Cold War Containment Ideology & Film Genre

I would like to use my blog post this week to discuss one of the issues related to Christina Klein’s book Cold War Orientalism that we did not discuss in class. Klein argues throughout her book that the primary narrative mode associated with “the global imaginary of integration” is the sentimental; which makes me wonder, what is the parallel genre associated with “the global imaginary of containment”? The only genre Klein discusses, in relation to “containment culture” is the Western: “Westerns with their emphasis on the frontier as a border between civilization and savagery and their resolution of conflict through violence, fit comfortably within the category of containment culture” (Klein 193). Klein’s brief discussion of the Western is worth considering within the context of Flower Drum Song because the film includes two intertextual references to westerns. Furthermore, in spite of the existence of Asian immigrants/laborers in the American West, most Westerns produced during the Cold War erase the historical presence of Asians in the West. Although I think that a more in depth analysis of Westerns using Klein’s framework would be valuable, the genre that I am really interested in relation to Cold War containment ideology is the film noir. I propose that we consider film noir as both an expression and a critique of the culture of containment.

Film noir is a notoriously difficult genre to define; unlike sentimental narratives or Westerns (which can be defined through shared, broad narrative trajectories), the definitive feature of noir is generally considered stylistic (i.e., consisting of a specific tone and mood). The distinctive lighting and cinematography that give noir its name work to create an atmosphere of tension, paranoia, claustrophobia, conspiracy, and fear. In this way, the visual elements of noir express one of the defining features of “containment ideology” according to Klein: fear (Klein 36). However, the cynicism and pessimism associated with the genre undercuts the conformity that true narratives of containment sought to promote. And so, I believe that the genre of film noir can be successfully read as a vexed expression of “the global imaginary of containment.” Because of the complex relationship between film noir and “containment culture” I am especially interested in analyzing the brand of orientalism peculiar to film noir. In her book “Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (2010) Homay King coins the term “shanghai gesture” to describe just this phenomenon: “This cinematic trope [the shanghai gesture] involves a movement whereby seemingly marginal Asian set dressing in Hollywood film ends up functioning as a load-bearing narrative element” (Homay King 48-9). For my paper, I hope to apply Klein’s historicist framework to some of King’s theories about orientalism in the film noir and provide a more sustained analysis of The Shanghai Gesture (1941) and other film noirs.

Citizenship and Appropriation in "Flower Drum Song"

In her discussion of Flower Drum Song, Christina Klein argues that Mei Li becomes a sympathetic character in the film because of her “dual identity” (Klein 240). She represents both the foreignness of her Chinese origins and the assimilation of the immigrant, without ever adopting the “wholesale assimilation” and whitening that Linda performs. The idealization of dual identity is, for Klein, evidence of a drive to present “American national identity as a pluralistic nation of immigrants” (240). I would argue, however, that Flower Drum Song actually foregrounds the foreignness of “dual identity” characters such as Madam Liang and thus complicates facile notions of the possibility of pluralism. More specifically, the film marks assimilating characters as even more foreign as they negotiate and appropriate American political ideology.

At the beginning of the film, Master Wang laments his sons’ use of American slang and their youthful enjoyment of life, to which Madame Liang replies, “This is the U.S.A. In my citizenship class I have learned, “We the people of the United States are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happy times.” The film situates Madame Liang as a cultural and linguistic mediator for her brother-in-law, whose outmoded ideals about marriage, social decorum and even financial wisdom are constantly mocked in the film. Yet, Flower Drum Song does not necessarily oppose Master Wang’s foreignness with a neatly assimilated Madame Liang. Though she is endowed with more American cultural capital, which allows her to negotiate her way through difficult situations with the younger generation of Chinese Americans, her imperfect assimilation is a source of comedy. She substitutes “happy times” for “happiness” in her rehearsal of the Declaration of Independence, yet it is difficult to view her blunder as a conscious mistake made simply for comedic effect. After all, she is coded as foreign from her first on-screen appearance, in which she orders “seahorse,” “snake meat,” and a “dozen thousand year eggs.” Later, she joins in with Master Wang’s song, “The Other Generation,” in which she positions herself as other than the assimilated Chinese Americans like Ta. Additionally, where the younger generation’s citizenship is never in question, Madame Liang is self-conscious about her need to prove her citizenship. She does this by referencing her education and by suggesting that she must become an American by learning how to be one. While the film perhaps calls on us to applaud her efforts to become a citizen, however, it also positions us to view her education as flawed and her assimilation as a flawed mimesis.

Ta and Madame Liang’s joint graduation party points to the role that formal education plays in the film’s treatment of citizenship. Madame Liang’s professor, upon giving his student an award, tells her “As Lincoln says, you can only fool half of the people at a time.” Initially, the professor’s statement seems out of place in the midst of the festivities. Madame Liang herself rejoins by saying “Right,” as if she herself has been taken off guard by the statement, and the conversation immediately turns to another subject. Yet, the uncomfortable nature of the exchange is important. The professor suggests that becoming an American citizen is an act of “fooling.” Yet, it is an imperfect and incomplete type of performance, always in danger of being exposed as disingenuous because “only half of the people can be fooled at a time.” More significantly, like Madame Liang’s flawed recitation of the Declaration of Independence, the professor misquotes Lincoln. The actual quotation is

‘If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’ (quoted in Steers, 92).

Edward Steers, in Lincoln Legends, notes that the precise origin of the epigram is highly contested among historians. While Lincoln’s secretaries believed it to have been part of a speech that the President delivered in 1858 in Clinton, Illinois, evidence given by Thomas Schwartz, the secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association, suggests that Phineas T. Barnum originated the quotation (Steers 92-3). Steers also notes that historians Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher, in Recollected Works, assign the epigram a “D,” that is, “‘a quotation about whose authenticity there is more than average doubt’” (93). It is ironic that the very act of attributing to Lincoln a quotation about inspiring confidence through honesty, rather than “fooling,” may be a false move. To discredit the authenticity of a Lincoln quote, Steers argues, is a “disturbing thing” for many people, given Lincoln’s historical popularity (93). This is not to suggest that Lincoln himself was complicit in “fooling” his supporters. Rather, I would argue the disturbance comes when such discrediting forces us to reevaluate our conception of our national history and its central actors. We gain a sort of nationalistic, even patriotic, comfort in associating certain ideals (i.e. honesty, pluralism, equality) with Lincoln. That comfort has been molded for us by our educational experience, the media, our families, etc. To learn that such a quotation may not only be falsely attributed to Lincoln, but may be credited instead to P.T. Barnum, notorious showman and conman, does indeed disturb our comfortable notions about one of our most revered Presidents. It makes us critically aware of the often inauthentic nature of the historical (master) narratives that we learn as part of our citizenship training.

Flower Drum Song thus presents an unsettling picture of what it means to become an American citizen. As Jodi Kim suggests in Ends of Empire, American historical narratives that establish the myth of American exceptionalism should be viewed as an “epistemological project” that opens itself to the “unsettling hermeneutics” of individuals (Kim 10). Madame Liang’s and the professor’s interpretations of American ideology is presented as flawed in order to highlight their difference. Their mistaken quotations suggest a flawed inculcation of American ideology, but also point to the unstable and polysemic nature of the ideology itself. In this way, their blunders point to the possibilities for reinterpreting and reimaging what an American citizen can look like, and for allowing the hackneyed rhetoric of American ideology to take on new meanings.

As a final note: In light of the above discussion, the notion of costuming in the film takes on a new dimension as well. We discussed in class that the outlandish costumes that Ta’s brother wears point to the constructed and performative nature of American cultural identity. Yet, such costuming can also be viewed as a flawed mimesis that highlights the racial foreignness of the wearer. As Klein notes of the negative review of Flower Drum Song written in Variety, “It is as if we are being asked to note ‘how darling’ or ‘how precious’ it is of them to undertake the execution of American dances,’” and, by extension, all American cultural signifiers (Klein 232). Even for Ta’s brother, who is an American citizen by birth, the performance of his Americanness serves to highlight his racial difference. Far from idealizing a dual identity as a signifier of American pluralism and integration, Flower Drum Song uses moments of “flawed” assimilation to mark and to mock foreignness, as well as ethnic and racial difference.

Works Cited

Kim, Jodi. Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War. “Introduction.”
Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-
1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Steers, Edward. Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

Narrative Gender Alignments and International Policy

In the "Musicals and Modernization" chapter of Cold War Orientalism, Klein provides the following analysis of the masculinity and femininity present in The King and I:

“The King and I is a variation on the Madame Butterfly narrative: a representative of America comes to Asia, falls in love with an Asian, the romance doesn’t work out, the Asian dies, and the American takes over the upbringing of their shared child. The King and I inverts the sexes, but in many ways the gender remains constant: Anna is partially masculinized as the bearer of Western knowledge and authority, while the King is partially feminized by his ignorance and his intense eroticization” (214).

Although her use of Madame Butterfly seems to me flawed, in that it ignores the callousness/emotional disengagement of the American presence and the serious naivete of the Asian figure, Klein makes a good point here. The gender roles of both the King and Anna are complicated by their alignment with a masculine, invading West and a feminine, eroticized East. However, it is intriguing that so much of Anna and the King’s dialogue is concerned with the proper roles of men and women, with the King arguing for a world of male sexual domination and empowerment while Anna encourages a partnership on equal footing. As Klein points out, Anna’s Westernizing force is, furthermore, explicitly linked to her domesticity rather than to a forceful presentation of power: she fights for a house of her own, teaches the Siamese proper table manners, etc.

In this way, then, I think it’s interesting to counter Klein’s point about the gender alignments of Anna and the King with her own point about the way the middlebrow, pro-modernization imagination conceived of Westernization at the time. If we understand Anna—and by extension the West—as particularly feminized, and understand the King—and by extension the East—as representative of unchecked, “barbaric” masculinity, it is informative to compare that concept with the view we studied at the beginning of the term. For example, the eroticized, feminine descriptions of Asian landscapes in tourist narratives spring to mind as a point of comparison. The shift in the gender alignments between the early explicitly imperialist era at the turn of the century and the sympathetic, somewhat culturally pluralistic attitude of the West during the Cold War mirrors the change in international policy.

South Pacific and the Rejection of America

I was very interested in Christina Klein’s arguments surrounding South Pacific. I’ve always thought of that show as surprisingly extreme, for its time, in its rejection of American racism and even America, and I think Klein softens that with her claim that it’s actually “a kind of promotional literature for postwar expansion” (163), based partly on Michener’s ideas of his book, which I, obviously, cannot refute. Her argument is persuasive, but it smoothes some of the sharper elements of the show’s really knotty questions about whether or not America is a lost cause, at least for the time being.

Klein argues that the final scene of South Pacific “shows that Americans can overcome their racism and that this will enable them to move into the Pacific with a clean conscience. Overcoming racism becomes here a precondition for successful expansion, and expansion the reward for overcoming racism” (164). I think Klein’s argument makes a lot of sense, especially as read into to the final scene of the show. However, casting the removal of racism as a tool with which to “clean the conscience” of possible “colonizers” (is there a word for “expanders”?), all funneled through the figure of the mother, ignores the fact that the characters who remain in the South Pacific—Nellie and Cable (Cable can never leave because he dies there)—do so because it would be impossible for them to return. Having moved passed the racism of their culture, they have somehow become less American.

Here’s a scene from the original script of South Pacific that will shed some light on this I think (Klein talks about this scene on page 162 of her book). It’s just after Joe Cable has again refused to marry “Bloody Mary’s” daughter Liat, because he can’t bring himself to believe in interracial relationships. He runs into Nellie who, a few scenes back, similarly decided she couldn’t marry Emile de Becque because, years ago, he had two children with a Polynesian woman, who has since died. Nellie accuses Joe of trying to get to Balai Hai, the island where Liat lives.

Cable: (Nodding thoughtfully) Liat. I’ve just seen her for the last time, I guess. I love her and yet I just heard myself saying I can’t marry her. What’s the matter with me, Nellie? What kind of a guy am I, anyway?

Nellie: You’re all right. You’re just far away from home. We’re both so far away from home.

(… Emile enters. He is earnest and importunate)

Emile: Nellie! I must see you.

Nellie: Emile! I—

Emile: Will you excuse us, Lieutenant Cable?

(Cable starts to leave)

Nellie: No, wait a minute, Joe. Stay. Please! (To Emile) I’ve been meaning to call you but—

Emile: You have asked for a transfer, why? What does it mean?

Nellie: I’ll explain it to you tomorrow, Emile. I’m—

Emile: No. Now. What does it mean, Nellie?

Nellie: It means that I can’t marry you. Do you understand? I can’t marry you.

Emile. Nellie— Because of my children?

Nellie: Not because of your children. They’re sweet.

Emile: It is their Polynesian mother then—their mother and I.

Nellie: …Yes. I can’t help it. It isn’t as if I could give you a good reason. There is no reason. This is emotional. This is something that is born in me.

Emile: (Shouting the words in bitter protest) It is not. I do not believe this is born in you.

Nellie: Then why do I feel the way I do? All I know is that I can’t help it. I can’t help it! Explain how we feel, Joe—

(Joe gives her no help. She runs up to the door of the dressing shack)

Emile: Nellie!

Nellie: (Calling in) Dinah, are you ready?

Nurse: Yes, Nellie.

Nellie: I’ll go with you

(The other nurse comes out and they exit quickly. Emile turns angrily to Cable)

Emile: What makes her talk like that? Why do you have this feeling, you and she? I do not believe it is born in you. I do not believe it.

Cable: It’s not born in you! It happens after you’re born…

(Cable sings the following words, as if figuring this whole question out for the first time)

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught from year to year,

It’s got to be drummed in you dear little ear—

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a different shade—

You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate—

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

(Speaking, going close to Emile, his voice filled with the emotion of discovery and firm in a new determination)

You’ve got the right idea de Becque—live on an island. Yes, sir, if I get out of this thing alive, I’m not going back there! I’m coming here. All I care about is right here. To hell with the rest.

(6 Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Modern Library, 345-7)

So here, Nellie, Cable, and Emile try to explain American racism, culminating in the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” Apart from the damning lyrics of this song, which Klein discusses, the most important moment is Cable’s declaration that “if I get out of this thing alive, I’m not going back there! I’m coming here” (6 Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein 347). Cable rejects Nellie’s “we,” which can translate to “Americans,” when she asks him to “explain how we feel” (346) to Emile, just before he rejects America as his home (notably, he decides not to go back to America because he finally understands what it has done to him, not necessarily because he decides to marry Liat after all, as Klein claims [162]). Nellie will eventually do the same when she chooses to stay in the South Pacific, with Emile’s children, despite the fact that she is unsure if Emile has survived the mission that killed Cable. Nellie’s new family can’t be an American export. It’s not an export from anywhere. It’s only possible “out here” in the almost mythical South Pacific—Cable’s ideal “island.”

To me, this show seems to threaten rather than soothe its audience about the subject of Asia and the possibility of Americans living in the Pacific. The traditional marriage plot is dangled like a carrot, as it were, in front of the middlebrow white American audience. Fail to fix this deeply imbedded problem in your culture, it warns, or this happy family will no longer belong to you, as it does not belong to you within the context of this narrative. The nuclear family, rather than being, as Klein argues, the main weapon in the American arsenal, is what is at stake in this story.

There are a lot of problems with this argument, the first of which is that I’m very persuaded by Klein’s. Also, I’m not as familiar with the movie version of South Pacific as I am with the theatrical version, so there could be a whole other group of possibilities there. But apart from everything else, how crazy is it that a piece of 1949 middlebrow American pop culture shows an American soldier in WWII rejecting the United States in favor of the Pacific island on which he’s been stationed?

In case you’re interested, here’s the above scene from the 2008 Broadway revival of South Pacific. The part I quoted is from about 3:25 to 7:40. There are some additions and some changes, most interestingly “back there” becomes “back to the United States of America,” and Cable elaborates much more on his feelings about America’s racism beforehand. “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” starts at 7:25. Sorry about the overacting. I’m not sure live musicals really translate well to Youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMLKmOJfM24&feature=related

Cultural Appropriation-Links Added

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/costume-cultural-appropriation

Just wanted to post this link since it is related to the issue of yellow face/black face/etc. Also, in one of the bonus features on the Flower Drum Song DVD, the term cultural appropriation was mentioned in terms of the musical being written by white males, even though the original novel was written by a Chinese-American.

I'm looking forward to our discussion about the movie!

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Updated 10/26/2011

Here is a link on the origin of the stereotypical Asian musical riff:

http://www.danwei.org/music/funky_chinatown_and_the_asian.php

And here is a link to a recent instance of yellow face:

http://www.refinery29.com/is-taping-your-eyes-to-look-asian-the-new-blackface

The Power of "Seventeen Syllables"

As Mrs. Hayashi tries to explain to her daughter Rosie in “Seventeen Syllables,” in a haiku one “must pack all her meaning into seventeen syllables only” (Yamamoto 9). Even though writing haiku becomes Mrs. Hayashi’s means of expressing herself, it is also a source of confinement and madness for her and her loved ones.

Writing haiku keeps Mrs. Hayashi from interacting with her husband and daughter. Rosie is of the Nisei generation, and she is more fluent in English than Japanese. Mrs. Hayashi writes haiku in her native tongue, so Rosie does not fully comprehend her mother’s work. Rosie’s father has no interest in his wife’s writing. At night, he now plays solitaire, since Mrs. Hayashi is not around to “challenge [him] to a game of flower cards” (Yamamoto 9). He only grunts when Mrs. Hayashi says “You know how I get when it’s haiku” (Yamamoto 11-12). Writing haiku is only confined to Mrs. Hayashi’s interest in her own household and alienates her from her family. It is also a means of confining her to her Japanese heritage and not fully assimilating into American life.

Seventeen syllables also serves as a metaphor for Mrs. Hayashi’s stillborn son, “who would be seventeen now” (Yamamoto 18). Even though the son would have been seventeen, he never got the chance to live and is forever confined to being an infant. The syllable is a short unit of speech and mirrors this brevity of life. Writing haiku was also Mrs. Hayashi’s “baby,” because of how devoted and proud she was of her work. Matthew Elliot describes Mr. Hayashi’s destruction of his wife’s Hiroshige prize as an act of silencing, but it can also be viewed as Mrs. Hayashi watching her son being born dead all over again.

Mrs. Hayashi’s haiku alter ego, Ume Hanazono, only lasted three months, like a haiku lasts for three lines (Yamamoto 8-9). But during those three months, she is obsessed with writing haiku and talking about haiku with like-minded people, such as Mr. Hayano and Mr. Kuroda. Obsession is often conflated with madness. Even Mr. Hayashi tells Rosie, “Ha, your mother’s crazy!” when Mr. Kuroda brings Mrs. Hayashi’s first prize for the haiku contest (Yamamoto 17). Mr. Kuroda’s visit is the last straw for Mr. Hayashi. He has been letting his annoyance evolve into anger over three months. When Rosie tells her father that her mother is delaying her return to the tomato fields because Mr. Kuroda is visiting, Mr. Hayashi erupts “like the cork of a bottle popping” (Yamamoto 17). His wife’s obsession has finally driven him mad and his act of violence upon the Hiroshige print is carried out without regret or consideration for how it might affect his wife and daughter.

Through Mrs. Hayashi’s story, Yamamoto has demonstrated the power of seventeen syllables to empower, but also to disrupt and destroy.

The Gender and Nationalism Binary in Okada's No-No Boy

Even before reading Kandice Chuh’s chapter from Imagine Otherwise, I was preoccupied with the representations of nationalism and gender that are mapped onto Ichiro’s parents in No-No Boy. Therefore, Chuh’s argument that Ichiro’s parents represent the opposite poles of both a gender and a nationalist binary was useful in pushing my thoughts on the same subject. However, while I agree with most of her reading of Ichiro’s mother and her madness, I do not think Chuh adequately accounts for Ichiro’s re-gendering of his parents: “[Pa] should have been a woman. He should have been Ma and Ma should have been Pa” (Okada 112).

First of all, to quickly establish the obvious, Ma is a woman, she believes Japan won the war and wants to return, and Japan is feminized and associated with women in American history and Japanese American writings. Pa, on the other hand, is a man, he knows the US won the war and is resigned to remaining, and the US is always figured as the masculine opposite to the feminine Japan. According to Chuh, these facts align Ma with Japan and femininity and Pa with the US and masculinity. Of course, as the reader and Ichiro accurately realize, Ma has usurped Pa’s patriarchal position in the family – she makes the decisions and, though Pa knows the truth that Japan has lost the war, he is silenced by her authority. Chuh, however, sees Ma’s position as the head of the family as a product of both parents’ sickness: Ma’s madness and Pa’s alcoholism (Chuch 73). Though I agree that Pa’s alcoholism is proof of the weakness that allows Ma to usurp him, that weakness can also be seen as a sign of feminization, effectively flipping the genders of Ichiro’s parents. What then – and this is what I’ve been grappling with – does it mean to suddenly associate inappropriate masculinity with Japan and inappropriate femininity with the US?

My initial thought – with which I think Chuh would agree – is that this gender reversal still maintains a binary, but an unstable one that cannot be sustained and is righted once Ichiro’s mother kills herself. Pushing beyond that, however, these negative and problematic embodiments of gender relate to the separate nationalisms represented by each parent. Ma represents masculinity and Japan; Pa represents femininity and the US. If the gender binary is really not so much a binary, but an embodiment of both in one (Ma is female, but represents masculinity, albeit a problematized version of it), then the same can be seen as a solution to Ichiro’s identity problem. Ichiro thinks to himself, “I am not Japanese and I am not American” (Okada 16), but what he needs and wants to be is both collapsed into one: “Japanese-American.” Not only is this what Ichiro wants to be, but it is also what Okada’s text wants the US government to recognize – an inseparable union of Japanese and American, not a dual identity with two separate parts where one half or the other gets privileged depending upon what is most convenient for the US to acknowledge.

Madness and Exile in No-No Boy and The Legend of Miss Sasagawara

In Okada’s book No-No Boy and Yamamto’s story The Legend of Miss Sasagawara two central female characters are represented through the lens of “madness”. It is important to note that The Legend of Miss Sasagawara is set during the years of Japanese internment (during World War II), whereas No-No Boy is located in the years after the period of Japanese internment. Juxtaposing the two stories, this posting will attempt to understand and examine the trope of madness that the two authors use in their storytelling strategies.

In The Legend of Miss Sasagawara, Miss Sasagawara is perceived as mad by the other inhabitants of the camp. While the others go about imitating their lives before their internment, performing a sense of normality in the face of total despair, Miss Sasagawara internalizes the trauma of being placed within camps. The other characters in the story go about business as normal – seeking employment, setting up house, acquiring and farming the land – all acts of pretense that situates these Japanese as loyal subjects to the American nation. By being good subjects, they perform their patriotism to America. Being patriotic means that they do not challenge the “system”, living life, waiting for the war to be over and during that time, proving their ability to be good American citizens. Miss Sasagawara’s refusal to be part of this deception, casts her as an outsider. Struck by the trauma of internment, a system predicated on relocations, constructing the Japanese as unreliable and untrustworthy citizens, Miss Sasagawara can be read as the only subject who is fully aware of the enormity of the situation and who is strong enough to psychologically face up to the realities of life for Japanese Americans during this time. At one stage she tries to normalize an abnormal situation (the internment camps resonate strongly with Nazi Germany’s concentration camps), training the children to put on a dance for the Christmas party. However, she is represented as breaking down afterwards, slipping into a state of depression. Life in the internment camps was not normal and because she is unable to buy into this deception she is constructed as pathological and problematic. She is the “other” – medicated and confined to an asylum.

I think it is helpful to challenge the commonsense reading of Miss Sasagawara as “mad” and “pathogical”, and rather to position her as the only sane person in the camp. She is the only one who is remotely in touch with reality. The other inhabitants seem to repress the trauma of internment and how this constantly reproduces the Japanese as “other” and inassimilable, producing a subject that can never be truly American, despising his/her ethnic Japaneseness because it always marks him/her as different. The trauma of the ambiguities of diasporic identity, minority marginalization and not belonging are reaffirmed through internment.

In No-No Boy, Ichiro’s mother is represented as the “mad” women. Her representation is more complex and is directly linked to her inability to acculturate and assimilate in America. Throughout the text she is represented as displaced, dreaming of her eventual return to Japan, where she can prove her success by buying a big house in her village. There is no hope for her return to her Japan, there are no ships coming to take her home, so instead she fabricates a world in which Japan didn’t loose the war, where the ships are on their way and Japan is waiting to welcome them back. Japan wouldn’t betray her as America has, their loyalty and allegiance is strongly rooted in a mythical homeland that would construct the subject as whole once again, upon returning to the point of origin. Through Ichiro’s eyes his mother Japanese-ness, her desire to return, her resistance to acculturation and assimilation is the origin of her sickness.

… for he saw that the sickness of the soul that was Japanese once and forever was beginning to destroy her mind… Did it matter so much that events had ruined the plans which she cherished and turned the once very possible dreams into a madness which was madness only in view of the changed status of Japanese in America? (pg. 104).

The war and internment complicated the positioning of Japanese in America. Some Japanese men - husbands, sons and brothers - went as good American citizens to fight against Japan. They fought a war to prove their American-ness, while at the same time their communities were placed in camps, because they were citizen who could not be trusted. Ichiro is in an ambiguous place, caught between his mother (who represents a mythical Japan) and his American citizenship.

They were two extremes, the Japanese who was more American than most Americans because he had crept to the brink of death for America, and the other who was neither Japanese nor American because he had failed to recognize the gift of his birthright when recognition meant everything (pg. 73).

For Ichiro’s mother, the inability to return has placed her in a continuous state of exile. It is this reality that is too much for her to negotiate, that drives her “mad”. She cannot psychologically reconcile the manner in which events had unfolded in America during her lifetime. With the promise of economic freedom she travelled to American to make a fortune, to live the American dream, always hoping to return to Japan. The internment in camps proved the inhumanity of America and highlighted the alien position of Japanese in America. America has let them down – constructing the Japanese as perpetually other. So she holds onto the hope of return to Japan, a space she can be accepted fully without any question. However, after the war Japan had changed, this is something that drove her further into the realm of madness, eventually ending in her death by suicide when it finally hits her that Japan lost the war, America had won and there would be no return to Japan.

The two stories treat the representation of madness differently, one reflecting strongly on the state of the mind during the internment period (and denial of this trauma by many), and the other reflecting on the trauma after internment which places Japanese Americans in a liminal position, having constantly negotiate a split identity. Ichiro’s mother, unable to do this, goes mad and then dies. Her death frees her son and husband from her mythical Japan, allowing them to begin the processes of acculturation and assimilation.

These two stories emphasize the importance of women to diasporic communities. Women are reproducers of the nation, race and ethnicity and are often represented as holding such communities together. However in No-No Boy the mother and her allegiance to a mythical Japan, fragments the community and threatens assimilation into American society. In order for successful assimilation to occur, she has to be removed. However Okada offers a complex representation and critique of American history that gives us a glimpse into the psyche of a Japanese community during a particular historic moment. Madness in these stories is related to exile and trauma. More importantly, the stories reflect on the madness of the worlds that the characters inhabit.

Refusing Loyalty in John Okada's "No-No Boy"

While reading No-No Boy, I kept coming back to notions of loyalty, whiteness and that elusive state of “being an American.” In Okada’s novel, these three terms seem to be inextricably linked. For Eto, Bud and other Japanese-Americans who are hostile to the no-no boys, loyalty oaths to the U.S. government and military service is meant to differentiate them from other “Japs” and to allow them to prove their Americanness. The Nisei profess their loyalty in order to stake their claim to citizenship and to assert their right to the clean, white America that Ichiro finds in the “homey magazines” (Okada 159). Yet, it is the very act of pledging loyalty that differentiates the Japanese-American from other, namely white, Americans whose loyalty is taken for granted and whose citizenship rights are never violated (159). Put differently, Japanese-American gestures of loyalty and belonging are simultaneously gestures of difference. As Okada portrays through the antagonism that exists between the no-no boys and the Japanese-American soldiers, no amount of military service or genuine confession of loyalty can erase such difference.

Most of the hostility that Ichiro faces as a no-no boy comes from Japanese-American servicemen whose post-war lives have left them disillusioned. At the VA hospital, Kenji explains to Ichiro that the reason for soldiers’ animosity is a “misbegotten idea that maybe you’re to blame because the good that they thought they were doing by getting killed and shot up doesn’t amount to a pot of beans” (Okada 163). Kenji implies that once the Japanese-American war veterans are back in America for a long enough time, they will “get cut down to their own size. Then they’ll be the same as you, a bunch of Japs” (163). Kenji denies even the possibility of a Japanese-American identity by equating “nisei” with the ethically and physically inferior “Jap” who is incapable of assimilation and who acts as a complete foil to the unhyphenated (white) American.

Gary, like Kenji, explains to Ichiro the hostility bred of disillusionment by referencing whiteness as a marker of national belonging:

They’ll see themselves getting passed up for jobs by white fellows not quite so bright but white. They’ll take a trip up to some resort, thinking this is God’s green land of democracy for which I killed a dozen Krauts, and get kicked in the face with the unfortunate mistake about the reservation story because he’d signed the letter Ohara and the guy at the resort thought it was good old Irish O’Hara” (Okada 227).

The Japanese-American is “kicked in the face” with the harsh truth that even life-giving gestures of loyalty to the United States do not guarantee that he will be recognized by his country as a proper citizen-subject like the others who are “not quite so bright but white” (227). The government, by calling upon the nisei to prove their loyalty as citizens, tacitly refuses the possibility of the sort of pure and presumed loyalty and citizenship of other Americans even before the oaths are made. Seen in this light, it is no wonder that Ichiro refuses to take such an oath or join the American army; he knows that, simply because he looks Japanese, he is always already constituted as alien by his country of origin. The Ohara/O’Hara distinction is also of importance in this passage: While Okada is not suggesting that the only difference between the Japanese and the Irishman is one of punctuation, he does suggest that such differences are at once as miniscule as the apostrophe and are yet made to appear great enough to justify racist programs like internment: For Okada, the apostrophe is “the little scale on which hinged the fortunes of the universe” (228).

If Japanese-Americans become disillusioned after the war, it is in part because whiteness still remains a signifier of access, belonging and Americanness. Sitting at the bar at the Club Oriental, Kenji reflects on the uniqueness of his sense of comfort in that space: “Not many places a Jap can go to and feel so completely at ease. It must be nice to be white and American and to be able to feel like this no matter where one goes, but I won’t cry about that” (Okada 133). Kenji suggests that it is not enough to be white or American. One must be both in order to feel such a constant sense of belonging. In another scene invoking whiteness, a Chinese girl at a prom is with a white boy, which means that “she has risen in the world, or so she thinks…[S]he flaunts her newly found status…with haughty smiles” (135). The Chinese girl dances with a white boy to change her status in the world, and yet that change is ultimately only in her head. Similarly, the soldier who returns to America has survived war, and has avoided “status-damaging” experiences like internment or jail time, and yet his status as an acceptable American is largely symbolic precisely because of his racial difference.

I am reminded in the above passage of a famous line from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: “There is a psychological phenomenon that consists in believing the world will open up as borders are broken down” (Fanon 5). Fanon is concerned with the psychosis that attends the black man’s desire to be white. The border to which Fanon refers is the one that separates the black Antillean from the European. People who believe in the ability to change one’s status by erasing difference are not seeking the type of post-racial humanism of Kenji, but rather seek to attain the intellectual and cultural markers of one race in particular—the white race.

Fanon later notes that “For [the black man] there is only one way out, and it leads to the white world. Hence his constant preoccupation with attracting the white world, his concern with being as powerful as the white man” (33). I do not argue that the Japanese-American characters in Okada’s novel wish that they were white. I would contend, however, that Japanese internment and loyalty oaths were racialized from the beginning and therefore foreclosed the possibility of a Japanese-American sense of “belonging.” Like the Antillean with his preoccuptation with whiteness, the Japanese-American soldiers exhibit a hypermasculinity and an excessive pride in their war efforts precisely because they know such efforts will never be enough. Ichiro, reflecting on the young waiter in Burnside, notes that the latter “was in the army and found it wasn’t enough so that he has to keep proving to everyone who comes in for a cup of coffee that he was fighting for his country like the button on his shirt says he did because the army didn’t do anything about this face to make him more American” (159). Again, to be more American is to look more American. The waiter, like Ichiro himself, cannot escape the racialized ideal that to be American is to be white. His race always already renders the loyalty oath a gesture of difference and differentiation.

We can now turn this entire analysis on its head by looking at loyalty from the perspective of the issei. We can consider how alignments with whiteness and with the American identity housed in images of picket fences and coca cola are the unforgiveable markers of disloyalty for people like Ichiro’s mother.

Re-Imagining Illness

The inspiration for my post comes from an observation that Molly made in her October 9^th blog post: “Throughout his short stories, Santos frequently describes Filipinos as ‘sickly’ or dirty, and repeatedly describes white Americans as ‘neat’ and especially as ‘clean’ or ‘clean-looking’.” Although dirt and disease are obviously negative markers, they do work to make the “invisible subjects” (Filipinos) “visible” when compared to the blank-white background associated with white Americans. Which made me wonder, is there a similarity between Santos’ coding of Filipinos as “sickly” and Hisaye Yamamoto’s unwell female characters in her short stories “Seventeen Syllables” and “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara.” Both of Yamamoto’s stories feature female characters who suffer from mysterious and, potentially, entirely psychosomatic diseases. Although the precise of origin of Mrs. Hayano’s and Miss Sasagawara’s illnesses are not articulated in both stories, it is only through their diseases that they become objects of interest to either of the narrators. Considering the long and racist history of association between Asian-Americans and metaphors of contagion, I find it striking that both Santos and Yamamoto would appropriate images of diseased Asian bodies in their own work.

I am particularly interested in how madness/mental anguish becomes inscribed on the female body through physical disease in both stories. In “Seventeen Syllables,” the narrator describes Rosie’s discomfort visiting the Hayano household:

“[a visit to the Hayano’s was] painful because something had been wrong with Mrs. Hayano ever since the birth of her first child. Rosie would sometimes watch Mrs. Hayano, reputed to have been the belle of her native village, making her way about a room, stooped, slowly shuffling, violently trembling (always trembling), and she would be reminded that this woman, in this same condition, had carried and given issue to three babies.” (9-10)

Although the cause of Mrs. Hayano’s mysterious ailment is never disclosed, there is an implicit parallel set up between Mrs. Hayano and Rosie’s mother through the reference to Mrs. Hayano’s “native village.” In both short stories, female sexuality is invoked as a possible source of female bodily suffering; however, in “The Legend of Miss Sasagawara,” Yamamoto also highlights how the mechanisms of modern healthcare, with its emphasis on “observation” have the potential to aggravate, and, perhaps, even cause further illness.

All of this makes me think of a number of questions I would like to raise on the blog: first, how does illness operate in Yamamoto’s text? Can a comparison be made between internment and quarantine? Does confinement breed disease along with discontent?

Miss Sasagawara and the Specter of the Japanese Archetype

What struck me most from the beginning of Yamamoto’s second story, is how Miss Sasagawara seems to represent so many well-worn features of the traditional Japanese woman, and Japanese culture as a whole, as imagined by white America at the turn of the century. She seems, in many ways, a direct continuation of characters like Cho-Cho-San and Yuki, and other archetypes of Japanese culture as depicted and understood by white America, which we’ve read about throughout the semester. The opening description of Miss Sasagawara is as “a decorative ingredient of some ballet” (Yamamoto 20). This idea of the ornate, theatrical Japanese woman who is more ornament than human being, is full of referents we should all recognize. This opening reminds me of Edwin Arnold’s notion of Japan as a “large painted and lacquered tea-tray, the figures of which...suddenly jumped up from the dead plane into the living perpendicular” (qtd Ferens 37) which Ferens quotes in her article. It isn’t a far cry from Cho-Cho-San’s lullaby (the idea of which came from Pinkerton), describing her baby as “a picture off of a fan” (Long 42), either.

Miss Sasagawara’s performative quality is deeply entrenched in stereotypes of Japanese women, of course, and brings Yuki strongly to mind. Watanna describes her as “a wild, vivid little figure, clad in scintillating robes that reflected every ray of light thrown on them; and, with her coming, the air was filled with the weird, wholly fascinating music of the koto” (Watanna 86). This sounds like Miss Sasagawara’s “daily costume” of “arrestingly rich colors,” offset by her “shining hair” which is “so long it would twice about her head to form a coronet” (Yamamoto 20). Miss Sasagawara’s alternately silent and hysterical personality (screaming at her neighbors, “fighting” [26] hospital orderlies), sounds more like Cho-Cho-San, silently listening at the “look-at meeting” (Long 53) with Yamadori, and then “viciously” attacking Suzuki (42). This archetype of the Japanese women is at once long-suffering and quiet, or brutal and violent. Miss Sasagawara’s origin is also mysterious—she’s come from an unnamed camp in the north, “some trouble” (20) occurred with her uncle’s family, and her mother is dead of a unknown cause. The exotic and mysterious hangs about Miss Sasagawara, just as it hangs about Japanese women and Japanese culture for white Americans at the turn of the century. There is even confusion about her age, which seems too high (“she looks so young, more like twenty-five [21]), a theme which pops up in Madame Butterfly when Cho-Cho-San claims she is thirty because “a Japanese always adds a few years” (Long 60).

Miss Sasagawara seems like a ghost from America’s past, carrying with her these old, imagined truths about Japan, who somehow turned up in (is haunting?) this ultimate statement of the modern treatment and understanding of Japanese Americans: the internment camp. What is most interesting, in light of this, is the way she is treated and understood by her fellow internees. In many ways, they react as white Americans reacted to their myth of Japan: with a combination of fascination and fear. Like Yuki and her “wholly fascinating” quality, Miss Sasagawara is “distracting” (Yamamoto 20). She is a constant source of discussion, but also plenty of anxiety (“she’s scary” [28] says Kiku’s sister Michi). Ultimately, this story seems to illustrate a dialogue between the model minority and the imagined other. Kiku and her friends actively work inside the system of the camp, enjoying their jobs, attending events, and making friends. They seem to have little to no resistance or even discomfort with their situation. By confronting these model minorities with the specter of the American idea of “Japan,” Yamamoto seems to be challenging her characters to question their situation and their performance of Americanness. Is this practice and image of othering their history, too, as American citizens? Or, as American citizens displaced into camps without cause, should they see Miss Sasagawara as their own reflection, a category invented by white America which they, too, fall under? In addition, this dialogue brings the idea of dual nationalism to light, but in a perverse way that locates fear as the core of identity. What and why something is feared may reveal an inner truth, the text seems to claim. If Kiku and her friends fear this ghost of embodied Japanese stereotypes, is it their American or Japanese “selves” that feel it? This has been longer than I intended but I feel like there is still more to say. Mostly, I am interested in how this idea might play out in a reading of Miss Sasagawara’s “sane” period as a fellow model minority in the camp, but I’m not quite sure what to do with that.

The Creation of Alternative Kinship Formation Outside of Ethnic Enclaves

One topic of the Marking and Santos readings that we didn’t get a chance to really touch upon in class, but really caught my interest was the very different regions these stories were set in, often rural spaces.  Most of what we’ve read so far in class in terms of Asian Americans has taken place on the West Coast, particularly California.  As I read through the stories I was particularly fascinated with how the physical space where these various stories took place seemed to necessitate alternate kinship formations than the ethnic enclaves in our previous readings.  I wondered how this difference in location would affect the identity formation of the characters in the stories and how they would make sense of their cultural identities and connection with nationalism.  Interestingly, I found a common strand that in each of these stories there was a desire to connect with other Filipinos, whether that is through familial relations, living spaces, friendship networks, or an invitation to a stranger for dinner.

            Throughout Yay Marking’s “My Filipino Mother,” there is a flow of migration, primarily through Marking’s mother.  Her mother’s first migration came as a child where she left her destroyed home in Cebu, leaving behind a drunkard father and the memories of her deceased mother and younger sister.  With her kinship ties severed, she had no attachment to the homeland, nothing and no one was keeping her in Cebu.  By stowing away in a ship, her mother made the journey from Cebu to a port in California, but she could not enter the port in San Francisco due to the devastating 1906 earthquake.  From the port of San Francisco she went north to Canada and later “…a missionary benefactor had taken her [to] Montana,” where she would settle (Marking 17).  It is here in Montana where Marking and her mother craft their identities; her mother preferring a “small, tight, blood kinship” while Marking sought a “big, loose, raceless brotherhood” (Marking 10).  In a space with few other Filipinos both women sought an environment where they could be Filipina outside of an established Filipino community.

In Santos’s three short stories, “So Many Things,” “Brown Coterie,” and “Scent of Apples,” the characters are also outside of a primarily Filipino enclave.  As a result they form other kinship ties and friendship networks to fill a void.  Throughout “So Many Things” the main character, Ambo, seems to be in search of a relationship with the Filipino community especially because he is living outside of California in Washington. With so few Filipino people in his area “[t]here was a time when he didn’t see one for years and years” (Santos 148).  Because of this absence he was willing to live with a “…Filipino mother and her child, although it would have been simpler to have lived somewhere else,” perhaps a place where he wasn’t despised by the daughter (Santos 150).  “Brown Coterie,” also set outside of California, is centered on a woman’s, Clarita’s, loneliness as her Filipino husband is away working as a doctor.  To mask her loneliness Clarita plans a dinner for her Filipino friends from Michigan to get together.  The title itself already alludes to the creation of an alternative space where a Filipino identity can be enacted.  This exclusive group of friends is distinct in two ways, firstly with their separation from a large community of Filipinos, and secondly through their class status as Filipino elite.  It is precisely because of this dual isolation that they have formed this coterie.  Finally, Santos’ third story, “Scent of Apples” is also a story of being isolated from a geographic community of Filipinos as well as the alternative formation of kinship to disguise the void.  This becomes painfully obvious when the old Filipino farmer, Celestino Fabia from Kalamazoo, MI, invites the narrator to dinner at his farm, although the two men do not know each other.  Fabia left the Philippines “…over twenty years ago,” and lives on a farm inhabited by only himself, is white wife, and their mixed race son (Santos 181), devoid of any Filipino community.  Thus his invitation to a complete stranger, purely on the basis of a shared cultural background, can be read as an alternative kinship formation.  The narrator, who remains nameless in this story, also understands the kinship void he is filling for Fabia saying as they part, “Tell Ruth and Roger I love them” (Santos 190).