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.”