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.
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