Race, Gender, and the "Passing" Transnational Adoptee

Reading Eng’s discussion of transnational adoption in chapter three, I was struck by how strongly Eng’s ideas seem tied to his background as a scholar of Asian American Studies. Eng’s discussion of transnational adoption practices notes that a significant percentage of adoptees are Chinese girls, and he asserts that transnational adoption practices represent another manifestation of our contemporary “colorblind age” and “collective refusal to see difference in the face of it” (95). But it seems to me that, at least in Eng’s work, the presumption of colorblindness and ability to “pass” is almost a unique property of Asian transnational adoptees (particularly those from China and South Korea). These children are seen as capable of passing for “white” and completing the white family unit, in striking contrast to African American children. Eng notes, “white parents who are reluctant or unwilling to adopt black children domestically (or fearful of child custody battles with birth mothers), have turned increasingly to transnational adoption as an alternative source for the (re)consolidation of family and kinship. From this angle, the Asian transnational adoptee serves to triangulate the domestic landscape of black-white race relations” (108).

Once again, we see the Asian subject placed in a “triangular” relationship with America’s history of racism, and this conception of America’s history stages domestic racism as a “black-white” struggle (rather than, for example, a “white-yellow” struggle). I think that the “colorblindness” Eng attributes to our contemporary moment could also be considered a more particular manifestation of the “invisibility” or erasure of Asian American communities from America’s racial history (rather than a more general racial colorblindness). These Chinese and Korean children are viewed as more able to enter and “pass” within the white family because they are perceived as unconnected to problematic domestic histories and entanglements (like “child custody battles with birth mothers”). But this logic erases the domestic Asian presence and renders all “Asian-ness” essentially alien to the American nation, or perhaps this logic only acknowledges domestic Asian-ness to the extent that the desire for children from China and South Korea might draw on the stereotypical perception of Asian Americans as “model minorities” who conform to the status quo. Ironically, a perception of the child as definitively "alien" seems necessary before the child can be imagined as finally assimilable within the white family unit.

I’m also fascinated by the way in which these ideas of potentially “passing” children—children viewed as uniquely able to be incorporated within the white American family—seem tied to a specific gender; the emblematic transnational adoptee (within the insurance commercial and within Eng’s book) is always female. This seems to be an interesting reversal from the adopted Asian children we’ve encountered thus far in our class. In Madame Buttefly and The Japanese Nightingale, the mixed-race child who travels to the Unites States (Trouble, Taro) is imagined as male (a detail Hwang preserves in M. Butterfly). Now, the adopted Asian child is imagined as female; perhaps the mixed-race child needed to be male in order to emphasize that he was a legitimate continuation of his white father—that he could potentially enter a white patriarchal lineage. In contrast, the current adoptee may be more valued for her—as Eng suggests—ability to perform emotional or “affective” labor within the family, a quality more often associated with women than men.

At the same time, the commercial also images the white American couple as female, and Eng’s critique of the Oedipal paradigm of family seems to involve a movement away from a focus on the father to a focus (almost exclusively in Eng) on the mother-daughter relationship. A gender analysis—and a potential feminist critique of psychoanalysis?—is an interesting thread of Eng’s work that I would be interested in discussing further in class.

Asian American Women in Film and Yellow Fever

I just found this link to a documentary about Anna May Wong.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1107767469/get-anna-may-wong-on-public-tv

The clip was very short, but towards the end, it said that Wong was originally chosen for the role of Auntie Liang in Flower Drum Song before she passed away in 1961.

I had not heard of her before studying other Asian American films in this course, but from what I understand, she was a pioneer, the first major Chinese-American actress.  Her most notable role was a prostitute in Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich.  If Wong had lived, she would have worked with Nancy Kwan, whose signature role was also a prostitute in The World of Suzie Wong.

Gina Marchetti presents one possible perspective of these two prostitute tales:

     "...'the fallen woman,' herself equated with the savage land through which the vehicle
     of civilization passes, is saved and rejoins the civilization that shunned her." (Marchetti 61)

Although Marchetti's remark is directed toward Shanghai Express and Stagecoach, a Western, I could see how it might apply to The World of Suzie Wong as well. Suzie Wong has to work as a prostitute in order to support her son, until she is "saved" by the American artist Robert Lomax.

I wonder how these representations of Asian women have affected the white American consciousness and how much these representations contribute to "Yellow Fever--Caucasian men with a fetish for exotic Oriental women" (Hwang 98).

Works Cited


Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Plume/Penguin Group, 1989.


Marchetti, Gina. Romance and the "Yellow Peril."  Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California 
     Press, 1993.

The White American "Gift" of Value

David L. Eng’s analysis of the John Hancock “Immigration” commercial and Deann Borshay Liem’s film First Person Plural in chapter 3 of The Feeling of Kinship struck me as surprisingly similar to an observation that I toyed with in an aborted blog post about the concepts of individualism, agency, and value in Madame Butterfly.

In Madame Butterfly, Cho-Cho-San is individualized only through her life with Pinkerton, though she ostensibly had a life (and even somewhat of a career as a dancer) prior to encountering him. For example, Long describes Cho-Cho-San’s intellect and reason as a gift from Pinkerton: “she reasoned as he had taught her – she had never reasoned before” (Long 44). Additionally, Pinkerton erases her past by forbidding her to interact with her family or practice her religion. Finally, Pinkerton views Cho-Cho-San as a commodity, one that he can own and shape to his liking, turning her into “an American refinement of a Japanese product, an American improvement on a Japanese invention” (Long 36).

Similarly, Eng writes that the John Hancock commercial “suggests that, through her adoption and crossing over an invisible national boundary, a needy Chinese object is miraculously transformed into an individuated and treasured U.S. subject” (Eng 99). Even though this transnational adoptee obviously had a history before coming to America, in the eyes of her parents and the American government her life didn’t start until she crossed into American soil and was put into the arms of her white American parents. The responses of Borshay Liem’s family to her arrival express a similar sentiment. Eng points to all of their “from then on” moments, and suggests that they “illustrate the ways in which Borshay Liem is commodified as an object to be enjoyed while, in the same breath, her Korean past is effaced and denied” (Eng 113).

Though the chronological gap between the publication of Madame Butterfly and the filming of the John Hancock commercial and First Person Plural is rather large, all three texts suggest that the Asian other is a malleable commodity whose history must be erased in order to have a life with white Americans. This idea that Asian Americans (or, more generally, any “other”) have individuality and value bestowed upon them through encounters with white Americans is surprisingly enduring and pervasive, and I think these examples could be a useful jumping off point for a further, more comprehensive discussion of the ways in which the white American majority sees itself as giving significance and value to the racial “other.”

Whitewashing Kinship

For my blog post this week, I would like to discuss the intersection between two key concepts in David Eng’s book The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy: the “racialization of intimacy” and “whiteness as property.” True to Eng’s book, the meeting of these two political ideas is staged within the private, domestic space of the family. In his introduction Eng concisely defines a key concept for his text: “The racialization of intimacy marks the collective ways by which race becomes occluded within the private domain of private family and kinship today” (10). But how exactly is race “collectively occluded”? Eng ties the “racialization of intimacy” to the “shrinking public sphere”: “the Reagan-Thatcher revolution obviated the possibility for national public debates about race, sex, and class by displacing them into the ‘intimate public sphere’ of privatized citizenship, normative family, and hetero-sexist morality” (6). What Eng fails to explicitly state, however, is the ironic fact that what really “occludes” race is whiteness. I would add to Eng’s characterization of the “intimate public sphere” as “privatized citizenship, normative family, and hetero-sexist morality” the term whiteness.

I believe that one of the ways that the “racialization of intimacy” is accomplished is by racing kinship and family as white. Eng’s book demonstrates how family/kinship relations can be conceived of as a form of property, I would argue that the prerequsite of possessing the property/right of/to intimacy/kinship/family is not just the erasure/forgetting of race, but also being raced as white. In his first chapter, Eng outlines some of the key ideas of Cheryl I. Harris’ article “ Whiteness as Property”: “Whiteness and property share a common premise in the right to exclude. . . .Whiteness was, and continues to be, a valuable and exclusive property essential to the self-possession oft the liberal individual, to the value of his or her reputation, and to the normative definitions of the enfranchised U.S. citizen-subject. Whiteness and property, liberty and freedom, are and continue to be inextricably intertwined” (46). In short, since the right to privacy/a family can be considered property, and since the pre-condition of owning such property is whiteness, the private family is coded as a form of white property. In order to forget about race, one has to be white.

Throughout the text, Eng discusses the melancholia of race/the burden of the “racialization of intimacy” by way of a metaphor of haunting, however, I think a better metaphor to describe how “the racialization of intimacy” operates would be that of whitewashing. From a distance a whitewashed wall appears white, but upon closer inspection one can make out the colors and shapes hidden under the surface.

Where is the South Asian in Asian American Studies?

                Jordache’s presentation that looked at Indians and South Africa and Kandice Chuh’s Introduction to Imagine Otherwise made me consider the absence of South Asians in our discourse of Asian American Studies.  I began to wonder, “Where is the presence of South Asians in Asian American Studies?”  I wondered if their exclusion from the exclusion was atypical or typical.  The term South Asian includes people from these countries: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lankan (http://eslibrary.berkeley.edu/asian-american-studies-collection). Thinking back on our course readings I realized an absence of Asian Indian literature, however, I remembered our introduction to the exclusions faced by Asians in America, and there is a brief mention of Asian Indians in Sucheng Chan’s chapter “The International Context of Asian Emigration” in her book Asian Americans. In my own experience with Asian Americans through Ethnic Studies in undergrad I also found a lack of South Asians in the discourse of Asian Americans. 

                In Chuh’s Introduction to Imagine Otherwise she explores what is meant by the term Asian American.  She sees the term Asian American as a homogenizing term that erases or belittles the diversity among different “Asian” groups (21).  In deconstructing the term Asian American Chuh focuses largely on the division in study of Asian Americans that seems split between activism and academics.  She later talks about the term Asian American as a representational sign saying, “’Asian American’ in this regard connotes the violence, exclusion, dislocation, and disenfranchisement that has attend the codification of certain bodies as, variously, Oriental, yellow, sometimes brown, inscrutable, devious, always alien” (27, emphasis added). I found this particular passage curious as it alludes to the lack of brownness in the term Asian American.  In looking up definitions of Asian Americans, South Asians seem to be a part of the definition although I have rarely seen their inclusion in Asian American Studies.

                I took to the internet to look at Asian American Studies programs to see if they included South Asians in their studies of Asian Americans, essentially I was looking for who they included in their definition of Asian Americans.  Many of the programs I saw included South Asians in their definitions of Asian Americans, but their faculty often didn’t include many people of South Asian descent while there was a disproportionate representation of faculty of Chinese and Japanese descent (at least among the California schools I happened to look at) and to a lesser extent faculty of Korean and Filipino descent.  While this is not necessarily a scientific or statistical finding, it is an observation I made. I wonder is there a space in Asian American Studies for their voices to be heard?

M. Butterfly’s Examination of Gender, Sex, Gender Presentation and Sexual Identity

     David Hwang’s play M. Butterfly offers of critique of many things which include: the relationship between the East and the West, Western imperialism (especially U.S. Imperialism) in the East, homophobia, and (the focus of this blog post) it calls into question the conflation of gender and sex. While all of these critiques are important I’m interested in how Hwang’s characters, particularly the biological women and Song Liling, offer a critique of the misleading conflation of gender and sex while also posing a queering of gender presentation and sexual identity. Just for clarity sake, gender is the socially constructed classification that ascribes qualities of masculinity and femininity which can change over time and are different between cultures; while sex is the bodily distinction that is based on anatomy (http://geneq.berkeley.edu/lgbt_resources_ definiton_ of_ terms). Gender presentation is the expression of one’s gender which is not always connected with one’s sexual identity. 

    In M. Butterfly, Hwang’s character Song is a biological male posing as a woman for the Chinese opera and for Communist China as a spy. As a woman Song allows himself to be courted by Rene and they carry on a twenty year partnership. For Song this gender presentation and sexual identity he must perform with tension because of the cultural norms of Chinese Communism where, as Comrade Chin states, “…there is no homosexuality in China” (39).  Song feels debased by his sexual interactions with Rene while simultaneously he desires to be worshipped and loved by him, however it is not clearly if he desires Rene for his masculine or feminine qualities.  In Song’s last conversation with Rene he remarks, “…I’m disappointed in you, Rene…I thought you’d become something more. More like…a woman,” (67) expressing a desire ultimately for a woman and not a man.  With Song, Hwang challenges notions of how gender and sex are conflated as well as how one’s gender expression is thought to connote one’s sexual identity.

   With most the biologically female characters, Hwang imbues them with masculine qualities. Renee is sexually forward and isn’t modest about discussing male genitalia and its association with economic and political power.  But perhaps the best critique of gender for a biological woman lies with Comrade Chin. Song questions Comrade Chin’s knowledge of how to be both a woman and a man.  Comrade Chin is characterized as masculine through her name and her powerful position within the Communist party in China.  This masculinity, however, is not in line with her sexual identity, as a heterosexual married woman.

 Works Cited

Hwang, David. M. Butterfly. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998.

http://geneq.berkeley.edu/lgbt_resources_definiton_of_terms

Asian Masculinity and Homosexuality

After reading Anne Cheng’s chapter on M. Butterfly, I found new meaning in Song’s statement that “being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man” (Hwang 83).  As Cheng puts it, “Asian and Asian American manhood is always exoticized, feminized, and hence made invisible” (Cheng 107).  Cheng briefly discusses the real-life story of the affair between Bernard Bouriscot and Shi Pei Shu, which inspired M. Butterfly.  Bouriscot claims that his gender misidentification was attributed to the “lack of sexual differentiation in China” (Cheng 114).  We can see part of that lack of sexual differentiation in the character of Comrade Chin, who is one of the few biological women in the play, who acts masculine by asserting dominance over Song in their scenes together.

Cheng highlights one way that the West has feminized Asian/American men:  hair.

            In nineteenth-century America, from the early 1870s to the 1900s, …popular pictorial

            representations of Asians in America played up this indistinction between the sexes

            through desexualization and animalization: men with “pigtails” and “Celestial Ladies”

            with ape faces. (Cheng 115)

Asian men also traditionally have less body hair compared to Western men.  One could argue that another way that the play feminizes Song’s character is by the description of his skin.  Comrade Chin says that Song’s hands are too smooth even after working the Hunan fields for four years (Hwang 71).  Gallimard comments on the “softness of her cheeks” after Song has stripped down for him (Hwang 89). 

This interchangeability of gender in the Asian male is part of Song’s identity crisis.  The play constantly reinforces that his value lies in his ability to pass as an Asian woman.  Only as an Asian woman is he able to obtain classified information from Gallimard in order to serve his country.  Only as an Asian woman is he loved by Gallimard.  Because one cannot distinguish between an Asian man or woman, Cheng suggests that “Asian homosexuality is an accident, an understandable mistake” (Cheng 115).  In the context of the play, this statement would only work from a Western perspective, since Comrade Chin constantly denounces homosexuality in China.

I admit that I have not read or seen enough to fully comment on the representations of Asian males in literature and film, but I’m wondering if there are balanced representations that do not buy into the typical emasculation and do not paint the Asian male as a sinister, sexual predator, such as in The Cheat (which by the way was a great connection made by Mary).

Works Cited

Cheng, Anne Anlin.  The Melancholy of Race.  New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Plume/Penguin Group, 1989.

The Western and the Eastern

In the description of this class, Denise cites Broken Trail, a recent TV miniseries western, as an example of representations of Asian Americans in recent cultural productions. After Tracey’s comment in class touching on the western genre, I find myself unable to resist posting about genre yet again.

To begin with, I would argue that the western genre is the genre most closely aligned with America/Americanism/the American Dream. In “The Western (Genre and Movies),” Douglas Pye notes that “oppositions of garden/desert, civilization/savagery … are at the heart of ideas about the west [and were] bound up with the western from the earliest times … The western is founded, then, on a tremendously rich confluence of romantic narrative and archetypal imagery modified and localized by recent American experience.”

It doesn’t seem a stretch in terms of usefulness to apply these ideas more broadly—if in a modified manner—in the service of conceptualizing “the eastern,” meaning Orientalist narratives. The relationship between exotic alien land and penetrating outside force is certainly heavily thematized in each. However, whereas in the Western the land is both a dream world full of promise and a rebellious/dangerous frontier, in Eastern narratives the land is a dream world characterized by a promise of danger or menace. The oppositions Pye considers to be so central to the western are merged in Eastern narratives that we’ve read.

For example, The Japanese Nightingale presents the East as having an ancient and mysterious civilization far more fascinating and compelling than that of the West; it is at least in part that blend of mystery and organized ritual that draws Jack towards Japan. Perhaps the earliest or clearest place to look for these narratives, however, might be in the early travel writing discussed in some of our reading. While I haven’t read any of this beyond the examples quoted in the criticism, the feminized / eroticized mode of describing the land seems like a variation on the colonizing narrative of the western. Both lands demand or invite conquering — and while the Western frontier fights back in its masculine, American way, the Eastern land has an eroticized and submissive attitude.

This is, of course, a far more complex issue than is possible to successfully explore in a blog post. One intriguing complication is the tendency in westerns to valorize the domestic—the archetypal western heroes are frequently either domesticated for the purpose of a happy ending or excluded, because of their lack of domesticity, from the happy ending of others (whom they’ve inevitably helped). It might be an interesting line of questioning to see how “the eastern” might be in conversation with that, and particularly the Butterfly genre, which is so concerned with domesticity.

M. Butterfly and The Cheat

Emily mentioned in class yesterday that it can be hard to talk about M. Butterfly because Hwang picks up on so many important issues that reach into so many different areas, and executes them so well. I agree. It’s easy to feel M. Butterfly working on us, and to see Hwang’s various branches of intricacy reaching off into things we’ve read or seen, that it can become difficult to coherently extract and build on what is already so ingrained in our experience of the play. For this reason, everything I feel like I want to say about the play seems at once minimizing and too big to contain—somehow obvious, and yet hidden until it suddenly becomes glaringly apparent as a core theme of the whole piece. (Incidentally, that is also sort of the narrative around which the play’s plot is built, so go figure. Hwang is just that good.) What I want to point out, in this post, gives me that uncomfortable feeling, but I’m going to move boldly onward.

In all the thought I’ve given to Hwang’s ability to critique American culture, literature, and foreign and economic policy by laying it bare in Gallimard’s and the audience’s relationship with Song, who consciously exploits the silly and dangerous assumptions upon which that relationship is based, I didn’t give much thought to how, in creating such a setup, Hwang’s depiction of Song fits into the continuum of insidious, uncategorizable, terrifyingly hybrid Asian characters that runs through Western literature. Just as M. Butterfly turns the “butterfly genre” on its head, deconstructing it, as it were, from the inside out, it also epitomizes, in some sense, the genre of which The Cheat might be an example, in which a dangerously hybrid Asian character destroys a white Westerner from within his/her own life. It’s hard to see the play this way, I think, because it works so well to subvert genre, but the more I consider M. Butterfly in terms of texts like The Cheat, the more I am fascinated by the connection. Obviously, this dangerous, hybrid, deviant, sexually mysterious Asian character is mostly a male stereotype, so it’s quite easy to see this as Hwang inverting another thread of Asian depiction in Western literature, at a more removed level. Indeed, in this analogy, Gallimard is cast as an Edith figure, which works extremely well with his more explicit feminization and ultimate destruction of the bounds of gender.

Looking back at The Cheat, and thinking ahead to M. Butterfly, common themes crop up almost instantly. The desperate and repressed Edith/Gallimard gains a sense of power when she/he enters into what turns out to be a rigged or suspect “deal” with Tori/Song. In beginning this relationship, Tori/Song eventually comes to claim a sense of “ownership” over Edith/Gallimard, which leads to Edith’s/Gallimard’s public performance and revelation of a shameful sexual interaction with Tori/Song, with implications of ultimate sacrifice. This revelation also cracks open the troubling nature of Tori/Song’s hybridity and establishes that character’s ultimate responsibility in breaking the law. Obviously, there are major deviations to be found if we think about Edith’s husband, but the storylines are strikingly similar. Whether this was conscious on Hwang’s part or not is essentially irrelevant, I think, since The Cheat is just one example of many in this genre which, like the “butterfly genre” is one in which our culture is so steeped, that, as Hwang says, he knew how to deconstruct it “despite the fact that I didn’t even know the plot” (95).

Gallimard's (Lack of) Power

The character of Gallimard in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, as I’m sure everyone noticed, is weak and cowardly, and yet, throughout the play, he yearns for power and convinces himself that he has it, though he never truly does.

We are immediately made aware of this in Act 1, Scene 1 when Gallimard describes his prison: “When I want to eat, I’m marched off to the dining room – hot, steaming slop appears on my plate. When I want to sleep, the light bulb turns itself off – the work of fairies. It’s an enchanted space I occupy. The French – we know how to run a prison” (2). Though we know he does not actually have any control over when he eats or when he sleeps, Gallimard convinces himself that he does – those things beyond his control (though jokingly attributed to fairies) happen when he wants them to. He also uses an association fallacy to put himself in a position of power despite being a prisoner: the French run the prison; Gallimard is French; therefore, Gallimard runs the prison.

Again, in Act 1, Scene 5, Gallimard fallaciously feels power – this time over women, though those women are actually photographs in a “girlie magazine” (10). He says, “…my body shook. Not with lust – no, with power. Here were women – a shelfful – who would do exactly as I wanted” (10). Those women can’t do anything, but Gallimard feels that he has the power to make them do what he wants, and so he enters into a fantasy where a woman from the magazine comes to life. She shows herself to him, but Gallimard – rather tellingly – is unable to react or to make the woman do anything to him. His power is actually powerless.

What I mean to point out with these two examples is how, right from the start, the audience is made to question Gallimard’s assertions of power. He uses faulty logic and proclaims power over agency-less objects, making the audience question Gallimard’s seeming power over Song later in the play. The scenes between Song and Comrade Chin reveal Song’s duplicity, but prior to that Gallimard believes he has power over Song (all her construction, of course), and the audience may very well fall prey to stereotypes and believe his power to be real. I, unfortunately, knew the play’s “surprise” before reading it for the first time (and Hwang kind of gives it away in the “Playwright’s Notes” section), but I’m curious as to the effect of Song’s reveal on an audience less familiar with the play – is it a surprise because it disrupts traditional stereotypes of Asian women? Or is it obvious from the beginning that Gallimard is being duped because his power could not be real? I guess I’m mostly curious about which takes precedence in a first time encounter with the play: the foreshadowing of Gallimard’s powerlessness by the playwright or the dominance of cultural and racial stereotypes. I hope we can discuss some aspects of this in class.

Locating the French in M. Butterfly

After reading M. Butterfly and Jodi Kim’s analysis of David Henry Hwang’s text in Ends of Empire, one question continues to trouble me: Does it matter that Rene Gallimard is French? Yes and no. Firstly, I will outline why it does matter, and why Kim’s analysis of M. Butterfly becomes problematic when reading the play in the context of French, rather than American, politics. As I will argue, France’s failed imperial relationship with Asia informs Gallimard’s struggles with his masculinity and calls into question his position as the bearer of both political knowledge and self-knowledge.

Hwang first legitimates Gallimard’s presence in China by making him a French diplomat. According to Ambassador Toulon, the United States did not have an embassy in Beijing in the 1960s. It is the French, with their long history of colonization in Asia, that must serve as the “eyes and ears” of the United States as the latter plans its attack in North Vietnam (Hwang 2.2). Toulon positions the French as givers of vital knowledge to the U.S. As Kim argues, Gallimard will eventually suffer from a “problem of knowledge” (Kim 91) that leads him to wrongly predict America’s success in Indochina. Yet it is precisely his French identity that places him in a privileged position of knowledge for the Americans—Gallimard becomes a sort of mouthpiece of the French nation that colonized Indochina for more than half a century—and that sets him up for failure. Gallimard becomes one among many failed imperialists: as a Frenchman, he is always already positioned in a history of French miscalculation because of France’s “loss” of Indochina by 1954. Toulon’s lament of this failure serves only to infantilize him and French diplomacy in general: “What a bunch of jerks. Vietnam was our colony. Not only didn’t the Americans help us fight to keep them, but now, seven years later, they’ve come back to grab the territory for themselves. It’s very irritating” (Hwang 2.3).

When the French embassy learns of America’s plan to assassinate Diem, Gallimard explains that he “considers this a vindication,” (Hwang 2.6), thus indicating a stance towards Vietnam that is imbued with French politics. Interestingly in this scene, Toulon credits Gallimard with advocating the assassination and notes that the success or failure of America’s plan will be a “test” of Gallimard’s diplomatic foresight (2.6). If America fails, according to Toulon, it will be Gallimard (and not the French government in general) that will be viewed as inept, but this is only because it is Gallimard’s name that is on the report. Toulon’s absurd diplomatic logic, as well as Gallimard’s miscalculations, present a poor image of French diplomacy grounded in a “problem of knowledge” (Kim 91). That problem is highlighted most obviously in Gallimard’s arguably willful and conscious misreading of Song’s gender and of his own sexuality. In fact, Gallimard links his presumed diplomatic prowess to his masculinity: When he is promoted to vice-consul, he recognizes that “At age thirty-nine, I was suddenly initiated into the way of the world” (Hwang 1.12). This world, according to Gallimard, is a misogynistic one in which “God is a man” and in which He “creates Eve to serve Adam, who blesses Solomon with his harem but ties Jezebel to a burning bed” (1.12). Thus, Hwang positions Gallimard as an always-already failed vessel of both diplomatic knowledge and self-knowledge because he is implicated in a history of failed French imperialism in Asia. His claims to masculinity are equally subverted (and perverted?) because such claims are linked to his position as the flawed bearer of knowledge.

There are several instances in M. Butterfly, however, in which Gallimard is complicit in subsuming his French identity under the heading “Westerner.” Hwang presents a subversive discussion of Orientalist perspectives through Gallimard, whose desire to place himself and Song into the stereotypical roles of the Butterfly genre ultimately adulterate his self-knowledge and foreground him as a failed negotiator of international relations.

Hwang critiques Cold War logics that define the East as homogenous. Yet, he is perhaps also critiquing a related logic that posits a monolithic West. In “The El Dorado of Commerce,” Kim argues that Hwang critiques Western tendencies to view the East as an “undifferentiated, homogenous mass, with one Asian national fungible with another” (Kim 87). Hwang achieves this critique through Gallimard, who compares his situation as a Frenchman in love with a Chinese “woman” to the story of the American Pinkerton and his relationship to the Japanese Cho-Cho-San and who thus makes little or no distinction between China and Japan. By the end of the play, it becomes evident, however, that Song Liling’s Chinese identity is crucial to the plot, since is working for Mao and the “Great Proletarian State”(Hwang 2.4). Song’s professed loyalties to Mao ground her identity in China and serve to highlight the absurdity of Gallimard’s alignment of Song with Cho-Cho-San and the Japanese-American relations of the Butterfly genre. While Song’s identity is always in gendered racial flux, her/his Chinese identity is crucial, even if Gallimard fails to recognize it as such. He is content to call her Butterfly and to discuss the universal characteristics of “Oriental women” (2.6). He willingly remains deaf to Song’s espionage even after he has been told that s/he is a spy.

Gallimard’s unwillingness to recognize Song’s nationalist identity in order to maintain the fantasy also causes him to view the West in a monolithic way, and to align himself (and be aligned) with an undifferentiated Western identity. After Song says that she will no longer play Madame Butterfly because it upholds stereotypes of the “Oriental woman and the cruel white man,” Gallimard laments, “So much for protecting her in my big Western arms” (Hwang 1.6). Like his desire to cling to a fantasy of the stereotypical Oriental woman, Gallimard is content to play the role of the stereotypical Westerner when he says “If the Americans demonstrate the will to win, the Vietnamese will welcome them into a mutually beneficial union…Orientals will always submit to a greater force” (2.3). In this instance, does it matter that Gallimard is French? By the end of the play, Gallimard becomes so steeped in Orientalist fantasy that he comes to recognize himself not only as Rene Gallimard and Madame Butterfly, but as “pure imagination” itself (3.2). Ultimately, however, Gallimard subverts his complicity in maintaining the Butterfly genre’s Manichean West/East, masculine/feminine logics by literally killing himself into the image of the Butterfly. Yet, what is interesting to me in his negotiation of the role of the Western male in the Butterfly tale is what it means for him to be a Frenchman in the political context of the Cold War.

Works Cited

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1988.

Kim, Jodi. “The El Dorado of Commerce: China’s Billion Bellies.” Ends of Empire:
Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Minneapolis & London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010. 63-93.

Multiculturalism as Imaginary Fusion

Lisa Lowe’s examination of the 1990 Los Angeles Festival of the Arts helped me to question the purpose of such events.  Although this event was meant to be a “celebratory…vision of Los Angeles as multicultural metropolis,” Lowe says that it does not address the larger issues of “exclusion…dissent, conflict, and otherness” (Lowe 85-86).  In other words, there is a false sense of heterogeneous groups coming together under the auspice of showcasing performing arts and also acceptance by the dominant race.  This immediately made me think of Anne Cheng’s discussion of the poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” by Walt Whitman in relation to Smith’s Twilight.  Cheng says that this poem “seems to embrace a fundamental assumption that the maintaining of the prevailing condition of not seeing the other…is necessary for an imaginative fusion” (Cheng 193). 

The LA Festival and Whitman’s poem both advocate multiculturalism as a sort of utopia

where differences in race, ethnicity, and class are overlooked.  This notion is “problematic”, because as an audience, we are asked to “forget history” (Lowe 86).  Diversity festivals create the illusion “that American culture is a democratic terrain to which every variety of constituency has equal access and in which all are represented” (Lowe 86).  Cheng says that “Love must look away in order not to look away” (Cheng 194).  In the context of the multicultural festival, we are asked to embrace the many cultures and peoples of our vast nation by overlooking their differences.  However, participating alone in the festival signifies difference and exoticness.  The performers become objects to which the dominant race fixates its gaze.  As a spectator, the dominant race can attend these events and feel it is active in achieving the myth of the melting pot with the racial other. 

But outside of the festival environment, how much interaction actually occurs between the dominant race and racial other?  This relates to what was said in class about how a potential white PBS audience can watch the film version of Twilight, attempt to be empathetic, and then return to their everyday lives without considering true coalition and resolution with racial others.  On the same token, how much interaction occurs between different racial and ethnic groups?  Why is art the site of attempting to unify disparate groups and what purpose does it serve?  Can art bridge differences?  As a Chinese-American poet in the 21^st century, these are all questions I would like to pursue in my own work and my own future participation in diversity festivals.

Works Cited

Cheng, Anne Anlin.  The Melancholy of Race.  New York, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Lowe, Lisa.  Immigrant Acts.  Durham, Duke University Press, 1996.