironic self-commentary. The “Fake Art of Comics” series by an anonymous independent artist takes this self-irony even further to suggest that the pre-1997 discourses of Hong Kong cultural identity are forms of self-promotion, self-commodification, and self-delusion. After National Allegory
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Life-size model of a Lo Ting; photograph by the author.
Though seemingly premised on lofty goals of cultural construction for the sake of diªerentiating Hong Kong’s diªerence from China, the discourse of Hong Kong identity easily falls prey to commodification. The tone in these comics, therefore, is not pathos but irony, a joke played upon the self who, seeking postcoloniality and national allegory, ended up being peddlers of cultural identity. What I find in these various genres of cultural expression, then, is a dual process of deauthentification. While authentic Chineseness is debunked and revised on the one hand, the romantic search for authentic Hongkongness is ironized as an impossibility. A pure, authentic, uncontaminated Hongkongness that can be absolutely distinguished from Chineseness is but a mere fantasy, a fabrication that ]
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An example of the Fake Art of Comics. Upper left: “Planners of culture and art force her to go sell [‘local culture’ in one basket and ‘historical identity’ in the other basket].” Upper right: “No business” [Each local culture costs $1,000; cultural identity costs $2,000]. Lower left: “She made some inexpensive pirated editions” [$10 for 10 local cultures; $5 for 10 historical identities]. Lower right: buyers line up.
is easily exposed as such. Hongkongness remains ambivalent and eludes cultural nationalists’ attempt to demarcate its boundaries. If anything, Hongkongness is an act of staging or performance: the archaeological digs, the interviews, the artifacts, and so forth are the props for this staging. What is performed or staged is then Hong Kong’s search for an identity, an ironic metacommentary on its romantic and nostalgic desires. Forgoing nostalgia and national allegory, Hongkongness in Fruit Chan’s Hong Kong trilogy and the other cultural works examined here is a complex process of negotiation with its colonial past and Chineseness, as well as its uncertain positionality within the colonial-postcolonial-neocolonial continuum. Appropriating and usurping national allegory, poking fun at authenticity, Hong Kong filmmakers and artists after 1997 have refused to hasten to name, to collect, and to preserve essential notions of Hongkongness or Hong Kong culture, while rethinking the premises of “Hongkongology” with self-reflexive irony. The Sinophone Hong Kong continues to move ambiguously around China and Chineseness, its vibrant culture leaving no authenticity untarnished, including the nativist, self-authenticating variety. As more standard putonghua is taught and spoken, as Hong Kong’s integration into China is more and more thorough, Hong Kong may inevitably cease to be a Sinophone community on the margins of China and Chineseness but partake more constitutively in the imagination of new forms of Chineseness within China.
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Colonialism is a substance with no name [today]. Empire has never waned. Its specter is circling around. —Wong Bik-wan, Records of Postcoloniality (2003) In the last analysis, one is a member of a world community by the sheer fact of being human; this is one’s “cosmopolitan existence.” —Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (1982)
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Cosmopolitanism among Empires It seems again to be the case that the age of empire is upon us, and it behooves us to consider this return of the age of empire in the contemporary historical context in order to ask the question whether a Taiwan cosmopolitanism is possible. The aim of this contextualization is to search for ways of understanding cosmopolitan expressions of Sinophone cultures such as Taiwan’s, even while metropolitan cosmopolitanism at large increasingly exhibits greater and greater imperial intentions, and the pressures of new forms of imperialism appear to be narrowing the space for cosmopolitan potentials from the margins. This chapter analyzes one ethically responsible form of cosmopolitanism from the margins that defies regulative logics and politics of transnational recognition. It also seeks to establish Sinophone culture as but one aspect of Taiwan culture. Oral, written, and visual languages of Taiwan’s multiculture exhibit the Sinophone’s resistance to China-centrism on the one hand, while they also show how the Sinophone transitions to the Taiwanese (multiethnically and multi]
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culturally defined) on the other. Their constitutive relationship is a relationship between part and whole (Sinophone culture is a part of Taiwan culture). I set up two frameworks below— one is that of empire and imperialism, and the other that of cosmopolitanism. THE AGE OF EMPIRES AND, ESPECIALLY, THEIR SIZES It is instructive to consider how our contemporary imperial formation relates to the immediately preceding one as analyzed by Eric Hobsbawm in his magisterial The Age of Empire, 1875–1914. If we can roughly assert that the post-1914 imperial formation is characterized by the continual rise of the United States as the single most powerful empire in the world, one can make a useful comparison with the previous age, when Britain was the imperial center of the world. Hobsbawm argues that the last age of empire must be explained mainly in economic and political terms. He lists seven main characteristics of world economy as the bases for the particular form empires took during the previous age of empire: broad geographical expansion; increasing pluralization; revolution in technology; concentrated capital and rationalized production; mass production fueling the rise of a consumer economy in which goods from far-flung regions were made available and in ever greater quantity; the rise of o‹ce and other service sectors; and finally, growing convergence between economics and politics.1 In other words, the geographical expansion of economy was both the cause and the eªect of the territorial expansion of empires, while overproduction set oª by rationalized mass production led to the need to create overseas markets and cull resources from overseas. This was the time when capitalism became truly global, ushering in global capitalism as we know it. Global capitalism, then and now, seeks inexpensive and the most thoroughly exploitable labor and maximum profit through an unequal national and international division of labor.2 Of the six major empires carving up most of the world at the time—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the United States—Britain was the one whose economy was most intimately enmeshed with the economy in the colonies in the sense that it benefited the most from the colonies. For the other empires, Hobsbawm notes, political motivations were sometimes more important than economic ones. Italy, Germany, and the United States expanded colonies not for economic interest but for the sheer status that the expansion conferred.3 ]
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We cannot fail to see that there are clear continuities between the age of empire and our age, as global capitalism has spread to such an extent that any externality to it has become increasingly impossible. The search for markets and inexpensive labor continues with greater intensity than ever before, with more remote parts of the Third World becoming incorporated into the labor force, while the international division of labor and production is becoming thoroughly rationalized. The clearest case of this continuity is China. As early as the age of empire, it was seen as the promised land for Western goods, and the same desire continues to stir great enthusiasm toward China from Western capitalists. In the twentyfirst century, the biggest historical irony of global capitalism, which was first Eurocentric and then U.S.-centric, may be the rise of this Third World nation to the rank of empires. From being the dumping ground for low-level manufacturing jobs to being a producer of high-tech products and bidder for highest symbolic capital using its newly accumulated hard currency, China has emerged as a global economic and political power, and the only potential threat to U.S. hegemony. By the late twentieth century, we had already witnessed the ineªectiveness of the European Union as a block to counterbalance the United States, so the only potential threat is recognized to be from China, hence the widely circulated new phrase “China threat.” David Harvey has argued, for instance, that the American invasion of Iraq may be explained in terms of America’s intention to maintain its superpower status in the context of rising China and China’s tremendous oil needs.4 The struggle for hegemony in the next phase of global power configuration is contingent upon the degree of control of available oil. Ross Terrill’s The New Chinese Empire and What It Means for the United States ostensibly provides a scholar’s substantive validation to the “China threat” with its sensational title, even though, in actual content, the book oªers a historical overview of Chinese imperialism from premodern times followed by a sobering analysis of the problems in contemporary China.5 While Southeast Asian nations, under a diªerent kind of “China threat,” have begun mobilization for an alliance to defuse Chinese influence and power, no other country is more squarely caught between the sometimes feuding sometimes collaborating empires of the United States and China than Taiwan. Taiwan’s place on the edge of these two empires is therefore not a metaphor, but a literal description.6 It may be the same fear of “China threat” that has prompted the pan-Western imperial union satirized in French philosopher Régis Debray’s 2004 novel, EmCosmopolitanism among Empires
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pire 2.0, subtitled “A Modest Proposal for a United States of the West.”7 This novel is instructive for illustrating the value attributed to size in contemporary imperial formation. The novel consists of a long letter written by a character named Xavier de C***, whose full name is not given, to the philosopher Régis Debray, and it is in essence a proposal for the union of the United States and Europe into a larger, “ultimate” nation, “the United States of the West,” with each complimenting the other in all aspects of politics, culture, economics, and so forth. The union is proposed as the only defense against the overwhelming demographic imbalance between the West and the rest. It will activate a renewed democracy to answer the threat of Islam, and above all, will have a clear sense of who the enemies are. In the immediate post-911 context, the clearest enemy is Islam, but China is feared to become the only “hyperpower” that will dominate the world. In short, the necessity of the pan-Occidental nation is premised on the potential threat from Islam and China because, as Xavier de C*** says, “Confucius+Allah = 70% of the planet’s oil reserves and two-thirds of its population.” A self-styled “disinterested evangelist of Western civilization,” he hopes that the union will preserve the superiority of the Occident and strengthen it.8 Two points about this novel are most relevant to the issues at hand. One is the increased value of size in the international power struggle: the bigger it is, the more powerful a nation seems to be. On the one hand, this ideology of size is prompted by a universal fear of China rising; on the other hand, it leaves little room for Taiwan to find value in its smallness. If we agree with the premise that nations in the world are hurrying toward forming larger and larger blocks to defuse China’s potential threat and power, what can small countries such as Taiwan do, especially if they do not have much clout in international politics? What can their cultures do? Do their cultures matter at all in this time of blatant competitions for size? The second point is the novel’s mentioning of Taiwan as “in eªect” the fiftysecond state of the United States, along with Israel as the fifty-first and Turkey as the fifty-third. Xavier de C*** calls these countries “de facto annexations” of the United States.9 These de facto annexed states add non-Western elements to the United States of the West to make it even more multicultural (even though, as Edward Said shows us, the similar case of the Jewish state was intended to be the opposite: to symbolically and otherwise part from the non-West and become European)10 and even more vital. The identification of Taiwan being a far-flung state ]
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of the United States is not news, as the activities of Club 51 have been fully related in Taiwan and Sinophone newspapers in the United States. Club 51 wishes to persuade the U.S. Congress to formally annex Taiwan as its fifty-first state so that it can be freed from the threat of China.11 Whether one considers this entirely absurd or not, it is revealing that a distant and casual observer of Taiwan such as the fictional character Xavier de C*** would hit upon the same point. By some measures, Taiwan may be seen as a neocolony of the United States, if by colonialism we suggest the right of the colonized to rely on the mother country for protection in times of danger. From various American recommendations for the United States to occupy or annex parts of Taiwan since the time of Commodore Perry, to America’s active engagement to transform Taiwan into a capitalist society through the creation of an economic comprador class, the actual neocolonial relationship between the United States and Taiwan is similar to those between the United States and its other more obvious colonies such as the Philippines and Puerto Rico.12 In this regard, others have called Taiwan as eªectively a protectorate of the United States.13 In truth, it is the “soft power” of the United States—“the diªusion of political ideas, educational know-how, and a sometimes omnipresent popular culture”—that distinguishes the American empire from previous European empires.14 What can be more telling than to simply note that Taiwan is now a model democracy (a.k.a. a model minority) with a high percentage of its upperechelon technocrats, educators, and bureaucrats holding advanced degrees from the United States, and the youth there are more familiar with Hollywood films than they are with those made by local directors. While the United States continues to maintain a policy of ambiguity in regards to the tension across the Taiwan Strait, the call of China presuming itself to be the father country of Taiwan continues with hundreds of phallic missiles pointed at Taiwan with tacit approval from the United States.15 It is not a secret that Taiwan is forced to maneuver cleverly and skillfully between these two empires, struggling to establish its own discursive authority in a context where the two empires presume to talk for Taiwan, posture on behalf of Taiwan, or make decisions for Taiwan. Taiwan history is the history of successive colonialisms and ambiguous relationships with China. To that extent, the current situation is not new. What is new is the particular imperial formation in which Taiwan’s economy and general well-being has become so intimately dependent both on the United States and on China. In either relationship, it is impossible for Taiwan to extract itself Cosmopolitanism among Empires
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economically. Culturally, even while Taiwanese cultural nationalism has become more successful in delineating its own cultural lineage as connected to but distinct from China, economic intimacy with China is creating substantial lobbying voices within Taiwan government for political concession to China. In the end, Taiwan’s relationships with the United States and China are based on deep economic and political entanglements that characterize the current situation. The situation is in every turn exacerbated by the U.S. position of ambiguity, which, in actuality, is a policy of contradiction. The U.S.’s contradictory policy promotes democracy in Taiwan (whose logical goal will be independence) and recognizes only “One China” (whose logical goal will be China’s occupation of Taiwan). This contradiction belies the hypocrisy of the United States toward its putative protectorate, Taiwan. Taiwan therefore is left with little leverage to either pressure the United States to recognize it, or pressure China to give up its territorial ambition toward Taiwan. The realm left over for greater maneuvering to engender possibilities of transformation is, in this situation, the realm of culture. As contemporary Taiwan discourses have shown, culture as both lived experience and discourse oªers a fertile ground as well as eªective means to forge new identities and to imagine new futures. The discourse of Taiwan consciousness and Taiwan identity has proved its power and eªectiveness in less than two decades, and it is still in the process of continuous (re)construction and (re)writing. There are many indications that people in Taiwan are living in a time of change, from the rewriting of history books to the renaming of streets and parks. A large-scale transformation of consciousness is under way, even though it appears to be only gradual. The refashioning of Taiwaneseness is undergoing its due process in all its contestatory and contradictory ways, as the o‹cial discourse increasingly comes to adopt a multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual orientation. What can Taiwan’s culture do, then? Rather, how has Taiwan’s culture done? To answer this question, I will set up the second framework, that of cosmopolitanism, in the following section. COSMOPOLITANISM, MULTIPLICITY, DANGER Studies of imperialism and empire have consistently neglected the cultures of the colonized. Hobsbawm’s book discussed above is clearly more concentrated on economics, as he seeks to explain the rise of empires in correspondence with the change ]
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in the multifaceted relationships of production, including market expansion. When he does analyze culture, he notes that even though metropolitan culture was definitely aªected by the imperial formation in terms of the familiar technologies of exoticism and Orientalism, the age of empire was characterized by a surprising consistency in the way the metropolitan centers viewed the rest of the world as “inferior, undesirable, feeble and backward, even infantile.”16 What this means is that besides a few notable cases of influence (such as African primitivism and Japanese exoticism), metropolitan imperial cultures were not aªected by the existence of colonies in any integrated fashion. Edward Said’s book Culture and Imperialism clearly disagreed with such a perspective by showing how profoundly colonialism and imperialism shaped canonical Western literature during the age of empire, but the analytical pivot of the book is on the imperial narrative psyche, not on that of the colonized.17 Said’s immense influence since the publication of Orientalism, combined with the work of the Subaltern Studies group and Gayatri Spivak’s strand of deconstruction, eventually engendered the emergence of postcolonial studies, which came to include the study of the literature and culture of the colonized. But decades of postcolonial studies have flaunted binaric, Manichean models of criticism privileging a model of resistance and containment. When a third term is introduced to the binarism, though rarely, it is the third term that is predominantly characterized by abjecthood and silence (the subaltern cannot speak, after all, according to Spivak), or mimicry and hybridity (containing both aspects of the colonized and the colonizer, per Homi Bhabha).18 In a signature essay entitled “Woman in Diªerence,” Spivak analyzes the colonized woman’s body as an aporia that exceeds imposed signification by nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism, all of which are mobilized by binarisms. In order to refuse imposed signification, however, the body must be in a state of utter abjection: a corpse “putrefied with venereal disease, having vomited up all the blood in her desiccated lungs.”19 The subaltern cannot speak in a language that can be understood, and hence she cannot speak; her putrefied body can escape imposed signification, but in the end it is nothing but the abjected body. The third term is, then, possible only in a state of extreme abjecthood. In Bhabha’s framework, the third term is the mixture of the colonizer and the colonized that disrupts their boundaries and thus threatens colonial authority. The problem with this latter framework is that if not recognized as a challenge to colonial authority, hybridity can simply be a symptom of the colonization of the colonized, who were made Cosmopolitanism among Empires
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to become cultural hybrids under the weight of colonial imposition. Hybridity of the colonized in and of itself does not necessarily pose any threat to the metropole; if anything, it may just be an eªective proof of the assimilating power of the culture of the metropole. To shift the context to that of Taiwan, where the per capita gross domestic product rivals that of some First World countries, its place on the edges of empires is a dramatically diªerent one from that of colonial India. Spivak’s subaltern is the absolute economic subaltern, ultimately very diªerent from the gallery of subjecthoods possible in Taiwan. We find all manner of possibilities in Taiwan’s cultural terrain, including abjecthood and hybridity, but we also find the possibility for cosmopolitanism, specifically defined. How do we understand the cosmopolitan yearnings of a small country vis-à-vis contemporary empires? How does it live through the dangers of the constant state of psychological and political war under the shadow of empires? In examining varieties of cosmopolitanism from diªerent subject positions, we may oppose the vernacular form against the metropolitan form. The word vernacular is often defined in opposition to what is standard, major, mainstream, or dominant, such as the language of the nonelite or the language of marginalized intellectuals and the colonized. So if metropolitan cosmopolitanism is defined as that capacity to espouse multiple cultures and multiple languages in the center by metropolitan intellectuals, vernacular cosmopolitanism may be a way of describing the marginal people’s interculturalism that is similar to but essentially diªerent from metropolitan cosmopolitanism. Vernacular cosmopolitanism may be bilingual in a metropolitan language and Taiwanese, Hindi, Korean, or another nonmetropolitan language, for instance, while metropolitan bilingualism may speak only metropolitan languages. There is definitely a hierarchy of languages and the kind of cosmopolitanism each implies; oftentimes, what gets recognized as cosmopolitan itself is open to questioning, as it is not immune from discursive power politics, or cosmopolitics. If we go with the broad definition of vernacular cosmopolitanism above, vernacular cosmopolitanism, set up in contradistinction to metropolitan cosmopolitanism, can challenge metropolitan cosmopolitanism in several ways: (1) by threat of similarity and hybridity that unsettles its dominion (we can be cosmopolitans too; and yes, some of us speak French and/or English— this is Bhabha’s strategy, discussed above); (2) by expanding its idiom to include nonstandard and marginal languages and cultures (a project of recuperation); (3) ]
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by angry protests and exuberant expressions of ressentiment so that vernacular cosmopolitanism can be “recognized” in a Hegelian dynamic of recognition; and (4) by unseating metropolitan cosmopolitanism altogether (if this is ever possible). In the U.S. context, vernacular cosmopolitanism of its minority peoples has it as its objective to be recognized as a viable option, an articulation of diªerence, and ultimately, a project to claim a portion of the center. In the international context, vernacular cosmopolitanism of marginal countries aims not only to flaunt its qualification for membership in the unequal terrain of world culture, which I have called “asymmetrical cosmopolitanism” elsewhere,20 but also to disseminate alternative possibilities to Western-centric cultural standards and norms. Indian Nobel Prize–winning writer and poet Rabindranath Tagore would be a prominent example of a vernacular cosmopolitan from a non-Western site. Struggle within the uneven terrain of cosmopolitics, here understood not in terms of the politics of democracy across the world,21 but in terms of the politics of cosmopolitanism, is part of the scenario for Indian postcolonial studies in the United States (even though the “real” object of discourse is Britain),22 as well as part of the scenario for ethnic studies in the United States. Each is undergirded by a certain culture of protest, and each is a project of articulating abjection on the one hand, and articulating counterdiscourses on the other. On one side is grievance and sadness; on the other side, discursive empowerment through recuperations of the vernacular. The agenda of articulation and recuperation, however, may dangerously cross over to a discourse of victimology, which vernacular cosmopolitanism needs to judiciously guard against. Art historian Hal Foster comments on the negative aspects of this tendency with biting satire: “For then as now self-othering can flip into selfabsorption, in which the project of an ‘ethnographic self-fashioning’ becomes the practice of a narcissistic self-refurbishing. . . . Who in the academy or the art world has not witnessed these testimonies of the new empathetic intellectual or these flaneries of the new nomadic artist?”23 The artist as ethnographer is Foster’s object of derision here, but the general point is about the self-serving potential of misapplied or disingenuous identity politics, about self-othering becoming self-absorption, selffashioning becoming “self-refurbishing,” to the extent that all critical content is neutralized and the work of art becomes a work of narcissism and self-promotion in the name of identity. Arif Dirlik’s equally satiric critique of postcolonial theory as the moment postcolonial intellectuals have arrived in the American academy aided Cosmopolitanism among Empires
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by the transnationalization of capital—that self-absorbing criticisms of British colonialism served to promote the careers of postcolonial studies scholars24—echoes many other critiques of what is sometimes viciously dismissed as victimology. While much of the critique of identity politics may be theoretically unsound and empirically flawed, as Linda Alcoª has convincingly shown,25 the bind of Hegelian dialectical dynamic continues to dictate the terms of struggle as action and reaction, domination and resistance, marginalization and centralization, and other such binary struggles and duals in search of sublimation. The question of the multiplicity of address for a given struggle is of theoretical importance here, because multiplicity is more than an aggregation of multiple binarisms. Multiplicity implies the possibility of a given actor or agent mediated by and mediating multiple sources so that its intention and address need to be analyzed via multiple frames, contexts, and references. The multiple mediations of a given artwork require the substitution of binaric models by an openness to multiple references with perhaps less clearly delineated horizons of understanding but a promise of new meanings and new possibilities of signification. The multiplicity here is not the multiplicity without responsibility, which metropolitan cosmopolitanism can legitimately be faulted for, but multiplicity as a necessary consequence and choice of those agents caught in the midst of and maneuvering among multiple imperial configurations. It is also not the multiplicity of a ressentiment-driven vernacular cosmopolitan, whose worldly horizon is oftentimes the extent of predominantly metropolitan culture spiced with fashionable ressentiment to it, and whose multilinguality and multiculturality are gestures of protest that reveal, more than anything else, a lovelike obsession with the metropolitan West. We oftentimes see, for instance, that self-styled marginalists are in the core more Eurocentric than the centrists. The upper-class marginalists who claim their marginality due to their race are very willing to flaunt their Eurocentric pedigree over those underdogs forced into the margin. The vernacular realm is not immune to class politics. Instead of seeking the third term by first setting up binaric models, then, as did postcolonial theorists discussed earlier, a notion of multiply mediated cosmopolitanism on the margins of empires allows for a much more expansive discussion of a given work of art or text without having to sacrifice complexity, which may include meanings that are likely to cause discomfort. Time and again, unseemly aspects of a theorist’s work (such as Martin Heidegger’s association with Nazism and ]
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Jacques Derrida’s relationship to Heidegger’s work) shock us into disbelief and place us in an ethical conundrum, purists of meaning that American scholars tend to be. To return to the situation of Taiwan, then, the postcolonial model and the model of cosmopolitics are useful but limited. Although it is a minor country on the margins of global imperial formations and under the shadow of multiple hegemonies, it is also one of the top ten trading partners of the United States. It is politically ostracized from all sides, but it has a vibrant culture and a strong contingent of cultural workers working in multiple directions with multiple traditions. In the context of heavy competition for size and hegemonic influence among empires, the portability and visibility of Taiwan’s visual culture, in its paradoxical lightness and smallness, is endowed with the power of changing perceptions and transforming imaginaries precisely because it works through and with multiple registers and references that can move beyond the obsession with injury, China, and the West. This cosmopolitanism draws on the resources of Taiwan’s multiculture as well as world culture with multiple forms and objects of address, so that it is possible to break from the circuit of oppression and marginalization. In an ironic sense, then, this is the kind of cosmopolitanism that lives well with dangers, not because of a certain kind of masochistic need to make sure that one’s powers “may not slumber,” as Kant theorized,26 but because immanent danger is the existential condition of life in Taiwan under the shadow of empires. To live within this existential condition is to have no luxury to philosophize that all that humanity should strive for, peace, is achieved by setting the necessary precondition of perpetual war so that it can be overcome. The two-part process that Kant described posits the premise of war as that which necessitates its structural overcoming through law and other rational means for peace to be possible. For the situation in Taiwan, the state of perpetual war is not just the premise but the result, which awaits its conclusion each time threats are uttered across the Taiwan Strait. Danger is therefore not the luxury to keep cosmopolitanism honest; it is the very condition of a cosmopolitanism that seeks to breathe a bit lighter and deeper while wearing a straitjacket. UNTRANSLATABLE ETHICS The protagonist in question in this chapter is Wu Mali, an installation artist who has challenged all known authorities in her work, be it political ideology, gender oppression, and the exploitation of Third World labor, as well as their intersecCosmopolitanism among Empires
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tions. In a set of antagonistic works, much like those of Hung Liu discussed in chapter 2, she articulated her critique of Taiwan society, government, and its culture of sexism. What distinguishes her from Hung Liu, in these early works, however, is that her politically and socially charged critiques were articulated within Taiwan with specifically local viewers and audience in mind. Unlike other transnationally situated artists, filmmakers, and writers who either strategically deploy political or national allegory for the purpose of immediate recognition, or creatively utilize essentialized cultural material in postmodern form to give exoticism a contemporary and politically correct twist, Wu Mali aims her political allegories and culturally specific articulations for local consumption, local viewing, and local critique. Her internationally exhibited works are often quite divergent from these works. Instead of the flexibility and translatability that we find in Ang Lee’s early work analyzed in chapter 1, we see instead a certain principled position on the untranslatability among contexts and context-based representations. These include the often-discussed series, the Formosa Stories (Baodao wuyu), installed and exhibited at Taipei’s IT Park Gallery in 1998. Three of the five pieces within this series are specifically women-centered installations, and these are Epitaph (Muzhiming, 1997), Stories of Women from Hsin-chuang (Hsinchuang nuren de gushi, 1997), and Formosa Club (Baodao binguan, 1998). In Epitaph (see color plate 6), Wu arranged the testimonials of female relatives of male victims of the 228 Massacre in 1947 on both sides of a U-shaped exhibition space, with a video of waves hitting against rocks placed in the middle of the space. Wu’s political critique is clear: she recuperates the repressed histories of female victims in the commemoration of the 228 Incident; a herstory against history’s ellipsis of women. At this level of reading, the piece is a typical feminist work that argues for the inclusion of women in the writing of history. The video installation in the middle, however, demands something beyond this reading. In the monotonous and iterative movement and sound of the waves against the rocks, Wu evokes nature’s expansiveness, depth, and persistence, a washing away of pain, or a chipping away at or an eroding of the hardness of suªering, whereby gendered suªering can be both embraced and transcended. The point is not just critique—the ruthless criticism of everything possible—but the possibility of transcending that critique. The mode of ressentiment should not be the perpetual mode of being. In Stories of Women from Hsin-chuang, testimonials of Hsin-chuang female textile workers are recorded onto the texture of the cloths hung on three sides of ]
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the U-shaped wall, words weaved into cloth, giving words form, texture, and materiality (see color plates 7 and 8). If history is the record of male heroes with all the power and means of representation in the printed page and other media, the medium that organically captures the experience of the female textile workers would be the cloth itself. They are thus recuperated as not merely producers of cloth garments, but producers of herstory; their work not merely existing for its exchange value, but for its gendered ideological and cultural value, implying larger symbolic meanings. The verbosity of the testimonials in their quantity and density reveal the strong subterranean desire of these female workers to speak for themselves, rather then to be spoken by, of, or most frequently, forgotten. Not only do their stories sewn into cloths register their hardship, their protest, but also through this form of expression, these life stories are transformed to representation, to art. Like the Freudian talking cure, the representation of the stories also heals. Sewing becomes a form of writing, the patterns of their lives shown as patterns on cloths. In Formosa Club, Wu Mali is at once at her most ironic and most recuperative (see color plate 9). Telling Taiwan history from the sixteenth century on from a sexual perspective as the history built upon the exploitation and commodification of female bodies, Wu reinscribes the masculinist metaphor of the colonized nation as the raped woman into a feminist critique of the multiple patriarchal forces that have depended upon Taiwan women’s sexual labor for political and economic gains. The grand narratives of the nation, be it the colonialist, the Nationalist, or the Taiwanese, hide behind them the blood and sweat of the most unspeakable form of labor. Recuperating this history thus exposes the hypocrisy of the national and economic narratives of Taiwan’s success. Hence the ironic placement of a framed calligraphy of Sun Yat-sen’s Confucian, moralistic phrase “Tianxia wei gong” (Serving the Public under Heaven)27 on the wall: the grand rhetoric is parodied to suggest male nationalists call for women to serve the public by serving men sexually. The entire island of Taiwan, the beautiful island Formosa, is a sex club, serving the Japanese soldiers as “comfort women” during the Pacific War, the American GIs during the Vietnam War, the Japanese tourists during the heyday of Japan’s “sex tourism” to Taiwan, if not local clientele of all hues and classes. The trinity of colonialist, nationalist, and capitalist expansion depends upon the dispensing of surplus male libido over the exploited bodies of local women. All three pieces are eloquent articulations of how herstory is the underside of history, repressed, elided, exploited, and silenced, needing to be recuperated to Cosmopolitanism among Empires
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challenge the hypocrisy and hegemony of history, while at the same time aªording means of healing or transcendence for the women involved. They are, one can say, clear feminist representations of a gendered intervention into history within the national terrain of Taiwan, the targeted audience being local Taiwanese. In their overt gestures toward Taiwan’s national history, these installations can be putatively considered national allegories, but they are not meant for consumption in the global multicultural market where national allegories sell well. There are two issues involved here. An obvious obstacle to the commodification of Taiwan’s national allegory is the lack of clarity as to how well it might sell—unlike countries such as China with consequential size and international power or those clearly Third World countries with corruption to expose and the so-called intractable traditions to overthrow (such as the practice of female circumcision and the veil, for instance), Taiwan is not known to the world for having had a particularly harrowing national history (even though it does in actuality) due to its political alignment with the U.S. right as well as its economic prosperity. Neither does Taiwan hold the world’s fascination in any particular area, given its lack of clout in international politics.28 For a minor and minoritized country such as Taiwan, in other words, even the commodification of national allegories is a luxury. After all, it was Hong Kong around 1997, with the world paying it much attention, when the greatest number of national allegories were produced. There is a symbiotic relationship between national allegories and international attention, one conducive to the other. The second issue of greater relevance here is in relation to the questions of ethics of representation that does not translate across national and transnational terrains. By the untranslatability of ethics I suggest that social critique should maintain its relevance within a given, specific context in order to prevent it from becoming commodified. When social critique, in the form of national allegories, is taken out of context, and is thus decontextualized, its political meaning is easily commodified. The ethical potential of the former—social critique in the original context—is lost once it is taken out of context, because it is that decontextualization that most readily allows for commodification. This can be illustrated by the contrast between the works of Hung Liu and Wu Mali. Hung Liu’s critique of the Cultural Revolution occurs not in China but in the United States; she is therefore not subject to potential censors within that original context, nor will her work have political eªect for those who are most immediately connected to that event. A decontextualized Cultural Revolution cri]
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tique is problematic when it serves to construct the exiled subject’s past in China as distress in self-conscious contrast to the present condition of opportunity and self-expression in the United States. That teleological narrative is an eager immigrant’s form of assimilationism. Similarly, the moment when the Chinese immigrant writer who writes in English, Ha Jin, narrativizes lives and experiences in the United States, rather than traumas that happened in China, is the moment when Ha Jin becomes a local writer rather than an exiled writer. The local then becomes a place of consequence and political investment. In other words, ethicality does not translate across national and transnational boundaries. The other important contrast pertains to the possession and use of cultural materials. Most of the immigrant art from China that has gained prominence in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century is profuse with cultural signs and symbols that are easily recognizable as Chinese. Xu Bing’s Book of the Sky series and Gu Wenda’s work with Chinese calligraphy are two prominent examples of how the deconstruction and critique of Chinese tradition (be it Confucian or Maoist) forms the core of their conceptual works. “China,” so to speak, is the cache, the rich repository of cultural materials and elements that are available for the immigrant Chinese artists’ use, as their claim on that repository is supposed to be unquestionable. Hung Liu’s critique of foot-binding falls into the same category, as does her use of images from the imperial court of the Qing dynasty in the Last Dynasty series of oil paintings. Without the cache of “China” as cultural capital, how do Taiwan artists enter the transnational terrain? What decipherable local cultural elements do they “own” to mark their nationality and ethnicity in particular, or uniqueness in general? For reasons explained in the previous chapters, even though the Sinophone culture as a translated Chinese culture in diaspora can serve as this resource, its users themselves are often paralyzed by anxieties and ambivalences due to the confusion over what is Chinese, what is Sinophone, and what is Taiwanese. Consequently, as Taiwan searches for a foothold in the transnational arena of cultural circulation, Taiwan artists find no ready recourse to master cultural codes easily recognizable by international audiences to make sense of a particular critique. If we look at the work of Wu Mali, who of all of Taiwan’s female artists is probably the most frequently exhibited outside Taiwan, we find a tendency toward universalistic, or shall we say, cosmopolitan themes, themes that have moorings in Western culture as much as Taiwanese and Sinophone cultures. Cosmopolitanism among Empires
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CAN COSMOPOLITANISM BE ETHICAL? We may conclude the above discussion by noting that the pandering of national allegory by non-Western artists in the metropole constitutes an ethical problem in the sense that their objects of critique are far away from the metropole, whose centrality or superiority is thus not questioned or threatened. Such distancing techniques are similar in mechanism as self-exoticization or self-Orientalization; it is an other-directed victimology that does not challenge the metropole. Rather, the metropole is comforted by the safe distance between the sites of trauma and itself. If such is the case, then the question before us is whether the obverse of national allegory is a certain kind of cosmopolitanism, and how, paradoxically, this minor cosmopolitanism is the ethical stance of a Taiwan artist refusing to fall into the self/other dynamic of transnational representation. Wu Mali has remarked, very sharply and astutely, on the politics of self-presentation in the transnational context on various occasions. She never thought she should choose “the most suitable and the most good-looking” outfit to wear to go out to the transnational art market, or she should adorn herself in fineries like “an imperial concubine waiting for the emperor’s visit,” and nor should she worry endlessly about how “an artist should sacrifice herself for the country.”29 In these very straightforward comments, she refutes the strategy of using national allegories for transnational consumption, refuses the passive role of a minor artist waiting to be “recognized,” and denies the nation the discursive monopoly over her work. In essence, she refuses transnational politics of recognition in global multiculturalism and the role of a representative for her nation. In these refusals, Wu extricates herself from the fast routes to recognition in both the global and local contexts. She thus liberates herself from the clichéd logic of the relationship between the global and the local, whose promise of recognition is rejected, albeit with cost. This refusal to play the game according to the rules of recognition is where the ethicality of her work lies. A short analysis of two pieces of installation art by Wu Mali that draw on world culture in very innovative ways is in order. These two pieces have traveled widely around various cities in the world, and it behooves us to consider the absence of national allegorical impulse in these works. The examples in point are The Library series and The Sweeties series. The Library was first exhibited at the Venice Biennial of 1995. Two sets of three metal bookshelves line the two walls on each side of a ]
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large window. Rows of books are placed on these metal shelves, and in the middle is a table with a glass bottle filled with shreds of paper (see color plate 10). Upon closer inspection, these books bearing all kinds of classic titles turn out to be clear acrylic boxes filled with shredded paper. The books include the Bible, Buddhist sutras, Confucian texts, Greek mythology, Nobel Prize–winning works of literature, and so on, and they are all shredded to pieces, stu‹ng the acrylic boxes lining the shelves as well as the glass jar on the table in the middle of the installation (see color plate 11). While the shredded books make a clearly critical commentary on the world’s canonical culture and literature, they also stand autonomously as objects d’art emerging from the destruction of classics. By debunking classics from various parts of the world, the reified culturalisms that these classics represent are literally dissolved into shreds of paper, which are material embodiments of a new global culture remade from the classics, rematerialized, or as Wu Mali puts it, becoming something like monosodium glutamate.30 This act of clearing is also an act of agency, deploying global resources of culture as she sees fit. The other work is called Sweeties of the Century from 1999. Wu Mali had several exhibitions of this show in various sites (Germany, Taiwan, the United States, etc.), and the main idea of the installation is a kind of reminder that historically significant figures from Europe, Asia, and elsewhere, no matter whether they were villains or heroes, were all once children. By evocative presentation of the sharedness of childhood, Wu suggests the possibility of a utopic, universal humanism. She “makes big people small again,” so to speak,31 and thus goes back to the childhood moments as unknown promises that could have turned out diªerently. The portraits of Hitler, Rosa Luxemburg, Eileen Chang, Lin Hwai-min, Petra Kelly of the Green Party in Germany are all included and juxtaposed in an unchronological fashion. Depending on the sites of the exhibition, she has also called the series Victorian Sweeties (because the exhibition was in a Victorian building, etc.). This last composite image entitled Sweeties of the Century shows Oscar Wilde, Michel Foucault, Eileen Chang, Lin Hwai-min, Wu Da-you, Ernest Hemingway, and Taiwan’s vice president, Annette Lu.32 Wu assumes a degree of agency toward the resources of world culture and approaches them with the same level of seriousness or dedication as she did to providing political commentary on Taiwan in her earlier work. Rooted in a multiplicity of address, these site-specific works dare to ponder universal themes; deploying a multiplicity of references, these works dare to refuse the particularisms Cosmopolitanism among Empires
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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]
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Wu Mali, Sweeties of the Century (2000), composite imagery. Used with permission of the artist.
of national allegory and self-Orientalization (in postmodern garb), and take the risk of nonrecognition. One may align this position with other nonreactive vernacular cosmopolitanism that seeks to go beyond ressentiment, beyond what Manthia Diawara has called “the identity prison-house.”33 But the vernacular cosmopolitanism thus conceived and transcended is a form of articulation within one nation-state and thus does not transport readily to the transnational context. Wu’s position in the transnational context, in refusing and challenging cultural particularism, is historically specific to Taiwan’s position on the edge of empires, where even the articulation of ressentiment does not have any ready cache per se. She enters the transnational as a cosmopolitan artist perhaps because even national determinations are a luxury. Hers is a form of hyperbolic universalism articulated by a minor transnational artist, which may exaggerate cosmopolitan access, but in the end attesting to the vision that cultural work is the site of transformative social practice when political and other realms are thoroughly colonized by the contesting and colluding wills of empires.
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Let us remain open to what is happening in the present, which invariably exceeds, a priori, our capacities of understanding. —Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998) It is impossible to break with the theoretical past in one blow: in every case, words and concepts are needed to break with words and concepts. —Louis Althusser, For Marx (1965)
Conclusion: The Time and Place of the Sinophone In coining the term Sinophone, my foremost concern has been to challenge specific “regimes of authenticity”1 which are themselves but constructs that have exercised various forms of symbolic or physical violence against those who are either problematically included or flagrantly excluded. Within any regime of authenticity, inclusion and exclusion often trace violent boundaries, but the diªerence between inclusion and exclusion can also be a matter of degree. The various fault lines within a politics of inclusion can be just as disempowering and oppressive to those nominally included, such that inclusion can be as problematic as exclusion. The categories known as “China,” the “Chinese,” and “Chineseness” are historically sedimented constructs built as much upon amnesia, violence, and imperial intention as subjective desires for belonging and community. Desires for belonging, after all, can also be products of ideological and cultural suturing; they are often responses to the hailing of nationalism, be it nationalist pride or resistance. Desires for belonging, furthermore, can ]
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themselves be built upon symbolic and other forms of violence against the others who do not or cannot belong. Various ethnic peoples were made “Chinese” in a procedure that is known to us today as national consciousness, which can itself be a form of colonialism. What we today deem to be the largest ethnic group in China, the Han, was itself a mixture of various ethnicities. An authoritative dictionary definition from China, evidently secure in its centrality and unself-conscious of the potential implications, states matter-of-factly that the Han “is the main ethnicity in China, consisting of the mixture of the ancient Huaxia and other ethnicities over a very long time. In its process of development, [the Han] also continuously absorbed various ethnic minorities in order to make itself even more powerful.”2 The phrasing “even more powerful” (geng jia zhuang da) and the verb “absorb” (xishou) imply a politics of power and incorporation, most likely unintended by the writer of this entry in the dictionary, thus pointing back to the seemingly innocent term “mixture” (hunhe) in the first sentence as a terrain of unequal relations of subject (who did the mixing) and object (who got mixed). If we further explore dictionary definitions of Huaxia, we find a connection back to the term China. Huaxia is the ancient name for China, and the two characters constituting the word, hua and xia, were nouns-cum-adjectives meaning “flower” or “beautiful” for the former, and “big” or “large” for the latter. Colorful robes with decorative designs are called hua, and big countries are called xia; hence Huaxia for China, a beautiful and big country.3 Recent scholarship in China has begun to explore the contours of “China” with a more, though limited, deconstructive intention, noting that it is not until the thirteenth century that “China” as such came into being, and that the geocultural boundary that we know to be China was the result of imperial expansion and Han cultural colonialism over time.4 The coming-to-being of the Chinese term for “China,” Zhongguo (literally, the Middle Kingdom), furthermore, traces the physical process of geographical expansion: it originally included only the areas surrounding the Yellow River, where the Huaxia settled, and it became the name of the nation only in the mid-nineteenth century.5 During the Spring and Autumn as well as the Warring States periods, “middle kingdom” was a common, not a proper noun, referring to those feudal kingdoms that occupied central geographical areas.6 The “Chinese diaspora” as the all-encompassing term for all ethnic peoples who have ancestral links to China oftentimes functions as the alibi for assigning ]
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Chineseness as an inescapable, ontological, a priori condition readily subjected to racialization within countries of settlement, to nationalist hailings by China, and to variously motivated cultural essentialisms, even though generations may have lived and died and centuries may have elapsed since the dispersal. “Chineseness” becomes a category that can be quantified and measured, and most importantly, insisted upon, privileging an ideology of origin that refuses to accept an end date to diaspora. Migration becomes a permanent condition, while localization and settlement are devalued as meaningful measures of experience. If I were to say that the permanent state of migration is not at all a truthful representation of what has happened to those peoples who migrated out of China over the centuries, I am only stating the obvious. But stating the obvious itself is made imperative by the multiplicity of interested agents—nationalism, culturalism, racism, and otherwise— insisting on the eternal validity of being Chinese, the measurable quality and quantity of Chineseness, and the centrality of China as the homeland. By proposing the linguistic category of the Sinophone, I hope to emphasize the following: 1. Diaspora has an end date. When the (im)migrants settle and become localized, many choose to end their state of diaspora by the second or third generation. The so-called nostalgia for the ancestral land is often an indication or displacement of di‹culties of localization, either by force or by choice. Racism and other hostile conditions can force immigrants to find escape and solace in the past, while cultural or other superiority complexes can estrange immigrants from the locals. Emphasizing that diaspora has an expiration date is therefore to insist that cultural and political practice is always place-based. Everyone should be given a chance to become a local. 2. The linguistic community is a community of change and an open community. When the descendants of immigrants no longer speak their ancestors’ languages, Hanyu and other Sinitic languages, they are no longer part of the Sinophone community. The Sinophone community is therefore a community of change, occupying a transitional moment (however long in duration) that inevitably integrates further with local communities and becomes constitutive of the local. It is an open community, furthermore, because it is defined not by the race or nationality of the speaker but by the languages one speaks. Just as Anglophone speakers are not necessarily British The Time and Place of the Sinophone
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or American, Sinophone speakers need not be Chinese by nationality. To equate nationality, race, and language is to be blind to the existence of multilingualism. To the extent that communities may be multilingual, linguistically determined communities necessarily trace porous and contingent boundaries. With these two emphases in mind, now we can retrospectively consider the time and place conjunctions raised by the protagonists of the chapters in this book. First of all, the transition from being a Taiwanese to a Taiwanese American (Ang Lee) or a Chinese to a Chinese American (Hung Liu) is a process that takes time; minoritization is a process, and thus identity is a temporal category, rather than simply an existential, cultural, political, or geographical one. The question to ask is not so much what is Taiwanese American, but also when is Taiwanese American. As this transformation takes time, it transverses over space and place across the Pacific and implicates itself within a transpacific sphere of cultural politics, especially when the artists in question intend to be successful in a commercial arena saturated by entrenched race, gender, and class determinations. A similar question can be asked about feminism: rather than what kind of feminist, but rather when and where is one feminist? Hung Liu is a case in point. Hers is the narrative of an immigrant from the Third World finding “liberation” from patriarchy (be it traditional or Maoist) in the liberal West, a teleological narrative that exposes severe fault lines of transnational encounters among women and feminists.7 Hung Liu’s work complicates this narrative by constructing multiple antagonisms toward disparate yet connected agents of power, but antagonism itself may also paradoxically be a not-so-innocent strategy of commodification. Observing Taiwan’s visual culture in the context of escalating tensions with China shows that resistant identities take time to construct and to take eªect, precisely because they are to perform a transformative function in people’s consciousness. From being a certain kind of atavistic, fantastic, and universal “Chinese” under the imposed authenticity by the Guomindang regime, the people of Taiwan have become “aboriginals” (no longer the pejorative “compatriots from the mountains,” shandi tongbao), Hakkas, Taiwanese, and new immigrants (from Southeast Asia and elsewhere), together forming the “New Taiwanese” (xin Taiwanren). Their spatial consciousness also progressively distances itself from China, even though Taiwan’s geographical proximity and close economic ties to China ]
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may not change. The New Taiwanese identity is a processional one: contemporary history is the ground of the mise-en-scène of its happening and formation. The Sinophone identity that is resistant to China seeks to articulate its diªerence from continental Chineseness by asserting the particularity of the local; and this searching and constructing is a process that happens in time. Time is what is necessary to validate the transformative functions of resistant identities, as the eªect of a new identity discourse and practice can only be seen after the fact. The present, then, is pregnant with possibilities and becomes the time and space of imagination and imaginative action with the potential to bring about change. Taiwan may have been a putatively diasporic community in the seventeenth century, when the majority of the Han population had just migrated from China to Taiwan; but it can be said that the diaspora ended a long time ago. Contemporary Taiwan is similar to what Benedict Anderson has called “creole states” such as the various states in Spanish America as well as the United States, which are led by people who share a common language with those against whom they fought.8 Like the tension that existed between the United States and Britain, which required a war of independence, the relationship between Taiwan and China is fraught with potential war. Launching missiles near the northern coast of Taiwan was China’s way of militarizing the relationship between China and Taiwan and involving both sides in competitive weapons building and an arms race. Within this race, “common language and common culture,” the Japanese imperial dictum that helped justify Japan’s invasion of China in the early twentieth century, appears to be the discursive basis for China’s claim over Taiwan. Anderson tells us that language was never an issue for creole states in the Americas in their struggle for national liberation;9 the decoupling of language and nation is also an everyday reality for many countries in Europe; so it is the prerogative of a Sinophone country like Taiwan to delink language and nation. For the first-generation mainlanders who immigrated to Taiwan in the middle of the last century and who are a small minority in Taiwan, their diaspora also has an expiration date. The moment when they realized that they would not return to China was the moment they decided that new sewage systems and new roads should be built because Taiwan is home, not the temporary, strategic post from which to “recover the mainland.” The usual negative eªects of fast-speed modernization such as environmental pollution and shoddy public works had been compounded by the mainlander Guomindang regime’s inability to see Taiwan as The Time and Place of the Sinophone
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home: why the need for long-term city planning or environmental protection when they had meant to be in Taiwan for only as long as it takes to recover China? Diaspora therefore expired even for these mainlanders when various local o‹cials in Taiwan were elected on the platform of improving public works, such as the riverside walk in Tamsui, the subway in Taipei, the hot springs in Pei-tou, historical town preservation in Hsin-chu, and many others. Of course, for the aboriginals in Taiwan, Taiwan has never been diasporic. Identities are therefore constructs in history and are place-based, and they change according to the new configurations in local reality vis-à-vis the translocal. Precisely because identities have the capacity to change, they can be transformative. Similarly for Hong Kong’s visual culture, we have seen history in action with its retrocession to China in 1997. The pre-1997 fervor to carve out a distinct Hong Kong identity against China’s impending containment is gradually giving way to a pan-Chinese identity, tracing a reverse trajectory from that of Taiwan. After the Hong Kong trilogy, Fruit Chan, the protagonist of chapter 5, began to explore the many possible relationships Hong Kong could have with China other than the anticolonial one.10 “China,” after all, is a complex entity within which many diªerent negotiations may be possible; what is distinct for Hong Kong artists is that these negotiations are not contingencies but necessities on their way to “becoming Chinese.” As the Hong Kongers become Chinese, the Chinese from China become “inlanders,” or “those from the interior” (neidi ren) rather than “mainland cousins” or just “mainlanders” who were problematically feminized and sexualized in the movie series discussed in chapter 3. The realignment of what is interior and what is exterior is taking place, as is China’s exertion of increased control over Hong Kong, as seen in the threat of the antisubversion law, the gradual demolition of the short-lived democratic system, and increased censorship of the media. One may say that, despite the struggles of some local intellectuals and politicians for autonomy, what is taking place in Hong Kong is the gradual interiorization of Hong Kong into China, the making interior of Hong Kong into the vast interiority that is China itself. This is identity transformation under the aegis of a controlling central government, which is oppressive or favorable to Hong Kongers depending on their position on freedom of speech, their view of Hong Kong’s place in the global economy, their (dis)connection to o‹cial Chineseness, and other such crucial issues of the day. It bears repeating that instances of Sinophone culture in flux show how the ]
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Sinophone can only be a transitional category and a partial description of the complexities of culture in a given location. Taiwan is Sinophone to a similar extent that Mexico is Hispanophone or the United States is Anglophone, but the multilingualism and multiculturalism in all these locations remind us that, as adjectives, these terms describe a limited and partial reality of the communities in question. The majority of Taiwanese may speak Mandarin, which is very similar to the Chinese standard putonghua, but the particular inflections, accents, diction, and even aspects of grammar are divergent, not to mention enunciation. Most Taiwanese also prefer to speak Minnan over Mandarin. When languages diverge due to historical changes and diªerent social formations—languages are, after all, living things that are constantly changed by their usage in particular contexts— are they still the same language? Is American English the same language as British English? Victor Mair has suggested, for instance, that what we consider to be dialects are actually separate languages.11 Minnan, Hakka, and the various aboriginal languages in Taiwan are clearly separate languages from putonghua, while Mandarin is more obviously Sinophone by comparison. The attribution of “dialect” status to languages on the margins emanates from the center itself as the actualization of an imperial intention, which defines, through an artificially constructed hierarchy, what is standard and what is not. What does Sinophone studies do, then? Or rather, what can Sinophone studies do? To these questions, I oªer several tentative answers by way of the following proposals: 1. By debunking the “Chinese diaspora” as the organizing concept for the study of various immigrant peoples who left China from centuries ago up to the present, it is possible to propose organizing concepts other than such essentialist notions as “Chineseness” and the “Chinese.” Instead, rigorously rearticulated concepts such as multiplicity, localization, creolization, métissage, and others can be deployed for more complex understandings of histories and cultures. Ethnic studies, other “phone” studies, such as Francophone studies and Anglophone studies, postcolonial studies, transnational studies, and additional relevant modes of inquiry may all be drawn from for Sinophone studies. 2. Sinophone studies allows us to rethink the relationship between roots and routes by questioning the conceptions of roots as ancestral rather than The Time and Place of the Sinophone
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place-based, or routes as wandering or homelessness rather than a more mobile conception of homeness that is paradoxically also more ethical and place-based.12 To decouple homeness and origin is to recognize the imperative of living as a political subject within a particular geopolitical space in a specific time with deep local commitments. To link homeness with the place of residence therefore becomes an ethical act that chooses concrete political engagement in the local. The claim of rootlessness by some nostalgia-driven, middle-class, first-generation immigrants is, for example, oftentimes narcissistic to the extent that it is not aware of its own trenchant conservatism and even racism.13 The place of residence can change—some people migrate more than once—but to consider that place as home may thus be the highest form of rootedness. Routes, then, can become roots. This is not a theory of mobile citizens who disidentify from the local nation-state and disengage from local politics, but the politicization of that mobility. 3. When routes can be roots, multidirectional critiques are not only possible but also imperative. Transcending national borders, Sinophone communities can maintain a critical position toward both the country of origin and the country of settlement. It is no longer an either/or choice between the ancestral land and the local place, which has been shown to jeopardize the well-being of the immigrants and their descendants. A Chinese American can be critical of China and the United States at the same time. In the case of Taiwan, this double critique allows for the emergence of a critical, articulatory position beyond the conventional association of Taiwan with the American right, so that Taiwan can be critical of Chinese and U.S. policies of containment as well as their collusion and complicity without being forced to choose one over the other. The Sinophone as a concept, then, allows for the emergence of a critical position that does not succumb to nationalist and imperialist pressures. The listlike manner in which I write these proposals is my way of organizing the many possibilities that are opened up by the notion of the Sinophone, to emphasize that the list is an open one awaiting addition and modification on the one hand, and that the list is also a limited one that does not prescribe what Sinophone ]
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can be or may be, on the other. As terms enter into circulation, new meanings are assigned, attributed, and created. The gradual increase of the usage of the term by scholars has already begun to enliven the life story of the term itself.14 By way of conclusion and returning to the issue of visuality, it is also important to emphasize the diªerence and similarity between visual language and spoken language, because visual language as form is as porous, if not more so, as oral language. As visual culture all around the globe responds to the hegemonic dissemination of Euro-American visual culture, as images travel faster and faster through electronic and virtual means, a transnational or global politics of culture more readily enters into the making of film and art in non-Western sites, whether aimed for local or Western markets. Charges that Asian filmmakers willingly engage in self-Orientalization, now in more postmodern and formally intelligent fashions, are therefore rather commonplace. But just as oral languages are constantly inflected by loan words and syntax, Sinophone visual culture through film and art is as open to the world and inflected by cultural cross-fertilizations as well as cultural politics. Reflecting the immense variety of geopolitical locations within which Sinophone communities are situated, Sinophone visual culture as such is an unbounded entity. With visual medium becoming more and more the primary means through which identity in process is articulated, Sinophone communities, while tracing porous linguistic boundaries, are open to the world through their production of visual culture. Film and art from Taiwan, pre-1997 Hong Kong, Sinophone America, as well as those sinophone places not studied in this book— spanning Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe, that is, basically the rest of the world— oªer us a rich transnational body of texts that challenge us to explore their local and translocal meanings and exigencies. The potential of the Sinophone in its global reach is never far away from the threat of China-centrism that can be appropriated by the emergence of China as a superpower. But as the past ten years of transnational and global studies have shown, there are diªerent ways of being global or transnational. Careful delineation of those global and transnational cultures complicit with imperialism, neocolonialism, and global capitalism from those transnational cultures resistant to them is the work that is urgently needed. We all live in the same transnational moment, we all live in the same context of globalization, and we may say that all cultures are becoming more and more transnationalized: this is the recognition of the coevality of all cultures in the contemporary moment. But coevality occurs in The Time and Place of the Sinophone
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uneven political and economic terrains, and thus the power politics of the contemporary must be as rigorously critiqued as was the politics of modernity. Sinophone visual culture is the minor form of the transnational that occurs through creolization of major languages (whether oral or visual) while being a culture in and of itself. The end result may be critical or complicit, but the risk of Chinacentrism in the context of the global emergence of China will hopefully keep it honest. When Sinophone expressive cultures become complicit with Chinacentrism, they lose their articulatory function as the fulcrum of resistant and transformative identities.
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NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Cantonese-language cinema from Hong Kong is the only nonstandard sinitic-language cinema that can challenge the Mandarindominated cinema from China and elsewhere. Minnan (Taiwanese) cinema has been much smaller in scope and influence. See Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), for the pivotal role Hong Kong cinema played in the rise and growth of Chinese cinema in Shanghai in the early twentieth century. 2. I explore this transpacific dimension in detail in chapters 1 and 2. 3. I am using the definition of the term overdetermination from Peter Gay’s Freud for Historians, quoted in Arif Dirlik, After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 101. 4. Dirlik, After the Revolution, 102–3. 5. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 82–89.
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6. Simone de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1976), 122. 7. Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System, ed. Anthony King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 27. 8. See Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1998), 93–135, as well as Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Global Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 67–96. 9. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 16. 10. The statement is Gore Vidal’s. Cited in Wendy Everett, “Introduction,” The Seeing Century, ed. Wendy Everett (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 6. 11. Samuel Weber, Mass Mediauras (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 78–80. 12. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 329–53. 13. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1995); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977); Mitchell, Picture Theory, 16–18. 14. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 13–15. 15. See Jay, Downcast Eyes, esp. 1–20. 16. Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217–51; Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988), 3–27; Paul Virilio as discussed in Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 180. 17. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine, trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994). See esp. chap. 5. 18. Ironically, Derrida is Staªord’s example of someone whose theory has propagated logocentrism. Her example also includes Homi Bhabha’s use of mirror imagery as the reduction of the visual to an “evil doubling colonial eye.” See Barbara Maria Staªord, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1996), 7–23. 19. Deborah Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 17–18. 20. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26–27. Martin Jay interprets Barthes’s work as generally negative of vision and visuality, even though Barthes’s writings, especially Camera Lucida, have
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been very influential in the study of the semiotics of film and photography. See Jay, Downcast Eyes, chap. 8. 21. Quoted in Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 20. 22. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 411. 23. Staªord, Good Looking, 4, 39, 24. Hence even melodramatic identifications by female television and film viewers are means of living out and testing diªerent lives and the limits of their current lives, according to Ien Ang. See her Living Room Wars (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), chap. 5, 85–97. 25. Dirlik, After the Revolution, 60–64. 26. Gary Hamilton cites Fernand Braudel for the notion of la longue durée as used here. See his introduction to Cosmopolitan Capitalists: Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the 20th Century, ed. Gary Hamilton (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999). 27. Large houses built to the limits of their lot in old and quaint neighborhoods in Canada by Hong Kong immigrants have been disparaged as “monster houses.” See Katharyne Mitchell, “Transnational Subjects: Constituting the Cultural Citizen in the Era of Pacific Rim Capital,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, 228–56 (London: Routledge, 1997). For flexible citizenship, see Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 28. W. J. T. Mitchell, “The Surplus Value of Images,” Mosaic 35, no. 3 (September 2002): 1–23. 29. Staªord, Good Looking, 200–212. 30. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 411; by global multiculturalism, I mean the culturalist constellation of national cultures constituting a global form of multiculturalism that ethnicizes and minoritizes national cultures from nonmetropolitan countries. See Shu-mei Shih, “Global Literature and Technologies of Recognition,” PMLA, 119, no. 1 ( January 2004): 16–30. 31. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1e. 32. Jonathan L. Beller, “Capital/Cinema,” in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, 77–95 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 33. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, esp. chaps. 1 and 2. 34. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 71–72.
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35. Poole, Vision, Race, and Modernity, 8–10. 36. Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” 3–23. 37. Everett, Seeing Century, 5–6. 38. See Hall, “Local and Global.” In this article, Hall notes how the “English eye” others and marginalizes the colonized. See also Franz Fanon’s discussion of the desire of the colonized to be looked at in a Hegelian vein in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), esp. chap. 7. For the gendered structure of gaze, see Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian G. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 39. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1981), 72. 40. Ibid., 106. 41. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), 3–68. The quotation appears on p. 42. 42. Anne Friedberg, “A Denial of Diªerence: Theories of Cinematic Identification,” in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Caplan (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 36–45. 43. Irigaray. Speculum of the Other Woman, 133–46. 44. Trinh T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 22–23. 45. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 162, 180; Metz, Imaginary Signifier, 3. 46. Although this statement is meant to be purely formalistic as a means to analyze the semiotics of film, it works well to describe film’s ideological eªect. Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator, trans. Nell Andrew, with Charles O’Brien (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 1–15. The quoted phrase appears on p. 47. 47. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 177. 48. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 30. 49. Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura of Ideology, trans. Will Straw (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 1–20. The quotation is from p. 17. 50. See Jay, Downcast Eyes, 471–91, for a summary and critique of the apparatus theory.
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51. Linda Alcoª argues in this regard that the critique of identity is purposefully conducted by some to deflect the power of the other over the self. Alcoª, “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula Moya and M. Hames-Garcia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 335. 52. Satya Mohanty, “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity,” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula Moya and M. Hames-Garcia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 43. 53. Ibid., 33–36. 54. Alcoª, “Identity Politics,” 331. 55. Mohanty, “Epistemic Status,” 58. 56. Linda Alcoª and Eduardo Mendieta, eds., Identities: Race, Class, and Nationality (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 3. 57. Dirlik, After the Revolution, 89–99. 58. Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (London and New York: Zed Books, 1997), 62. 59. Weber, Mass Mediauras, 78–80. 60. See, for instance, Judith Butler’s discussion of melancholia as fundamental to subject-formation in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 61. Alain Touraine: “The transformation of individuals into subjects results from the necessary combination of two a‹rmations: that of individuals against communities, and that of individuals against the market.” Quoted in Manuel Castells, The Information Age, vol. 2, The Power of Identity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 10. 62. Castells, Power of Identity, xv. 63. Ibid., 2. 64. Castells’s typology includes only legitimizing, resistance, and project identities. By project, he means the production of new identities enabling the transformation of the social structure; Castells, Power of Identity, 8. 65. The early twentieth-century version of national characteristics is evinced in the work of none other than the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun, who saw his mission to be curing the diseased Chinese people inflicted with a host of recognizable, negative characteristics as a literary doctor. The contemporary version of the idea of national characteristics is the hot topic of the “quality” (suzhi) of the Chinese people. The argument goes that the quality of the Chinese needs to be improved in order for China to advance quickly on the path of modernization.
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66. Trade routes between China and Southeast Asia were opened as early as the second century, and by the sixth century, communities of people from China could already be found in port cities throughout the region. See C. F. FitzGerald, The Third China (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1965). 67. Instructive comparisons can be made between Sinophone societies and those European countries where nationality and ethnicity are clearly not equated. We can think of Latvia, for instance, where only about 56 percent of its population is Latvian and the rest are Russians and others. 68. David L. Kenley, New Culture in a New World: The May Fourth Movement and the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, 1919–1932 (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 163–85. 69. Wang Gungwu, The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 79–97. 70. “Dual domination” is Lingchi Wang’s descriptive term for this condition. See Lingchi Wang, “The Structure of Dual Domination: Toward a Paradigm for the Study of the Chinese Diaspora in the United States,” Amerasia Journal 21, nos. 1–2 (1995): 149–69. 71. Carolyn Cartier, “Diaspora and Social Restructuring in Postcolonial Malaysia,” in The Chinese Diaspora, ed. Lawrence J. C. Ma and Carolyn Cartier, 69–96 (Lanham, MD; Boulder, CO; New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 72. Lynn Pan lists these peoples under the category “hybrids,” which is also a chapter title in Pan’s book Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (Boston, Toronto, London: Little Brown, 1990), 156–58. 73. Wang Gungwu, “Chineseness: The Dilemmas of Place and Practice,” in Cosmopolitan Capitalists: Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the 20th Century, ed. Gary Hamilton, 118–34 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999). 74. Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 289–95. 75. See Leo Suryadinada, ed., Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1997). 76. Wang Gungwu, Chinese Overseas, and Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, both exemplify this. 77. See, for instance, Emanuel Wallerstein’s three-volume The Modern World-System (San Diego: Academic Press, 1974–1989), as well as Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization. 78. Victor Mair’s important work shows that what we know to be standard Chinese belongs to the Sinitic language group, where the mistakenly named “dialects” are not variations of standard Chinese but are actually diªerent languages. Minnan and Cantonese are thus diªerent languages from Mandarin (Taiwan standard) and putonghua (China standard). See Victor Mair, “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolet’? Reflections on Some Key Sino-English Linguistic Terms,” Sino-Platonic Papers 29 (September 1991): 1–31. See also Mair’s intro-
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duction to Victor Mair, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, and Paul Rakita Goldin, eds., Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 1–7. 79. Margaret A. Majumdar, Francophone Studies (London: Arnold, 2002), 210, 217. 80. For Lusophone Africa, see Patrick Chabal et al., The Postcolonial Literature of Lusophone Africa (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996). 81. Cartier, “Diaspora and Social Restructuring.” 82. Of course, even the ethnic category of the Han is a construction. See this volume’s conclusion for an elaboration of this point. 83. Farewell China is the title of a film made by then Hong Kong–based British-trained filmmaker Clara Law. Taiwan cultural critic Yang Zhao’s famous book Farewell China (gaobie Zhongguo) captures this sentiment vividly. 84. Mieke Bal, “Figuration,” PMLA 119, no. 5 (October 2004): 1289. 85. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 83–107. 86. “Sinophone Asian American literature” may simply be changed to “sinophone American literature,” as this literature is categorized by language. Similarly, one can make a distinction between Chinese America and sinophone America, the latter referring to sinitic-language-speaking American communities. Again, linguistic designation allows the possibility of overcoming distinctions made solely based on ethnicity or race. See Sau-ling Wong, “The Yellow and the Black: The African-American Presence in Sinophone Chinese American Literature,” Chung-Wai Literary Monthly 34, no. 4 (September 2005): 15–53. 87. Margaret Majumdar, “The Francophone World Moves into the Twenty-first Century,” in Francophone Post-Colonial Cultures, ed. Kamal Salhi (Lanham, MD; Boulder, CO; New York, Oxford: Lexington Books, 2003), 4–5. 88. ChosQn Korea considered itself the sojunghwa (literally, small China) that was more authentically Chinese than the Manchu Qing dynasty. 89. Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouªe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 105–14. 90. For this particular view on the historical character of what Benjamin calls “dialectical images,” see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1989), 290–91. 91. Crouching Tiger was released in 2000, while Hero first opened in China in 2002. The release of Hero in the United States was delayed until 2004. 92. Craig Smith, “‘Hero’ Soars, and Its Director Thanks ‘Crouching Tiger,’” New York Times, September 2, 2004, B1, B5. 93. “A Tiger Still Crouching,” Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2004, E4.
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94. Evans Chan notes that this imperial trajectory was prepared by Zhang’s increasing conformism to the Chinese government in two previous films, The Story of Qiu Ju and Not One Less. See his “Zhang Yimou’s ‘Hero’: The Temptations of Fascism,” Film International 8, no. 2 (2004): 14–23. 95. “A Tiger Still Crouching,” Los Angeles Times, August 22, 2004, E4. 96. Weber, Mass Mediauras, 82–107. 97. Thomas Mathiesen’s notion of the synopticon is summarized by Zygmunt Bauman in Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 51–53. 98. See Paul Ricoeur interviewed by Richard Kearney, “The Power of the Possible,” on the arts as having the dynamic tendency toward possibility. Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 44–45.
1. GLOBALIZATION AND MINORITIZATION 1. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990). 2. Aihwa Ong, “On the Edges of Empires: Flexible Citizenship among Chinese in Diaspora,” Positions: East Asian Cultures Critique, 1, no. 3 (1993): 745–78. 3. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, “Introduction: Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, 3–33 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), chap. 1; Mike Featherstone, “Global Culture: An Introduction,” in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1990), 1–14. 4. Frederick Buell, National Culture and the New Global System. (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 122, 137, 205, 247. 5. Anthony King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (New York: Routledge, 1990), 39–45. Also see Anthony King, “Introduction: Spaces of Culture, Spaces of Knowledge,” in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8. 6. Buell, National Culture, 196–205. 7. Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), chap. 1. 8. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, “Afterword: Toward a Cultural Politics of Diaspora and Transnationalism,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese
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Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 324. 9. Lowe, Immigrant Acts, chap. 7. 10. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, chap. 7. 11. I am using the term Third World as inclusive of the geopolitical Third World and the Third World within the First World (ethnic minorities) after Chandra Mohanty, Anna Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 12. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 196. 13. See Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, chap. 9. 14. Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 67. 15. R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 159–60. Also see Shu-mei Shih, “Nationalism and Korean American Women’s Writing: Theresa Hak-kyung Cha’s Dictee,” in Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman, 144–62 (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1997). 16. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967); Mariana Torgovnick, Closure in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3–8; Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 22. 17. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Eªect,” in French Literary Theory Today, ed. T. Todorov, 11–17 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 18. Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouªe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 112. (Emphasis in the original.) 19. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, “Real Virtuality,” in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 116. 20. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997). 21. Sau-ling Wong, “Ethnicizing Gender: An Exploration of Sexuality as Sign in Chinese Immigrant Literature,” in Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley G. Lim and Amy Ling, 111–29 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).
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22. Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in The Big Aiiieeeee, ed. Jeªery Paul Chan et al., 1–92 (New York: Meridian, 1991). 23. The film was released on video only after the success of Ang Lee’s later two films. 24. In an earlier version of the film script, there were clear references to the Tiananmen Massacre, which Ang Lee cut out entirely to avoid political connotations. See Peggy Hsiungping Chiao, “The Melancholy of Old Age: Ang Lee’s Immigrant Nostalgia,” in Cinedossier: Ang Lee, ed. Taipei Golden Horse International Film Festival Executive Committee, 28–29 (Taipei: Shibao chubanshe, 1991). 25. Lau Mun-yee, “Heterosexualized Homosexual Love: Ang Lee’s ‘The Wedding Banquet,’” Cultural Criticism (wenhua pinglun, Hong Kong) 2 (1994), 137–44. 26. Cynthia Lew, “‘To Love, Honor, and Dismay’: Subverting the Feminine in Ang Lee’s Trilogy of Resuscitated Patriarchs,” in Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 3, no. 1 ( Winter 1995): 1–60. 27. Mark Chiang, “Nationalism and Sexuality in Global Economy: Presentations of the Chinese Diaspora in The Wedding Banquet,” paper given at UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, April 18, 1996. 28. Chinese Daily News, January 22, 1996, A1. 29. China Times Weekly 65 (March–April 1993): 75. 30. Chinese Daily News, July 4, 1996, B2. 31. Suzanne Hamlin, “Chinese Haute Cuisine: Re-creating a Film’s Starring Dishes,” New York Times, August 10, 1994, C3; Hamlin, “Le Grand Excès Spices Love Poems to Food,” New York Times, July 31, 1994, H9, H20. 32. David Denby, “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Ang Lee,” New York, August 29, 1994, 110. 33. Bruce Williamson, “Movies,” Playboy, September 1994, 26. 34. See chapter 4 for a detailed analysis of Taiwan’s consumption of “China” in changing contexts. 35. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 25. 36. Chinese Daily News, January 22, 1996, A1. 37. Sarah Kerr, “Sense and Sensitivity,” New York 29, no. 13 (April 1, 1996): 43–47; Donald Lyons, “Passionate Precision: Sense and Sensibility,” Film Comment, January-February 1996, 36–41. 38. A. Lin Neumann, “Cultural Revolution: Taiwan Director Ang Lee Takes on Jane Austen,” Far Eastern Economic Review, December 28, 1995, and January 4, 1996, 97–98. 39. Jack Kroll, “Jane Austen Does Lunch,” Newsweek, December 18, 1995, 66–68. 40. Kerr, “Sense and Sensibility.”
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41. See, for instance, the December 18, 1995, issue of New York, p. 51. 42. Janet Maslin, “In Mannerly Search of Marriageable Men,” New York Times, December 13, 1995, C15. 43. Graham Fuller, “Shtick and Seduction” Sight and Sound, March 1996, 22. 44. Ibid., 20–22. 45. Emma Thompson, The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries (New York: Newmarket Press, 1996), 220. 46. Ibid., 226. 47. Ibid., 232 and 228 respectively. 48. Ibid., 207. 49. Chinese Daily News, May 20, 1997, D6. 50. Chinese Daily News, April 9, 1996, D1. 51. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 71. 52. Chow, Primitive Passions, 173–202.
2. A FEMINIST TRANSNATIONALITY 1. For transnational feminist practice and transnational feminism, see the articles collected in Ella Shohat, ed., Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), esp. Inderpal Grewal, “On the New Global Feminism and the Family of Nations: Dilemmas of Transnational Feminist Practice,” 501–30. Also see Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos, eds., Dialogue and Diªerence: Feminisms Challenge Globalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2. See my companion article to this chapter in which I triangulate feminism across China, Sinophone, and U.S. divides in terms of transnational feminist practice: Shu-mei Shih, “Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounters, or, ‘When’ Does a ‘Chinese’ Woman Become a ‘Feminist’?” Diªerences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 90–126. This article is also anthologized in Waller and Marcos, Dialogue and Diªerence. 3. Kobena Mercer, “Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diaspora-Based Blackness,” Third Text 49 ( Winter 1999–2000): 59. 4. Theodore Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York : Continuum, 1983). 5. Carmi Weingrod, “Collage, Montage, Assemblage,” American Artist 58 (April 1994): 18–21. 6. Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouªe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 159.
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7. In a series of paintings entitled Family I (1990–91, 72×108×12) and Family II (1991, 60×80×9), teacups are placed upside down to show patriarchal denigration of women as spilled water, and empty bowls are used to show how women were empty of value in traditional conceptions. The female images are fainter in these works, to show how they are not commemorated in family lineage records, hence their existence is considered inconsequential to memory and history. Hung Liu registers her feminist intent prominently in all of her work from this period, as she explains clearly in several interviews and numerous articles about her. 8. Donald Kuspit, “Beyond the Passport Photograph: Hung Liu in Search of Her Identity,” in Hung Liu, 3–7 (San Francisco: Rena Bransten Gallery, 1992). 9. See Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 296. 10. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 11. Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997). 12. Song number 210 from Marlon K. Hom, ed., Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 312. 13. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), chaps. 6 and 7. 14. See Hom, Songs of Gold Mountain, 218–19. 15. Mayfair Yang, “From Gender Erasure to Gender Diªerence: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality, and Women’s Public Sphere in China,” in Spaces of Their Own, ed. Mayfair Yang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 35–67. 16. In reality, the anti-foot-binding movement began as early as the late nineteenth century, so it was not a prerogative of Maoist China. 17. Some notable examples include Anchee Min’s Red Azalea, Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Anhua Gao’s To the Edge of the Sky: A Story of Love, Betrayal, Suªering, and the Strength of the Human Courage, and Ting-xing Ye’s A Life in the Bitter Wind: A Memoir. For my discussion of Anchee Min’s autobiographical novel, see Shih, “Transnational Encounters.” 18. Frank Chin, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” in The Big Aiiieeeee! ed. Jeªery Paul Chan, Frank Chin, and Shawn Wong, 1–92 (New York: Meridian, 1991).
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19. Wong Bik-wan [Huang Biyun], On Postcoloniality (Houzhimin zhi) (Tapei: Datian, 2003), 30. 20. Ibid., 139. 21. See, for instance, Margo Machida, Elaine Kim, and Sharon Mizota, eds., Asian/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art (New York: New Press, 1994), and Shohat, Talking Visions. 22. Thalia Gouma-Peterson, “Hung Liu: Stories, Identities and Borders,” in Hung Liu: A TenYear Survey, 1988–1998. Exhibition catalog edited by Kathleen McManus Zurko ( Wooster, OH: College of Wooster Art Museum, 1998), 10. 23. Mike Giuliano, “Double Identity: East Meets West in Southeast Baltimore,” City Paper, March 29, 1995, 35. 24. This was an exhibition catalog of various photographs from several museums, archives, and personal collections. The exhibition was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from April 15 to June 25, 1978, and the catalog was published by Aperture in New York the same year. 25. The Face of China as Seen by Photographers and Travelers, 1860–1912, commentary by Nigel Cameron (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1978), 89. 26. See Li Xiguang and Liu Kang, eds., Behind the Demonization of China (yaomohua Zhongguo de beihou) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1996). 27. Roland Barthes, “Striptease,” in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag, 85–88 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 28. Dorothy Ko, “Bondage in Time: Footbinding and Fashion Theory,” Fashion Theory 1, no. 1 (March 1997): 3–28. The quotation is from p. 24. 29. Gayatri C. Spivak, “Diasporas Old and New: Women in the Transnational World,” Textual Practice 10, no. 2 (1996): 245–69. Quoted on pp. 250–51. 30. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 153–68. 31. Ibid., 197. This entire sentence was in italics in the original.
3. THE GEOPOLITICS OF DESIRE 1. For a useful genealogy of the term Greater China and its related issues, see Harry Harding, “The Concept of ‘Greater China’: Themes, Variations, and Reservations,” in Greater China: The Next Superpower? ed. David Shambaugh, 8–34 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Although Macao and other Han Chinese communities abroad have been technically included in the more inclusive conception of “Greater China,” discussions
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have revolved mainly around Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, the three key economic players. 2. See, for instance, the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival’s 1994 o‹cial publication called films in Chinese language “China Film” (Zhongguo dianying ): “Division” and “Reunion”: A Perspective of Chinese Films of the 90s (“duanlie” yu “fuhe”: zhanwang jiushi niandai Zhongguo dianying ). The title of this collection of articles on Chinese cinemas reveals the sense of optimism then circulating regarding the formation of a pan-Chinese cultural sphere which was not premised on the constitution of a pan-Chinese nation-state before the March 1996 missile crisis in the Taiwan Strait. “Zhongguo” (China) as such was not as much an issue as in the later years, when it is replaced by “Huayu” (Sinophone) or “Huaren” (Sinophone people). For this mid-1990s optimism, see also Thomas Gold, “Go with Your Feelings: Hong Kong and Taiwan Popular Culture in Greater China,” in Greater China: The Next Superpower? ed. David Shambaugh, 255–73; and Taiwan film critic Peggy Hsiungping Chiao, “‘Tra‹cking’ in Chinese Films,” trans. John Balcom, Modern Chinese Literature 7, no. 2 (1993): 97–101. 3. Harding cites the circulation of these terms, showing their prevalence in the mid-1990s. Harding himself, however, shows reservations regarding the possibility of such cultural integration. 4. Zhong-gang-tai is a Hanyu neologism referring to China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong: zhong from Zhongguo (China), gang from Xianggang (Hong Kong), and tai from Taiwan. This term itself registered a sense of deep link among these three places, which again revealed the mid-1990s optimism about the possible emerging of a “pan-Chinese” culture until the missile crisis of 1996 and the retrocession of Hong Kong in 1997. 5. Chandra Mohanty, Anna Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.); Deniz Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 376–91 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, Patricia Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992). 6. See Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917– 1937, chap. 10, “Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism.” 7. Although one of the aims of this chapter is to deconstruct the “Greater China” ideology as espousing a problematic integrationist logic, the juxtaposition of Taiwan and Hong Kong vis-à-vis China can be construed by some as a methodological enactment of this ideology. My reply is that it is only through a direct engagement of their interrelationships that the fissures and contradictions of the “Greater China” ideology can be most thoroughly exposed and the coming into being of a Sinophone consciousness can be tracked. 8. Christina Kelly Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Commu-
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nist Politics, and Mass Movement in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1996). 9. The little overseas students are also called parachute children. These young students, often in their middle school or high school years, are “parachuted” to the United States from Taiwan and Hong Kong by their parents in consideration of their future. Sometimes the mother accompanies them; in other situations, they are placed in special homes catering to this demographic group. The neologism for the father who travels back and forth between these sites is called the “astronaut” and the mother “inner beauty” (nei zai mei) for its homophonic punning with “wife in America.” These neologisms are distinctly Sinophone articulations, resulting from unique circumstances of contemporary immigration. The fear of China’s takeover (in Hong Kong) and invasion (in Taiwan) fanned the trend to an unprecedented height in the years leading to 1997, and this trend was also accompanied by outflow of capital from these two places to the United States. 10. For the first-generation immigrants, a kind of diasporic nationalism continues to hold sway, and the tension between the Taiwanese and the Chinese is played out as long-distance political struggles played out locally, such as the Taiwanese protest against China’s anticessation law in 2005 in front of Los Angeles City Hall. This is the Sinophone space that may give over, by the next few generations, to U.S.-based struggles of Asian Americans, when Chinese languages may or may not be spoken. 11. Chinese Daily News, May 1, 1996. The Chinese Daily News is a Hanyu newspaper published in Los Angeles with extensive coverage of news from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Chinese America, and other Sinophone communities in South Asian and Southeast Asian countries. We may say that it is the quintessential Sinophone publication. 12. Coastal cities such as Shenzhen have been named the Special Economic Zone, where foreign investment and global trade are encouraged with tax breaks and other benefits not found in the rest of China. The Special Economic Zone has been playing the leading role in integrating China’s economy with the global system. 13. See Gayle Rubin’s classic essay, “The Tra‹c in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Feminist Frameworks, ed. Alison M. Jagger and Paula S. Rothenberg, 155–71 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984). In this article, Rubin argues, among other things, that the tra‹c in women, through marriage and other ways, has been the means by which patriarchal kinship systems are maintained. 14. See chapter 4. By the late 1990s, this claim to authentic Chineseness lost ground in Taiwan as the ruling Guomindang party gradually shifted from a mainland-based cultural ideology to a localist cultural ideology, finally to be replaced by an independence-oriented, native government, the Democratic Progressive Party. 15. An ironic anecdote related to this paranoia is the sale of a computer game derivative of the book called “Final Battle across the Taiwan Strait in August 1995,” selling for NT$600
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(US$24) each since 1994. The computer software is published by Softworld International Corporation located in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. 16. This can be seen in the following developments: The strategic Japanism of the Lee Tenghui government—the invocation of Japanese colonial history in Taiwan as that which makes Taiwan distinct from China—was not as valuable a political capital as it had been previously. The climactic and geological theories of Taiwan’s diªerence—Taiwan as an island with oceanic geocultural formations as opposed to China’s continental formations—also seemed to be waning. Even the Democratic Progressive Party noted the necessity of toning down its independence agenda in its party proclamations when the legislative election of 1995 approached and the 1996 presidential election was in sight. In this particular climate, the New Party (xindang ), the bastion of prounification ideology formed in 1994, won a surprisingly large number of seats in the legislative election. Although a new, more aggressively independence-oriented party, the Nation-Building Party ( jianguodang ), was formed in 1996, it has not been able to garner popular support. 17. The typology of Chinese women here is derived from the following news reports: Chinese Daily News, August 24, 1994, A8; September 5, 1994, A1; November 2, 1994, A9; February 16, 1995, A7; February 3, 1996, A8. Also see China Times Weekly 64 (March 1993): 80–81; 62 (March 1993): 80–81. By the dawning of the new century, this particular topic disappeared almost completely from the news. 18. Chinese Daily News, September 9, 1994. 19. For instance, an early 1990s sympathetic reception of the dalumei can be seen in a fictionalized account by Wang Pen-hu in his popular novel Amoi Bride (Xiamen xinniang ) (Taichung: chenxing chubanshe, 1991). Xiamen (old name Amoi) is one of the most popular cities where a lot of Taiwanese went to invest and later settle. 20. The foreign exchange currency was available only to foreigners and was worth more than regular mainland currency, renminbi (people’s currency), because certain upscale goods could only be bought with them in special stores such as the Friendship Store. This system of dual currency was abolished in China in the late 1990s. 21. China Times Weekly 53 ( January 1993): 80–82, overseas edition. 22. Gold Mountain was coined by nineteenth-century laborers from China who came searching for gold in California. Today, one of the two Sinophone names for San Francisco is still “Old Gold Mountain” ( jiujinshan). 23. China Times Weekly 930 (December 1995): 41–51, Taiwan edition. 24. Hsu, Chieh-lin, Li Wen-chih, and Shiao Chyuan-jeng. Taiwan’s Asia Pacific Strategy (Taiwan de yatai zhanlue) (Taipei: Institute of National Policy Research, 1991), 152–60. 25. Author’s personal communication with Lee Yuan-chen, April 1995, Santa Barbara, California.
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26. Chiu Chang and Lin T’sui-fen, One Country, Two Wives (yiguo liangqi) (Taipei: jingmei chubanshe, 1994). 27. Cheng Ying, writing for the popular Hong Kong newsmagazine The Nineties, noted that “new immigrants” refers to post-1980 immigrants who came not for political reasons, as did the earlier waves, but for economic reasons, and that this group tended to be politically pro-China. See Cheng Ying, “The Typology of New Immigrant Faces in Light of 1997” (xinyimin de jiuqi lianpu), The Nineties ( jiushi niandai) 301 (February 1995): 127–31. 28. Chinese Daily News, November 30, 1995. 29. Lau Sun, “Hong Kong Files” (xianggang dang’an), The Nineties 302 (March 1995): 78–79; Ifumi Arai, “Suzie Wong’s China” (Susi Huang de Zhongguo), The Nineties 302 (March 1995): 20–21. Similarly in Taiwan, the anxiety over Taiwanese marrying mainland women triggered statistical projections that if fifty extra mainlanders were added to those mainlanders admitted to Taiwan each year, in twenty years there would be more than one hundred thousand of them residing in Taiwan (China Times Daily, July 26, 1993). The threat appeared real particularly in light of China’s policy of enforced Han migration to Tibet, using the strategy of Han migration to overwhelm the local population in order to quell dissent. 30. Leung Wu Suet Gei, “Valentine’s Day: Red Rose and White Rose” (qing’renjie: hongmeigui yu baimeigui), The Nineties 302 (March 1995): 10–11. 31. Lau Sun, “Hong Kong Files”; Chinese Daily News, November 30, 1995, and June 13, 1996. 32. Chinese Daily News, October 7, 1994. 33. Leung Wu Suet Gei, “Valentine’s Day.” 34. Ifumi Arai, “Suzie Wong’s China.” 35. Leung Wu Suet Gei, “Valentine’s Day.” 36. This was promoted in the booklet published by the New Women’s Promotion Association (xin funu xiejinhui), Services for Women in Hong Kong (xianggang funu fuwu), published in 1995. See esp. pp. 63–64, 135–36. 37. A more informed view of the history of the Taiwan Communist Party in particular and Taiwanese Marxist thinking in general shows that Taiwanese Marxists cannot automatically be dismissed as China sympathizers. A famous case in point is female communist leader Hsieh Hsueh-hung, whose views and life story showed the tension between Taiwanese and Chinese Marxism, and Taiwan Marxism’s imbrication with Taiwan consciousness. See Chen Fang-ming, A Critical Biography of Hsieh Hsueh-hung (Hsieh Hsueh-hung ping-chuan) (Taipei: Qianwei, 1988). 38. Information provided by a mainlander turned Hong Kong resident informant, March 1995. 39. See Weng Ouhong and Ah Jia, The Red Lantern (Hongdeng ji), adapted (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 1965).
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40. See the articles by Leo Lee, Li Cheuk-to, and Esther Yao in New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, ed. Nick Browne et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), for the analysis of allegorical renderings of Hong Kong’s identity formation vis-à-vis China in Hong Kong films. 41. Press Freedom Guardian, July 21, 1995. 42. Rey Chow, “Things, Common/Places, Passages of the Port City: On Hong Kong and Hong Kong Author Leung Ping-kwan,” Diªerences 5, no. 3 (Fall 1993): 179–204. The quotations are from p. 199. 43. Rey Chow, “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s,” Diaspora 2, no. 2 (Fall 1992): 151–70. 44. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). 45. Quentin Lee, “Delineating Asian (Hong Kong) Intellectuals: Speculations on Intellectual Problematics and Post/Coloniality,” Third Text 26 (Spring 1994): 11–23. The quotation is from p. 19. 46. Chu Yiu Wai and Wai Man Sin, “Between Legal and Cultural Colonialism: The Politics of Legitimation of the Cultural Production in Hong Kong,” paper presented at the Seventh Quadrennial International Comparative Literature Conference, Tamsui, Taiwan, August 1995. 47. Ackbar Abbas, “Building on Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture and the City,” Public Culture 6, no. 3 (Spring 1994): 441–59. 48. Nick Browne, “Introduction,” in New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics, ed. Nick Browne et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7. 49. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23. 50. See chapter 5 for a more detailed discussion of nostalgia and Hong Kong cinema on the eve of 1997. 51. Alfred Cheung, Her Fatal Ways (biutse nayhoye), parts 1–4 (Hong Kong: Golden Harvest, 1990–94). The fact that the films were farcical and bombastic allowed expression of the most direct and unmediated desires (supposedly speaking on behalf of the Hong Kong populace) toward China, because the director could always deny that the films were ever meant to be true representations. The success and popularity of the films in the market also attest to the degree to which the audience seemed to have related to the films. 52. John Fiske gives a succinct summary of the “fort-da” game theory in Freud: “Freud draws our attention to the infant’s ‘fort-da’ game in which the child continuously throws away a loved object only to demand its return. His explanation is that the game is enacting the disappearance and appearance of the mother, and that in playing it the child is not only symbolizing his or her anxieties about the mother’s return, but is also beginning to use
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symbols to control the meanings of his or her environment.” See Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 1987), 231. 53. The name Qian Li (meaning “One Thousand Lis”) is a parody of Wan Li (literally “Ten Thousand Lis”), member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China. Li is an ancient Chinese unit of distance. One li equals two kilometers. In another mainlander movie entitled Mainland Dundee (Biaoge wo lai ye), a female character is named Jiang Chun (after Jiang Qing). These are examples of direct satires on mainland political figures. 54. Author’s interview with Alfred Cheung, Santa Monica, California, March 1996. 55. See the special issue of the Hong Kong Cultural Studies Bulletin entitled “Northward Imaginary: Repositioning Hong Kong’s Post-colonial Discourse,” published by the Hong Kong Cultural Studies Program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1995. For a more extensive critique of this “Northward Imaginary” discourse, see Shu-mei Shih, “Problems of the ‘Northward Imaginary’: Cultural Identity Politics in Hong Kong,” in Cultural Imaginary and Ideology (wenhua xiangxiang yu yishi xingtai), ed. Stephen Chan, 151–58 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1997). 56. A telling example of how geopolitics controlled cross-area popular culture can be seen in the example of Ah Mei, a popular Taiwan singer. She is of aboriginal descent and was invited to sing the Taiwan national anthem, which, ironically, is still the party song of the Guomindang, at the inauguration of the native president Chen Shui-bian. After her appearance, she was banned from going to China by the Chinese government for several years and her music was also banned in China. 57. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 58. See Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Diªerence in the Global Cultural Economy,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins, 269–95 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Bruce Robbins, “Introduction: The Public as Phantom,” in the same volume, pp. vii–xxvi; Miriam Hansen, “Unstable Mixtures, Dilated Spheres: Negt and Kluge’s The Public Sphere and Experience, Twenty Years Later,” Public Culture 5, no. 2 (1993): 179–212. 59. Richard Madson, “The Public Sphere, Civil Society, and Moral Community: A Research Agenda for Contemporary Chinese Studies,” Modern China 19, no. 2 (April 1993): 183–98. 60. Mayfair Yang, “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis,” in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini, 287–319 (New York: Routledge, 1997). 61. The best example of this is the publication of a women’s writing script in China called nushu by Fembooks (nushudian), a subsidiary of the Awakening Foundation ( funu xin-
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zhi) in Taiwan, whose director was at the time Lee Yuan-chen, interviewed earlier in the chapter. 62. A good example is Taiwanese feminists’ refusal to attend the United Nations Women’s Conference held in Beijing in September1995, due to the Chinese government’s military threats and the Chinese government’s insistence that they attend as “Chinese” and not Taiwanese representatives.
4. THE INCREDIBLE HEAVINESS OF AMBIGUITY 1. Victor Mair, “How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language,” electronic article published in 2005 and available at http://pinyin.info/readings/mair/ taiwanese.html. 2. C. T. Hsia coined the phrase “obsession with China” and made it famous. In his use, the phrase refers to the heavy obsession with national issues by China’s intellectuals in the twentieth century. Taiwan’s “obsession with China” is of a very diªerent kind in the beginning of the twenty-first century. See C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), 533–54. 3. See chapter 1 on flexibility and translatability in the context of globalization. 4. My use of the term Taiwanese people here refers to people in Taiwan. It is important, however, to point out the less-than-homogeneous demographic composition of these people, as it includes aborigines (yuanzhumin), native Taiwanese (Taiwanren—immigrants from China over the centuries until 1945), mainlanders (waisheng’ren—post-1945 immigrants from China), Hakkas (kejiaren), as well as the so-called overseas Chinese (huaqiao—recent Han immigrants from countries other than China). 5. See Li Ch’iao, The Formation of Taiwan Culture (Taiwan wenhua zaoxing ) (Taipei: qianwei chubanshe, 1992), 144, 331. See also T’sai Shih-p’ing, “The Formation of a CounterDomination Discourse” (Yige fanzhipei lunshu de xingcheng ) in Journeying through the Finde-siécle (Shijimo pianhang ), ed. Meng Fan and Lin Yao-te (Taipei: Shibao chuban gongsi, 1990), 452. 6. The participation of aborigines in this endeavor is arguably minimal, as most of those involved are native Taiwanese, mainlanders (particularly second generation), and Hakkas. The aborigines remain largely marginalized in terms of cultural and political representation, although there have been attempts on the part of members of the mainstream cultural scene to include their voices. 7. Li Chien-hung, Cultural Guerillas (Wenhua youjibing ) (Taipei: Zili wanbao wenhua chubanbu, 1992), 170. 8. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Taiwanese stock market skyrocketed, a
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huge number of people in Taiwan, particularly in urban areas, were involved in stock market speculation. 9. Li, Cultural Guerillas, 170. 10. These military metaphors were widely used in mainstream newspapers and magazines such as China Times, United Daily, and China Times Weekly. For instance, number 83 of China Times Weekly published on July 31, 1993, has on the front cover the following line: “The new strategy for opening and developing the mainland market: attack cities and seize territories.” On the front cover of the previous issue, number 82 ( July 23, 1993), are these words: “Invade and conquer Wuhan city: mastering the mainland’s domestic market.” 11. Exports to Hong Kong (the medium for Taiwan’s China trade) in June 1994 for the first time exceeded those to the United States, Taiwan’s largest trade partner for half a century. Chinese Daily News, Los Angeles edition, June 14, 1994, C8. 12. The agenda of Taiwan nativism (bentu zhuyi) or Taiwan consciousness (Taiwan yishi) more or less concentrated on a call for an aªectionate concern for the land, its people, and its culture over and beyond the dictates of China’s cultural hegemony as institutionalized by the Guomindang. During the late 1970s nativist literature debates (xiangtu wenxue lunzhan), there was a call for resistance toward Western cultural and economic hegemony from a Marxist perspective (such as in Ch’en Ying-chen’s work), but today’s nativists rarely consider the question of Western cultural imperialism as an important issue on the agenda. For a typology of Taiwan nativist sentiments or Taiwan consciousness, see Huang Kuangkuo, Taiwan Consciousness and China Consciousness: Meditation under Two Complexes (Taiwan yishi yu Zhongguo yishi: liang jie xia de chensi) (Taipei: Guiguan tushu gongsi, 1987), 35–47. 13. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 114–57. See also, Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), xxi. 14. My use of the word complex here consciously echoes the use of the word as naming a psychological condition in the “Taiwan complex” and “China complex” debate during the 1980s. See Huang, Taiwan Consciousness, and Yang Ch’ing-t’su, The Fate of Taiwan and China Complex (Taiwan mingyun Zhongguo jie) (Kaohsiung: Dunli chubanshe, 1987). 15. Jameson, Geopolitical Aesthetic, 119. 16. This does not mean that there were no references at all to contemporary China’s sociopolitical system. When that system was referred to, it was most often done in an oblique, ambiguous manner and often for the distinct purpose of expressing a critical intent against the Chinese government. 17. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 143–65.
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18. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), xi. 19. Ibid., xii, 1–2. 20. Ibid., 73–107. 21. Ibid., 73.
5. AFTER NATIONAL ALLEGORY 1. “Love at last sight” is a phrase Ackbar Abbas coins in his Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), chaps. 1 and 2. 2. Ibid. 3. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Film as the primary cultural genre that seems to capture something unique and important about Hong Kong culture can be attested by the explosion of scholarship on Hong Kong cinema in English. See, in chronological order, Stephen Teo, Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997); David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Esther Yau, ed., At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Esther Cheung, ed., Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2004). 4. Nick Browne used Fredric Jameson’s notion of the future anterior temporality to describe the Hong Kong postcolonial mentality of fear of the future that will undo the present as the past of that moment in the future. See my discussion in chapter 3. Nick Browne, Paul Pickowicz, Vivian Sobchack, and Esther Yau, eds., New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5. The example frequently cited is the film Matrix, which mixes Hong Kong–style martial arts sequences with a futurist science fiction thriller genre. 6. Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65–88. 7. Fredric Jameson, “A Brief Response,” Social Text 17 (Fall 1987): 26. 8. These few paragraphs on national allegory are excerpted from Shu-mei Shih, “Global Literature and Technologies of Recognition,” PMLA 119, no. 1 ( January 2004): 16–30. 9. For the rhizome, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), chap. 1, pp. 3–26.
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10. Fruit Chan, Made in Hong Kong, 1997. All translations from the films are the author’s. 11. Note that this is quite a departure from earlier gangster movies in Hong Kong, in which gangsters often provide an alternative morality and heroism from the hypocrisy of colonial and Mainland Chinese rulers, such as those in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow series. 12. Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 95–122 (London: Verso, 1992). 13. Yuk-yuen Lan, The Practice of Chineseness (Hong Kong: CyDot Communications Management & Technology, 1999), 34. 14. Ibid., 60–65. 15. Hong Kong Arts Center, “Museum 97: History, Community, Individual,” exhibition catalog, Hong Kong Arts Center, June 23, 1997, to July 12, 1997.
6. COSMOPOLITANISM AMONG EMPIRES 1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 50–55. 2. Ibid., 34–45. 3. Ibid., 67–68. 4. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 5. Ross Terrill, The New Chinese Empire and What It Means For the United States. (New York: Basic Books, 2003). 6. A spate of recent scholarship has focused on China during the Qing dynasty as an empire. From this perspective one may infer that twentieth-century China was more an anomaly in a long imperial tradition, which may find its newest expression in the twenty-first century. See, for instance, Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). It is also telling that Qing imperialism is suddenly becoming a hot topic just when China is beginning to flex its muscles in the international scene. 7. Xavier de C*** , Empire 2.0: A Modest Proposal for a United States of the West, prologue by Régis Debray, trans. Joseph Rowe (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2004). That Debray’s book somehow captures an incipient structure of feeling in the West is seen by the fact that Timothy Garton Ash’s book Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (New York: Random House, 2004) proposes uniting the West and spreading democracy in the same vein with utmost seriousness. 8. de C***, Empire 2.0, 34, 43, 131. 9. Ibid., 53.
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10. Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003). 1 1. For more information on Club 51, see chapter 2. 12. V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism (1978; repr., London: Verso, 2005), 67, 114, 291. 13. Perry Anderson, “Stand-oª in Taiwan,” London Review of Books ( June 2004): 12–17. 14. Kiernan, America, 364. 15. Refer back to chapters 3 and 4 on the intricacy of Taiwan’s relationship with China. 16. Hobsbawn, Age of Empire, 79. 17. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993.) 18. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), see esp. chap. 4. 19. Mahasweta Devi’s story discussed and quoted in “Woman in Diªerence,” in Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 77–95. The quotation is from p. 94. 20. Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), chap. 5. 21. Cosmopolitics as a politics of democracy in the world is how Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah use the term in their Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 22. The process of substitution here involves (post)colonial ressentiment expressed against Britain becoming a popular theory in the United States academy. 23. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 180. 24. Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). The title chapter referenced here is chapter 3. 25. See Linda Alcoª ’s Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). A chapter from this book entitled “In Defense of Identity Politics” was delivered as a lecture at UCLA, Transnational and Transcolonial Multicampus Research Group lecture series, January 11, 2005. Also see her “Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula Moya and M. Hames-Garcia, 312–44 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), for an earlier critique of identity politics. I discussed this essay in some detail in the introduction. 26. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Intent,” in Perpetual
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Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983), 34–36. 27. The original meaning is meant to promote a consciousness for public service as opposed to narrow focus on individual or private gain. 28. Here the only exception may be Taiwan cinema, whose auteurs such as Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang, and Tsai Ming-liang have a small following in international film circles. 29. These remarks are from “Rumors about the Venice Biennial Participants” (eryu feiwu Weinisi shuangnianzhan mingdan chulu), China Times Daily, March 11, 1995; Chen Shun-chu, “How Far Is the International ‘Stage’? To Act in a Drama across the Ocean?” (guoji xiuchang you duo yuan? piaoyang guohai qu banxi?), The Artist (yishujia) 314 ( July 2001): 10; letter to the author by Wu Mali, dated November 14, 2000. 30. http://web.ukonline.co.uk/n.paradoxa/maliwu2.htm 31. Information originally available at http://www.apt3.net/apt3/artists/artist_bio/mali_wu _a.htm. 32. Eileen Chang, Lin Hwai-min, and Wu Da-you are household names among Taiwan’s educated. Eileen Chang is a Shanghai writer exiled to Taiwan and the United States, whose work continues to fascinate generations of scholars and readers, thus engendering a school of study called “Chang Studies.” Lin Hwai-min, the artistic director of Cloud Gates Dance Company, is considered a national treasure in Taiwan for his contribution to Taiwan arts and for his international reputation. Wu Da-you is a scientist at the Academica Sinica, the highest research institution in Taiwan. 33. See Manthia Diawara, In Search of Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 31.
CONCLUSION 1. The phrase comes from Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 2. The Ocean of Words (cihai) (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1989 ed.), 996. 3. Ibid., 139. Also, The Origin of Words (ciyuan) (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1988), onevolume edition, 1447. 4. Discussed in Arif Dirlik, “Timespace, Social Space, and the Question of Chinese Culture” (unpublished manuscript). 5. Ocean of Words, 1584. 6. Origin of Words, 48. 7. See Shu-mei Shih, “Towards an Ethics of Transnational Encounters, or ‘When’ Does a ‘Chi-
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nese’ Woman Become a ‘Feminist’?” in Diªerences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 90–126. 8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), 47. 9. Ibid. 10. See for instance, Durian, Durian (liulian piaopiao), in which a Chinese woman from the north comes to work in Hong Kong as a prostitute and then returns to China. In this movie, Hong Kong no longer functions as a totally foreign place for the Chinese woman but becomes the frontier capitalist outpost for the in-landers (neidi ren) from China proper. See Pheng Cheah, who oªers this interpretation of Hong Kong as the capitalist outpost, in “Another Diaspora: ‘Chinese-ness’ and the Tra‹c in Women from Mainland China to Hong Kong in Fruit Chan’s Durian Durian,” paper presented at “The Chinese Diaspora” conference, University of Zurich, August 10–15, 2005. 11. See Victor Mair, “What Is a Chinese ‘Dialect/Topolet’? Reflections on Some Key SinoEnglish Linguistic Terms,” Sino-Platonic Papers 29 (September 1991): 1–31. See also Mair, “Introduction,” in Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture, ed. Victor Mair, Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, and Paul Rakita Goldin, 1–7 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005). 12. The term wandering Chinese has enjoyed much currency. See, for instance, the now classic group of essays under the special issue title “The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today,” Daedalus 120, no. 2 (Spring 1991). 13. Sau-ling Wong analyzed racism against African Americans prevalent in overseas Chinese literature or Sinophone Chinese American literature written by first-generation immigrant students in the United States. While wallowing in self-pity over a sense of rootlessness, some of these writers had the most conservative tendencies toward issues of race, gender, and class. See Wong, “The Yellow and the Black: The African-American Presence in Sinophone Chinese American Literature,” Chung Wai Literary Monthly 34, no. 4 (September 2005): 15–54. 14. Sheldon H. Lu and Emilie Y. Yeh, in the introduction to their edited book, Chinese LanguageFilm: Historiography, Poetics, Politics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 1–24, use the term Sinophone film interchangeably with what they call Chinese-language film. See also note 13 regarding Sau-ling Wong’s use of the term as in “Sinophone Chinese American Literature.”
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Notes
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INDEX Abbas, Ackbar, 141 abjection, 85 aboriginals, Taiwanese, 4, 12, 186, 188, 212n6 Academy Awards, 51–52, 57 accumulation, flexible regime of, 40, 43 Africa, 25, 28, 30, 31, 191; francophone, 119; primitivist art inspired by, 185 African Americans, 26, 218n13 agency, 11, 42, 68, 113; foot-binding and, 83; gender binarism and, 76; of minority subjects, 43 Age of Empire, The (Hobsbawm), 166 Ahmad, Aijaz, 143, 155 Ah Mei, 211n56 Alcoª, Linda, 174 alienation, 21, 22 allegory, national, 142–44, 149–50, 164, 178, 182; Hong Kong as city-nation, 144–50, 145, 149; mundane events and, 150–57, 152, 156; transnational consumption and, 180 allochronicity, 132 Alloula, Malek, 69 Althusser, Louis, 18–19, 183 Amin, Samir, 21
Anderson, Benedict, 187 antagonism, 66–67, 186; liberal antagonism against Maoist state, 71–77, 73–75; of minority subjects, 77–79, 78; Western gaze and, 79–84, 80–81 anthropologists, 132 anticommunism, 4 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Deleuze and Guattari), 86 Appadurai, Arjun, 42, 114 apparatus theory, 19, 22 archaeology, 158, 159, 164 area studies, 12, 43, 64 Arendt, Hannah, 165 articulation, 35 Asian Americans, 41, 43, 123 Asian American studies, 23, 46, 123 Asian studies, 46 assemblage, as art practice, 65–66 assimilation, 41, 59, 60, 179; of China by Hong Kong culture, 112–13, 114; gender diªerence and, 47 August 1995 (Cheng), 94 Austen, Jane, 56, 57, 58
]
231
[
authenticity, 4, 154; Chineseness and, 157, 158, 162; commodified production of, 13, 14; fracturing of, 5; global multiculturalism and, 143; Guomindang regime and, 186; hidden assertion of, 37; Hong Kong identity and, 161; immigration into United States and, 41; nostalgia as inauthentic longing, 108; of photographic representation, 66; regimes of, 183; transnationality and, 64; whiteness and, 27 Avant-Garde (Liu), 73, 75, 76 Avant Garde Press (Qianwei), 126 babas, 26, 29 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 155 Bal, Mikie, 32 baoyeennai (keeping concubine/mistress), 104, 105 Barthes, Roland, 10, 82, 194–95n20 Baudry, Jean-Louis, 19 Beauvoir, Simone de, 7 Beijing, 5, 67, 117, 212n62 Beller, Jonathan, 14 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 39, 59–60 Berger, John, 17 Berlin Film Festival, 51 Bhabha, Homi, 107, 171, 172 biutse (older female cousin), 105–6, 108–12, 116 Bollywood cinema, 14 Book of the Sky ( Xu), 179 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 183 Brazil, 28 bricolage, 36 Britain and British empire, 28, 138, 144, 147, 153– 54, 173; end of Hong Kong rule, 150; geographical symbolism and, 148; as imperial center of world, 166; postcolonial studies and, 174 Browne, Nick, 107–8 Bryson, Norman, 84 Buddhism, 181 Buell, Frederick, 41, 42 Burnett, R., 17 California, Southern, 90–91, 94, 96, 102 Cambodia, 26
]
232
[
camera, eye of, 17 camera obscura, 19 Cannes Film Festival, 58 Cantonese language, 31, 34, 105, 193n1; cinema in, 2; as “dialect,” 198n78; in Hong Kong, 29; variations of, 93 Cape Verde and São Tomé, 29 capital, 12, 43, 45, 166; cultural, 63, 76, 77, 138 capitalism, global: China’s communist ideology and, 105; empire and, 166–67; femininity and, 109–11, 113–14; flexibility of, 21, 40, 43–44, 123; identity in, 16–23; image commodity as value, 15; international division of labor and, 43, 166; late capitalism, 43, 123, 129; Maoist state and, 76; modernization and, 133; multiculturalism and, 63; transnational image culture and, 19, 191; visuality in, 8–16 Castells, Manuel, 22 celebrity status, 39 Chan, Fruit, 140, 144; Hong Kong trilogy, 150, 152–53, 164, 188; national allegory and, 155 Chan, Jackie, 59, 142 Chang, Eileen, 181, 217n32 Chang, Sylvia, 48 Chang Chen, 3 Charles, Prince, 56 Chatterjee, Partha, 46 Cheng Yu Ling, 109 Chen Shui-bian, 120, 211n56 Cheung, Alfred, 108, 113 Ch’ien Fu, 126 Chin, Frank, 47, 76 China, imperial (dynastic), 35, 38, 83, 115, 158– 59, 184 “China, mainland,” 92, 96, 124–29 China, People’s Republic of (PRC), 2, 12; anticessation law, 120, 207n10; classical Chinese culture and, 122; containment of Hong Kong and Taiwan, 55, 87, 92, 93, 115, 151, 188; dalumei threat to Taiwan and, 99, 209n29; economic and political rise of, 5, 120, 137, 167, 191–92; “eternal China” of Taiwanese travel programs, 129–35; ethnic minorities (“nationalities”), 5, 31, 35, 132; “Greater China” ideology and, 86, 89, 92; Hong Kong retrocession to (1997),
Index
140–41, 158; as isolated communist state, 3; Maoist period, 71–77, 73–75, 204n16; military threat to Taiwan, 119, 120, 138, 169; postsocialism in, 114; South Korea and, 29; Special Economic Zones, 104, 207n12; Taiwan’s relationship with, 54, 87, 94, 118, 120–21, 135–37; triangulation with Taiwan and Hong Kong, 36–37, 86–89; U.S. relations with, 55. See also Cultural Revolution China, Republic of (Taiwan), 4, 36 “China,” as construct, 4, 5, 33, 64, 111–12, 183; artists’ use of cultural materials and, 179; politics and ideology absent from, 130 China-centrism, 14, 313, 160, 165, 191, 192 Chinaman (Liu), 78–79 “China threat,” 56, 78, 167 China Times Weekly, 97, 99 Chinatowns, 27, 64, 70 “Chinese,” 25, 26, 103, 122, 138, 183; as category of ethnicity, 24; as essentialist notion, 189; Hong Kong identity and, 106.154; national characteristics, 24, 197n65; national consciousness as colonialism, 184; as symbolic totality, 35; Taiwan immigrants in China and, 121 Chinese Americans, 12, 25, 26, 36; Americanness and, 33; Chinese culture and, 122–23; Chineseness in relation to, 27; film critics, 52; meiji huaren, 27 Chinese American Studies, 46–47 Chineseness, 3, 5, 183; cultural spectrum of, 27; design and, 157–58; as essentialist notion, 189; Hong Kong identity and, 157–62, 160–63, 164; ironic cinematic depiction of, 154–55; racialized, 24, 25; Sinophone network and, 4; Taiwan’s identity and, 121, 122; as umbrella term, 25 Chinese studies, 23 Chinglish, 29 Chinocholos, 26 Chiu Chang, 102 Chow, Rey, 60, 94, 106–7 Chow Yun-fat, 2, 3, 142 Chung-ho City (Taiwan), 1–3, 5, 6 cinema, 32, 42, 60, 88, 191, 193n1; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 1–8; fifth-generation,
Index
38; film studies, 17–19, 39; industrial capitalism and, 19; transnational coproductions, 118. See also Hollywood cinema; Hong Kong cinema civilization, 51, 64, 122, 132 civil rights movement (U.S.), 26, 27 class, 11, 13, 21, 186; alienation and, 22; Maoist notion of class struggle, 72 Clinton, Bill, 55 Club 51, 53, 169 coevalness/coevality, 43, 60, 132, 191–92 Cold War, 56, 64 collage, 36, 65, 66 Collective Invention, The (Magritte painting), 159, 161 colonialism, 10, 15, 70, 157; cosmopolitanism and, 41; as culture shared by colonizers and colonized, 137–38; Hong Kong transfer to China and, 105–6, 140; imperial narrative psyche, 171; master narratives of, 155; national consciousness as, 184; paternal symbolism and, 146–47; protection by mother country, 169; specter of, 165; U.S. relations with Taiwan and, 55. See also Britain and British empire commodification, 59, 67, 126, 128, 129, 162 commodities, 8, 13, 40 communications technologies, 40 communism, 3, 99, 101; anti-Japanese war and, 105; classical Chinese culture and, 122; influence of Hong Kong culture and, 106, 113; in Malaysia, 26; masculinized woman and, 109–11; in Taiwan, 125, 209n37 Communist Party, Chinese, 102, 130 communities, imagined, 94, 144 Confucianism, 49, 52, 56, 177, 179, 181 consumption, 11, 14, 15, 60, 157, 180 Cookie Queen (Liu), 78 cosmopolitanisms, 41, 165, 170–75; ethics and, 180–82; minor, 182; postcolonial and metropolitan, 44, 172; vernacular, 172–73, 182 courtesans, 67, 69 Crary, Jonathan, 9 “creole states,” 187 critics, film, 57–58, 59
]
233
[
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (film), 2–8, 14, 37–38, 52, 118 Cultural China, 31 Cultural Revolution, 48, 66, 178; Chinese culture denounced during, 122; model operas of, 72, 105, 111; trauma narratives from, 76 culture, 7, 13, 33, 63; China as market and, 64; classical Chinese culture, 3–4, 121, 130; coevality of cultures, 191–92; cultural capital, 63; identity-formation and, 170; nodal points of meaning and, 46; ownership and authenticity of, 38; pan-Chinese, 87, 88, 206n2; “soft power” and, 169; Taiwan–China relationship and, 121–23 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 171 Customs (Liu), 77 dalumei (“mainland sister”), 94–103, 100, 114, 116, 208n19 dalu taitai (“mainland wives”), 96 Debord, Guy, 9 Debray, Régis, 167–68 deconstruction, 171, 179 Deleuze, Gilles, 31, 86 democracy, 120, 168, 169, 170, 188 Democratic Party (Hong Kong), 30 Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] (Taiwan), 119, 125, 207n14, 208n16 Democratic Progressive Party (Taiwan), 95 Deng Xiaoping, 114, 115 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 175 desire, 10, 11, 17; geopolitics of, 94; nostalgia and, 108; Oedipal triangulation of, 18; Orientalist economy of, 69, 82 deterritorialization, 103, 114 dialects, 24, 189, 198n78 diaspora, 11, 23–24, 179; China’s global influence and, 34–35; Chineseness as criterion of determination, 26–27, 122, 184–85; culture of hybridity and, 26; debunking of, 189; as ethnicity or race, 30, 185; expiration date of, 185, 187; homeland as notion, 28; mass media and, 115; as unifying category, 25 Diawara, Manthia, 182
]
234
[
diªerence, 20, 42, 173; national boundaries and, 93–94; suppression of, 38, 44 Dirlik, Arif, 7, 21, 40, 173 double-voicedness, 155 Downcast Eyes ( Jay), 10 Durian Durian (film), 218n10 Dutch colonialism, 138 Eastern Jin dynasty, 158 Eat Drink Man Woman (film), 48, 50–54, 55 economy/economics, 7, 141, 166, 170 ego, constitution of, 17–18 Eight Thousand Li of Roads, Cloud, and Moon [Baqianli lu yun he yue] (TV program), 130 empire, 165, 166–71 Empire 2.0 (Debray), 167–68 Empson, William, 117, 124 England, Victorian, 56–57, 59, 72–73 English language, 27, 29, 30, 34, 172; Asian Americans and, 123; British and American, 118, 189; trauma narratives from Maoist China written in, 76 Enlightenment, 9 environmentalism, 22 Epitaph [Muzhiming ] ( Wu), 176 eroticism, 54 essentialism, 11, 20, 185 ethics: cosmopolitanism and, 180–82; untranslatability of, 175–79 ethnicity, 20, 22, 179; absorption of minorities and, 184; “Chinese” as, 106; Chinese diaspora and, 23, 24; o‹cial ethnicities of China, 24; Taiwanese nativism and, 126; transnationality and, 63 ethnic studies, 43, 64, 173 Eurocentrism, 11, 19, 22, 167, 174 Europe, 31, 191 European Union, 167 Everett, Wendy, 17 exoticism, 54, 58, 131, 171 Fabian, Johannes, 132 Face of China as Seen by Photographers and Travelers, 1860–1912, The, 79, 80
Index
Fairbank, John K., 53 “Fake Art of Comics” (anonymous artist), 161, 163 Family I and II (Liu), 204n7 Farewell China (film), 48 Father Knows Best (film trilogy), 48, 54 Father’s Day (Liu), 73, 73–74 femininity, 54, 71, 72, 109–11 feminism, 18, 22, 39, 176; antagonism and, 186; geopolitics of desire and, 90; in Hong Kong, 89, 104–5; Maoist state criticized by, 71–77, 73–75; nationalism and repression of, 46; patriarchy opposed by, 67–71, 68; in Taiwan, 89, 101–3, 116, 212n62; transnationality and, 62, 63, 67, 84, 90 fetishism, commodity, 13, 15, 129 Fifty-first Club. See Club 51 filial piety, 48, 56 “Film and Popular Memory” (Foucault), 103 film studies, 17–19, 39 First World, 33, 89, 143–44, 154, 155 flexibility, 41–42, 43; nodal points and, 47–59; translatability and, 59–61 “flextime,” 44 flow, 40, 44–45 food, 53, 57, 58, 64 Fordism, 43 For Marx (Althusser), 183 Formosa Club [Baodao binguan] ( Wu), 176, 177–78 Formosa Stories [Baodao wuyu] ( Wu), 176–78 “fort-da” games, 109, 210–11n52 Foster, Hal, 85, 173 Foucault, Michel, 9, 39, 103, 181 France and French empire, 28, 30, 34, 166 Franco, Jean, 85 francophone (French language), 28, 30, 172; colonial history and, 119; francophone studies, 27, 189; in Quebec, 29 francophonie, 28, 34 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 17, 210n52 Friends of Lin Li-yün Association, 91 Fujian Province, 93 Fuller, Graham, 58
Index
gaze: academic analysis of, 17, 18; Western, 63, 68–69, 71, 79–84, 80–81 gender, 11, 21, 71, 175, 186; Maoist erasure of, 72, 73, 76; media representations of mainland Chinese women, 92, 116; minoritization and, 46–47; nationalism and, 103; public sphere and, 114–16; in Sense and Sensibility, 57–58; transnational articulation of desire and, 87; U.S. economy of, 54; visual economy and, 62 Gender and Nation ( Yuval-Davis), 46 Germany, 115, 166, 181 globalization, 11, 22, 28, 41–42, 191 Global Modernity (Dirlik), 40 Golden Lotus/Red Shoe (Liu), 72 Gramsci, Antonio, 62 Grandma (Liu), 73, 74, 74–76 “Greater China,” 49, 86, 89, 92, 205–6n1; deconstruction of, 206n7; as economic trope, 116 Guangdong Province, 93 Guattari, Félix, 31, 86 Guomindang, 4, 29, 73, 130, 134; authenticity of “Chinese” culture and, 93, 121–22, 123, 129, 186; Chinese history viewed by, 132, 133; Guoyu language and, 118–19; mission to recover “mainland” (dalu), 124–25, 128, 132; nativist discourse and, 126–27, 129, 136, 213n12; nostalgia toward China, 132; Taiwanas-homeland ideology, 135, 187–88 Habermas, Jürgen, 114, 115 Hailam language, 29 Ha Jin, 179 Hakka (people and language), 4, 29, 186, 189, 212n6 Hall, Stuart, 8, 44 Hamlin, Suzanne, 53 Han-centrism, 23, 24 Han Chinese, 24, 94, 159; dictionary definition of, 184; in South Korea, 29; of Taiwan, 118 hanja, Korean language and, 28, 35 Han script (Chinese characters), 28, 35, 38 Hansen, Miriam, 114
]
235
[
Hanyu, 5, 29, 30, 118, 159; accents of, 34; Chinese American literary canon and, 123; community of change and, 185; Guoyu compared with, 118–19; literature and hegemony of, 33. See also Mandarin language; putonghua Hark, Tsui, 12 Harvey, David, 10, 40, 167 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 22, 174–75 Hemingway, Ernest, 181 Her Fatal Ways (film series), 108–13, 112, 210n51 heroes, 39, 177 Hero (film), 37–39 herstory, 176, 177–78 heterogeneity, 5, 7, 38 heterosexuality, 49, 66 history, 7, 12, 66, 74, 149; ellipsis of women from, 176; identities and, 188; male heroes as subject of, 177; nostalgia and, 108 History of Taiwan, The (Taiwanshi), 127 Hitler, Adolf, 181 Ho, Oscar, 160 Hoa people, 25–26 Hobsbawm, Eric, 166, 170 Hokkien language, 29 Hollywood cinema, 4, 6, 58–59; Academy Awards, 51–52; Asian-inspired cinema in, 8; hero narratives in, 39; Hong Kong cinema and, 14, 142; Sinophone directors in, 42; “soft power” of United States and, 169 homosexuality, 49–50, 51, 54, 66 Hong Kong, 2, 5, 136; “ancestorland colonialism” of China and, 105–6; British colonialism in, 4, 93, 106–7; Chineseness and, 27–28, 144, 155; classical Chinese culture and, 3–4; colonial nostalgia in, 141–44; film audiences in, 59; Han as majority in, 30; history of, 160; impending retrocession to China (1997), 105, 106, 113, 114, 144; integration into China, 88, 92, 140–41, 164, 188; “mainland cousin” and, 88, 103–14; “One Country, Two Systems” slogan, 102; refashioned identity of, 157–62, 160–63, 164; Shanghai compared with, 137; transition to PRC rule, 36, 158, 178; travel of visual products and, 12; triangulation with PRC and Taiwan, 36–37, 86–89
]
236
[
Hong Kong cinema, 3, 14, 36, 107, 142; biutse theme in, 108–13, 112; gangster movies, 148, 151–52, 152, 215n11; Made in Hong Kong (xianggang zhizao), 144–50, 145, 149; national allegory and the mundane, 150–57, 152, 156 Hongkongness, 157–62, 160, 162–63, 164 Honkongology (Xianggang xue), 141, 142, 158, 164 Hou Chun-ming, 159, 160 Hou Hsiao-hsien, 118, 217n28 House of Flying Daggers (film), 37 Hsiung Lü-yang, 131 Huaxia people, 184 humanism, 9, 21, 63 Hunan Province, 103 hybridity/hybridization, 26, 28, 41, 44; assemblage and, 65; colonialism and, 138; of the colonized, 171, 172; exoticism and, 71; impurity and, 107 hyperfemininity, 72, 77 hypermasculinity, 47, 147 Ice Storm (film), 58–59, 60 iconology, 19 identification, spectatorship and, 18 identity, 6, 135; art as narcissism and, 173; articulation and, 35; assemblage and, 65; critique of identity politics and, 20; formation of, 65; global capitalism and, 16–23; in Hong Kong, 106; Lacan’s concept of vision and, 9; negotiation of, 87; pan-Chinese, 188; postmodernism and, 20–21; as prison-house, 182; realist theory of, 21; structure of gaze and, 18; in Taiwan, 119 identity politics, 20, 23, 121, 136, 173 ideology, 18–19, 48, 105 images: as commodity, 8; commodity fetishism and, 15; dialectical, 36, 199n90; flow of images and money, 45; travel of, 12, 13 immigrants, 42–43, 62, 77 imperialism, 10, 20, 24, 41, 166 Independent Evening News (Zili wanbao), 126 India, 28, 70, 137–38, 172 individualism, 21 Indonesia, 25, 26 Information Age, The (Castells), 22 Injerto, 26
Index
intellectuals, 85, 153; diasporic, 106; in imperial China, 38; metropolitan cosmopolitanism and, 172; self-othering and, 173; in Taiwan, 93, 105, 125, 136 Internet, 12 intertextuality, 35–36 Intimate Enemy, The (Nandy), 137–38 Iraq, 39, 167 Irigaray, Luce, 18 irony, 35, 153, 155 Islam, 168 Israel, 168 Italy, 166 Jabar, Kareem Abdul, 59 Jackson, Jesse, 52 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 129, 130, 143, 155 Japan, 25, 35, 98, 118; colonial rule in Taiwan, 137, 138, 208n16; as exotic influence on Western culture, 171; imperialism of, 187; Japanese cultural identity, 157–58; sexual exploitation of Taiwanese women, 177; U.S. alliance and, 120 Japanese language, 28, 119, 138 Jay, Martin, 10, 16 Ji Ranbing, 90–91, 94 Jiu Jin Shan (Liu), 77 Journey West a Thousand Li [Qianli xiyou] (TV program), 131–32 kanji, Japanese language and, 28 Kant, Immanuel, 175 Kelly, Petra, 181 King, Anthony, 41 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 79 knowledge, 20–21, 23 Ko, Dorothy, 83 Korea, 25, 29, 35, 36, 122, 199n88 Korean language, 28, 29 kung fu movies, 2 labor, division of, 42, 43, 166 Lacan, Jacques, 9, 17, 18, 19, 45 Laclau, Ernesto, 35, 45, 46, 66 Lan, Yuk-yuen, 157–58 language, 24, 27, 28–29, 33, 192; creolized, 29;
Index
literature in Sinitic languages, 32–33; nation delinked from, 187; Shandongese, 29; Sinophone as community of change, 185–86; Taiwanese aboriginal, 29, 31, 119,189; vernacular, 172–73. See also specific languages Last Dynasty (Liu), 84, 179 Latin America, 31, 191 Lau Mun-yee, 49 Laundry Lady (Liu), 78 Law, Clara, 48 Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Arendt), 165 Lee, Ang, 2, 12, 42, 63, 84–85, 119; career as film director, 48; Chinese traditionalism and, 56– 57; definition of Sinophone and, 34; directorial style, 58; flexibility and, 47–59, 64, 176; food fetishism and, 53; identitarian struggle of, 6, 186; minority subject position and, 56; nodal points in early work, 46; Taiwan audiences and, 51, 52, 59; translatability and, 59– 61, 176 Lee, Quentin, 107 Lee Teng-hui, 94, 120, 125, 127, 128, 208n16 Lee Yuan-chen, 102 Leung, Tony, 110 Lew, Cynthia, 51 Li, Jet, 142 Library, The ( Wu), 180–81 Li Chien-hung, 127 Lin Hwai-min, 181, 217n32 Lin Li-yün, 90–91, 102 Lin T’sui-fen, 102 Little Cheung (film), 155–57, 156 Liu, Hung, 12, 64, 84–85, 176, 178–79, 204n7; antagonism of minority subject in works of, 77–79, 78; assemblage and, 65–66; as immigrant, 66; Maoist state criticized by, 71–77, 73–75; Olympia works, 67–71, 68; photographic work of, 66–67; transnational feminism and, 62–63, 85, 186 local, the, 25, 33, 119, 122, 145, 179, 185, 187; vs. the global, 12, 16, 180 localism, 102–5, 190 Longest Summer, The [ Jinnian yanhua tebie duo] (film), 140, 150–55, 152
]
237
[
Lo Ting exhibitions, 158–61, 160 Lowe, Lisa, 41, 42 Lu, Annette, 181 Lukjins, 26 Luxemburg, Rosa, 181 Lu Xun, 81, 197n65 Lu Yan, 52 Lyotard, Jean-François, 9 Macao, 27, 205n1 Made in Hong Kong [xianggang zhizao] (film), 144–50, 145, 149, 151–52 Magritte, René, 159, 161 Mair, Victor, 119, 189, 198n78 Malay language, 29 Malaysia, 2, 25, 26 Manchus, 23, 24, 35, 122 Mandarin language, 98, 105; accents in cinema, 2, 5; in Hong Kong, 106; in Taiwan, 29, 93, 189, 198n78; topolects of, 118. See also Hanyu; putonghua Manet, Edouard, 68 Maoism, 63, 71–77, 73–75, 179, 186 Mao Zedong, 114, 146 martial arts genre, 2, 3, 4, 36, 38 Marx, Karl, 15, 19 Marxism, 105, 128–29 masculinism, 177 masculinity, 46, 54 Mauritius, 26 meaning: multiple fields of, 13; nodal points and, 45, 46, 61; production of, 44, 57 media, mass, 22, 86, 88; empires and, 38; gender and, 87, 116; Hong Kong television in southern China, 113; identity and, 106; public sphere and, 115; star power and, 39 mediauras, 39 mediascape, 114 mei (little sister), 96 memory, 66, 103, 108 men: “Chinaman” epithet and, 78–79; Chinese American, 47; Chinese men and Westernized desire, 69–70; Hong Kong businessmen, 104, 116; Japanese, 98; oppression of Chinese women, 84; Taiwanese businessmen, 90–91,
]
238
[
95–96, 98–99, 101, 116, 135; white men, 69, 80, 80 Mercer, Kobena, 63 Mestizos, in the Philippines, 26 Metis, of Cambodia, 26 Metz, Christian, 17, 18, 19 Mexico, 189 mimesis, 6 Minh-ha, Trinh T., 18 Minnan (Taiwanese) language, 3, 29, 189; in cinema, 2; as “dialect,” 198n78; Guoyu in relation to, 118, 119; immigrants in United States and, 34; mainland Chinese women and, 93 minorities: of China, 24, 132; flexibility of global capitalism and, 42; mass media and, 115; model minority, 57, 169 minoritization, 58, 59; of Chinese immigrants, 66; ethnic autobiographies and, 76; gendered, 61; immigration and, 77; multiculturalism and, 195n30 Minor Transnationalism (Lionnet nd Shih), xi mirror stage, Lacanian, 17 misrecognition, 17, 18, 24, 154–55. See also recognition missionaries, Western, 24, 83 Mitchell, W. J. T., 8, 9, 13, 19, 32 modernity, 43, 132 modernization, 43, 95, 132, 187, 197n65 Mohanty, Satya, 20 Mongolia, Inner, 23 montage, 19, 65–66 Mouªe, Chantal, 35, 45, 46, 66 multiculturalism, 7, 13, 107, 189, 195n30; commercialized identities and, 23; global, 7, 63; Hong Kong authenticity and, 143; minoritization and, 53, 54; suppression of diªerence and, 44, 45, 63; Taiwanese identity and, 121; “United States of the West” and, 168 Nandy, Ashis, 137–38 Nanyang, 26 narrative, 5, 17, 45, 79, 88; closure and, 44; colonialism and, 171; in film diegesis, 2, 50, 58; geopolitical, 92; hero narratives, 39, 177; identity and, 21, 66, 108; of liberation, 63;
Index
nationalist, 70; nostalgia as form of, 108; Orientalist, 69; trauma narratives, 76, 78; visuality and, 32 nationalism, 30, 93; Chineseness and, 185; desire for belonging and, 183–84; gender and, 88; leftist nationalism in PRC, 113; narratives of Chinese government, 160; “overseas Chinese” and, 25; patriarchy and, 46–47, 52, 61, 88, 89, 177; rhetoric of rescue and, 151 Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Chatterjee), 46 nationality, 20, 30, 179 national liberation, 89, 116, 187 Nation and Its Fragments, The (Chatterjee), 46 nation-states, 11, 41–42, 190; flexible subject and, 60–61; geopolitics of desire and, 88; metropolitan, 47; nodal points of meaning and, 46; postcolonial and Third World, 25, 41, 47 Nazism, 174 neocolonialism, 15, 23, 169 New Chinese Empire and What It Means for the United States, The (Terrill), 167 New Left, Chinese, 113 New Year, Chinese, 13 New York, city of, 32 1984 (Orwell), 10, 78 nodal points, 45–46, 47–59, 61 Nonini, Donald, 42 Northward Imaginary (beijin xiangxiang ), 113 nostalgia, 30, 108, 132, 134, 164; colonial nostalgia in Hong Kong, 141–44; diaspora and, 185; for French empire, 34; martial arts genre and, 4; national allegory and, 143–44; repudiation of, 148–49, 153; rootlessness and, 190 occularcentrism, 9, 10 Olympia (Liu), 67–68, 68 “One China” ideology, 13, 119, 120, 170 “One Country, Two Systems” slogan, 88, 102 Ong, Aihwa, 42 Opium War, 160 Orientalism, 38, 54; anti-Orientalism in support of, 71, 82–83, 85; empire and, 171; eroticism and, 81, 82–83; self-Orientalization, 84, 180, 182, 191; Western gaze and, 69
Index
Orientalism (Said), 171 Orwell, George, 10, 78 overdetermination, 7, 12 overseas Chinese (huaqiao), 27 “overseas compatriots,” 135 Pan, Lynn, 27 pan-Chinese culture, 49, 87, 88, 188, 206nn2,4; identity, 188 Panofsky, Erwin, 19 panopticon, 17, 39 paradox, 36 patriarchy, 46, 47, 63, 83; antagonism as resistance to, 66; California murder case and, 91, 96, 102; feminist antagonism against, 67–71, 68; geopolitical “kinship system” and, 116, 207n13; liberal West as liberation from, 186; Maoist, 72; nationalism and, 52, 61, 89; reconstitution of, 48; in Taiwan, 101, 102; as theme in cinema, 48–49, 51, 54; Third World nationalism and, 88; white male colonial, 69 P’eng Tseng-chi, 90–91, 102 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 111, 140, 153 Perry, Commodore Matthew, 169 perspectivalism, Renaissance, 16 Peru, 26 Philippines, 25, 26, 169 philosophy, European/Western, 9, 22 photography, 8–9, 66–67; Orientalist use of, 69; Western gaze and, 79–82, 80; as Western product, 70 politics, 7, 153, 166, 180, 190, 192 “Politics of Admittance, The” (Chow), 94 Pollock, Griselda, 10 Poole, Deborah, 10, 15 pornography, 108 Portuguese empire and language, 28, 29 postcoloniality, 144, 156, 157 postcolonial studies, 17, 171 postmodernism, 20, 128–29 postmodernity, 9 poststructuralism, 9, 22 power, relations of, 10, 17, 39, 154; ethnicity and, 184; size of empire and, 168; “soft power,” 169 “Power of Cinema” ( Woolf ), 140
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239
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Power of Identity, The (Castells), 22 Practice of Chineseness, The (Lan), 157 production, visual mode of, 14, 16 prostitutes, 67, 73, 79, 101, 218n10; mainland women in Hong Kong, 103; Chinese women in Taiwan, 93, 96, 97, 102; Orientalist narratives and, 69; Western technology and, 70 psychoanalysis, 17, 19, 22 public spheres, 40, 86, 90; gendered, 88, 114–16; pan-Chinese, 114 Puerto Rico, 169 punctum, 10 Pushing Hands (film), 48–49, 50, 52 putonghua, 5, 31, 146; “dialects” in relation to, 198n78; in Hong Kong, 154, 164; ironic performance of, 154; Taiwanese Mandarin and, 189. See also Hanyu; Mandarin language Qin emperor, 38, 39 Qing dynasty, 83, 122, 179, 199n88, 215n6 Quebec, 29 race, 20, 21, 186 racialization, 24, 26, 57, 71 racism, 27, 41, 52, 185; Academy Awards and, 57, 59; nostalgia and, 190; postcolonial cosmopolitanism and, 44; stereotypes and, 77, 78–79 rape, 177 recognition, 17, 18, 150, 165, 176; coevality of cultures, 191; Hegelian dynamic of, 173; transnational politics of, 179, 180. See also misrecognition Records of Postcoloniality ( Wong), 165 recuperation, 172, 173, 177 Reddest Red Sun (Liu), 72–73 Red Detachment of Women, The (Maoist opera), 72 Red Lantern, The (Maoist opera), 72, 105 Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud), 183 religion, 20, 23 representation, 6, 85, 177; criticism as, 63–64; identity and, 16; photographic, 66; as pictorialization of the world, 9, 22; transnationality as mode of, 62; writing as valorized form of, 9
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240
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Resident Alien (Liu), 77–78, 78 ressentiment, 136, 173, 174, 175, 182, 216n22 Rivers and Mountains, Ten Thousand Li of Love [ Jiangshan wanli qing ] (TV program), 129, 133, 134 Robbins, Bruce, 114–15 Russia, 166 Said, Edward, 54, 168, 171 San Francisco, 27, 32, 70, 208n22 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 62 satire, 35 scapegoating, 26 scopic drive, 17 Searching for the Strange on the Mainland [Dalu xunqi] (TV program), 129, 131, 131 semicolonialism, 24 Sense and Sensibility (film), 52, 56–60 Seven Types of Ambiguity (Empson), 117 sexism, 71 Shanghai, 27, 79, 132, 135; cinema in, 193n1; as economic mecca, 137; Taiwanese artists in, 117, 118 Siao Yu (film), 48 Sichuan Province, 132 Silk Road, 131, 133 simulacra, 9, 10 Singapore, 25, 27, 28, 30 Sinitic language, 4, 16, 32, 198, 199 Sino-Japanese Wars, 35, 81 Sinophone, 4, 137–39, 190–92; articulations of, 23–39, 61; Chinese culture and, 6, 122; Chineseness and, 33, 164; colonial history and, 28, 119; as community of change, 185–86, 188–89; cosmopolitanism and, 165; diaspora and, 179; global multiculturalism and, 7, 8; immigration and, 34, 123; intertextuality and, 35–36; linguistic power struggles and, 30–31; literature in Sinitic languages, 32–33, 199n86; monolithic Chinese culture and, 5; as notion in disappearance, 30, 31–32; place-based, 30, 37, 185, 190; regimes of authenticity and, 183; visual economy and, 15–16, 191 Sinophone studies, 189–90
Index
“snake head” smugglers (shetou), 95 socialism, 130, 133 socialist realism, 66 South America, 25 Southeast Asia, 25, 29, 31, 167, 191, 198n66 Southeast Asian studies, 23, 27 Souvenir (Liu), 79–83, 81 Spain and Spanish empire, 28, 30 spectacle, society of the, 9, 140 spectatorship, 14–15, 18 Spivak, Gayatri, 69, 85, 171, 172 Spring and Autumn period, 184 Staªord, Barbara Maria, 10–11 stereotypes, 47, 52, 77, 141; “Chinaman,” 78–79; fortune cookies, 77–78, 78; sexualization of Asian women, 54 Stewart, Susan, 108, 141, 150 Stories of Women from Hsin-chuang [Hsinchuang nuren de gushi] ( Wu), 176–77 Straits Settlements, British, 29 Subaltern Studies group, 171 subjectivity, 7, 10, 15, 64; artworks and, 32; Cartesian subject, 16; deterritorialized, 41, 43; of female spectator, 18; feminist, 62, 85; hybridized, 40; nation-states and, 42; poststructuralist notion of, 22; transnationality and, 60 subtitles, in films, 6, 8 Sung dynasty, 159 Sun Yat-sen, 127, 177 surveillance, 9, 10, 17, 153 Swan Song (Liu), 72 Sweeties of the Century ( Wu), 181, 182 symbolic stage, 18 Tagore, Rabindranath, 173 taichi, 49, 52, 56, 58 Taipei, 1, 3, 51, 176, 188 Taiwan, 2, 54, 169, 208n16; aboriginal languages, 29, 31, 119, 189; Americanism in, 47–48, 53; American right associated with, 178, 190; China as “intimate enemy,” 135–37; China’s threat of forceful reunification and, 88, 92, 94–95, 119, 169; Chineseness and, 27–28;
Index
cinema in, 1–8; classical Chinese culture and, 3–4; colonial United States compared to, 28– 29; cosmopolitanism of, 165–66, 175; dalumei (“mainland sister”) images in, 88, 94–103, 100; economic relationship with China, 12–13, 120–21, 123–24, 135, 170, 186; female artists in, 175–79; as “fifty-first state” of United States, 53, 168–69; film audiences in, 48, 51, 59; First World economic level of, 172; Han as majority in, 30; history of “mainland China” and, 124– 29; independence claims of, 3, 5, 30, 95, 115, 120; Japanese colonial rule in, 137, 138, 208n16; McDonald’s restaurants in, 44; Marxist intellectuals in, 105, 209n37; military alliance with United States, 120; minoritization of, 52–53; multicultural identity of, 119, 120–21, 121, 170; multilingual community of, 31; nativist discourses in, 125–27, 136; New Taiwanese identity, 29, 121, 186–87; postmodernity of, 128–29; as “Republic of China,” 36; sexual exploitation of women in history of, 177; struggle for international recognition, 93, 139; Three No’s policy toward, 55; travel of visual products and, 12; triangulation with PRC and Hong Kong, 36–37, 86–89; U.S.–China rivalry and, 167, 168, 169–70, 190 Taiwanese Americans, 12, 36, 90–91, 186, 207n10 Tan Dun, 140 technologies, 40, 166 television, 32, 88, 136, 159; Hong Kong television in southern China, 113; satellite, 12; in Taiwan, 118, 127, 129–35, 131, 134 Teochiu language, 29 Terrill, Ross, 167 Terrorizer, The [Kongbu fenzi] (film), 129 Thailand, 25 Third World, 33, 41, 43, 69; defined, 201n11; economic status of, 89–90; exploitation of labor in, 175; international division of labor and, 167; nationalism in, 46; nostalgia and, 143; oppression of women in, 178; patriarchy in, 88, 116; postmodernity as exit from, 129 Thompson, Emma, 58 Three Principles of the People (Sun Yat-sen), 127
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Tiananmen Square massacre (1989), 106, 141, 202n24 Tianjin Province, 103 Tibet, 23 time, 66, 82; allegorical, 149–50; diaspora and, 185–88; future-anterior mode, 107–8; identity and, 186, 187; resistant identities and, 187; visual media saturation and, 14 tokenization, 57 Tokyo, 137, 138 topography, 44 topolects, 29 tourism, 44, 130, 160, 177 translation, 5, 6, 56, 59 transnationalism/transnationality, 42, 44, 62, 63, 67; capital and, 174; complicities of, 85, 191; epistemics of, 85; feminism and, 62–63, 67, 84, 90, 116, 186; gender and, 88, 92–93; minor artist and, 84, 182; politics of representation and, 6, 63, 165, 180, 191; public sphere and, 114– 16; subjectivity and, 43, 46, 60; the Sinophone and, 30, 192; Third World and, 41–42 Trinidad, 26 Tsai Ming-liang, 118, 217n28 Turkey, 168 Tu Wei-ming, 115 Uigurs, 23 unconscious, Freudian, 14 United Nations, 127 United States, 5, 12, 23, 36, 142; as anglophone country, 189; Asian immigration into, 41; China as threat to hegemony of, 167; ChineseAmericans, 25, 27; Chinese Exclusion Acts, 25; Chinese immigration to, 77; cultural hegemony of, 34, 53; as empire, 38–39, 166, 169; film audiences in, 59; immigrant television and film in, 32; Indian postcolonial studies in, 173; non-Western “annexations” of, 168–69; “One China” policy, 170; postcolonial migration to, 45; racial politics of, 60; reception of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 6; as settler anglophone country, 28; Sinophone communities in, 90–91; Sinophone films set in, 48; Taiwan–China
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242
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relations and, 119–20; Taiwanese immigrants, 52, 90–91, 207n10; Taiwan’s political relations with, 55–56, 178, 190 universalism, 43, 57, 120, 182; economic, 121; feminist, 116; liberal feminist, 77 Untitled (Liu), 83 untranslatability, 176, 178 victimology, 76, 85, 173, 174, 180 Victorian Sweeties ( Wu), 181 video art, 8, 42 Vietnam and Vietnamese, 12, 26 Vietnam War, 177 Virilio, Paul, 9–10, 17 vision, 9, 10 “vision machine,” 17 visuality (visual culture), 32, 85, 191; in global capitalism, 8–16; identity and, 6, 19; patriarchy and, 18; as primary means of identification, 8 voyeurism, 68, 69, 71, 80, 82 Wang Gungwu, 27 Wang Yung-ch’ing, 101 Warring States period, 184 Weber, Samuel, 39 Wedding Banquet, The (film), 6, 48, 49–51, 54 Wenda, Gu, 179 Westernization, 52, 70–71 Western world, 24, 25, 137–38; China seen as threat, 56, 78, 82, 167–68; technology of, 70 White, Hayden, 44 whiteness, 27, 47 Wilde, Oscar, 181 Williams, Raymond, 7 Winslet, Kate, 56 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 14 “Woman in Diªerence” (Spivak), 171 women, 21, 54; Chinese American, 47; colonial gender dynamics and, 69; foot-binding of, 57, 72, 76, 83–84, 179, 204n16; history and, 176; Hong Kong wives, 104–5; “mainland cousin” in Hong Kong, 103–14; mainland women in Taiwan and Hong Kong, 87–88, 89, 92, 94– 103, 100, 116; in Maoist China, 72, 73, 76; as
Index
objects of commodification, 67; representation of, 18; Taiwanese wives, 90–91, 101–3 Wong, Sau-ling, 33, 47, 218n13 Wong Bik-wan, 76, 83, 165 Woo, John, 42, 142, 148 Woolf, Virginia, 140 working class, 151, 156 World War II, 177 Wu Da-you, 181, 217n32 Wu Mali, 34, 175–79, 180–82 Xinjiang Province, 23 Xizang Province, 23 Xu Bing, 179
Index
Yan, Lu, 52 Yang, Edward, 118, 129, 217n28 Yang, Mayfair, 72, 115 yeenai (concubine/mistress), 104 Yellow River region, 184 Yeoh, Michelle, 3 Yi people, 132 Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, 45 Yuval-Davis, Nira, 46 Zhang Yimou, 37–38 Zhang Ziyi, 3 zhong-gang-tai triangle, 87, 93, 115, 206n4 Zhongguo (Middle Kingdom), 184, 206n4
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Designer: Text: Display: Compositor: Indexer: Printer and binder:
Nicole Hayward Adobe Garamond Akzidenz Grotesk family Integrated Composition Systems Alexander Trotter Friesens Corporation
