My grandmother, a traveller, always brought back dolls for my sisters. Some were quite finely made, others funny little souvenirs, but each, wearing her or his national costume, stood for the culture they came from.
Soon there was a cupboard full, and I was interested in trying to make them move. I had a puppet theatre at the time, and was an enthusiastic deviser of miniature extravaganzas into which I could co-opt some of these dolls. Put on a finger, they could be wagged beside the leading glove puppets. Then, when life-size clothing became available, it was tempting to act out pieces for ourselves. The pink silk bathrobe my grandmother brought back from Singapore or Hong Kong gave rise to a play called ‘The Goddess’ in which my sister – or was it me? – appeared from the wings at the end to put right the romantic miseries of those lost – ‘amazed’ – in some exotic clime. I don’t know what our sense of the East, or the tropics, was based on; our primary references would have included The Mikado, Madam Butterfly and South Pacific, and my grandmother’s photographs of herself in oriental dance spectaculars of the 1920s. I don’t recall being much aware of an Asian presence in Adelaide in the 1950s and ’60s, except for a visit to a Chinese restaurant on a special occasion, until my father started bringing home Japanese and Chinese businessmen for weekend barbecues – but that was later.
Yet in those childhood theatricals the elements were already present: tourism, costume, performance, ritual, and gender ambivalence. The Goddess who came down from her heavenly mountain in pink silk to put all to rights in the last scene was androgynous and all-bountiful, omnipotent yet all-merciful, pure, yet all-experiencing – and her embroidered vestments originated in a tourist hotel shop. In her bewildering array of attributes, she was – I would discover later – Asia, as first conceived in our scripting and enactment of her.
It is a site, or a trope, that merits subjection to cultural analysis. What interests me here is the identification of other cultures with their dress, the intimacy of our association of costume change with difference, and with the possibility of difference – different experience, different power, different wisdom. To put on someone else’s clothes is easy, of course; to naturalise the look is much more difficult, and may not even be desirable, since that would miss the point – of slipping round the house in a sarong or chinois dressing gown, of the batik shirt, the Mao suit, the sari or the kaftan. Or, those looks that, epitomising the undesirable Asianisation, can never be worn: bound feet, elaborate Japanese kimono, elongated earlobes, coolie hat, or, for that matter, the salaryman’s dark suit, tie, white shirt and Rolex watch. The idea that being Asian is a matter of dressing up runs into a conception of Asia as a zone of theatre, peopled by masks. Contrast this with Asian practice, where the identification of modernisation with wearing Western clothes (beyond the salaryman suit now to Levi 501s, Armani and Gautier) has been carried out so resolutely as to internationalise Western clothing, in both where it is made and how it is marketed, with the result that the West has no ‘national costume’ left, and is rendered into a transparent state of undress, tariff barriers notwithstanding.
In the People’s Republic of China nowadays, for instance, the only place you see people wearing what is thought of as traditional dress will be in contexts of ritual and display, such as political parades, religious festivals and major sporting events, in luxury hotels and restaurants, for weddings and in the theatre. Equally, the anti-traditional costumes of the Maoist era are now confined to the military and enforcement organs, and menials. It is curious, then, that the China constructed for and by foreigners – I’m thinking particularly of cinema, but there are parallels in the visual arts and other areas of promotion – is so dependent on distinctively Chinese forms of dress. It means, in turn, that plots tend to revolve around theatrical performers (M. Butterfly, Farewell My Concubine), weddings (Red Sorghum, The Wedding Banquet) and concubines, the precursors of today’s hotel and restaurant hostesses (Raise the Red Lantern, The Joy Luck Club). Heavy make-up is required. Can the outside world not see Chinese except as masks and butterflies (victim women), broken on a wheel?
This habit of imagining is partly a consequence of Chinese politics. China has masked itself to the world for so long. Chinese officials, especially those seen abroad, have had to be actors. Internally too, Chinese political life is a kind of theatre, with relationships between leaders and Party, and Party and people, stagemanaged by formidable propaganda arts, arts which reached their apogee (but not their end) in the Cultural Revolution theatrics attributed to Chairman Mao and his showbiz wife Jiang Ching. Unreality, if you like, is a Chinese reality. Blame it on the philosopher of Taoist paradox, Chuang-tzu.
Is it sensible for us, as Australians, to want to find a different Asia? Or is it mostly fin de siecle coincidence, come round again, that this postmodern (because pre-modern) quality of China – and other developing sectors of Asia – soothes anxieties that our world is destabilising and toppling, and suits our yearnings for an escape from the pressures of history, as new economic and political determinations affect us from outside?
The 1990s see us charmed by a new bamboo curtain of chinoiserie, and some comparable trends concerning other regional indigenous cultures. As so often before in Australian history, and in the broader evolution of Western civilisation, the East is looked to for inspiration, renewal, release, and even, in an ironic reversal of missionary roles, of salvation. To the Enlightenment, and under Mao, China offered models of Utopian government. To the late nineteenth century, China offered an escape from puritanism, and, to hippiedom, a new kind of spirituality. To the economic gurus of the 1980s and ’90s China, via Confucianism and the Four Little Dragons, offers a regime of economic vigour. To Australia now, China, in this protean construction, is an essential ingredient in a new reflection of ourselves. It doesn’t matter much what the diverse Chinese may actually make of us or what they may want. When we say to the Chinese, ‘But we’ve remade ourselves in this image for your sake,’ we may find them as bamboozled as we are when we observe Chinese diplomats following the rules of Western etiquette they’ve learned from their going-overseas manual: Don’t Pat the Child and Kick the Dog – foreigners do it the other way round.
This is territory Chris Berry explores in a dizzying, brilliant essay, A Bit on the Side: East–West Topographies of Desire (1994). Discursing on Asian elements in cinema as seen and made in Australia, from an insider/ outsider position (he comes from England via Peking and California), Berry tosses off some welcome insights into Australia’s embrace of Asia. While he comments mostly on film, notably The Good Woman of Bangkok, a discussion text for which Cultural Studies must be grateful to director Dennis O’Rourke, Berry is at his best on the politico-psychology of the progression of ‘identities’ that is taken for Australia’s cultural history: a commitment to British empire, displaced by nationalism, inflected to include multiculturalism as an extension of the ‘fair go’ ethos, barely accommodating Asians who arrived as refugees, only to be challenged by the claim that Australia, being part of Asia, needs further re-alignment. Berry points out the problematic binarism of all this: Britishness versus barbarism; free Australia versus enslaving Mother England; Australia en face with Asia. He imagines a new kind of relationship altogether, Australia-in-Asia, where identity ceases to be an either/or choice. ‘The idea of a clear line between … male and female, oppressor and victim … Australia and Asia, begins to give and the space of “Australia in Asia” as a postcolonial space rather than a third self-conception based on the nation begins to emerge …’ In this quest, Berry finds particular inspiration in the various constructions of Asian queerness seen in recent cinema, where the challenge to hierarchies of sexuality and gender in queerness implies a critique of the authoritarian structures by which Asian societies, or their governments, often see themselves constituted.
Moving from a discussion of homosexual rights (virtually non-existent) to broader human rights in Asia, Berry concludes his book with a timely warning against the Asian argument that human rights are ‘relative’ and by implication a Western invention and plot. This is a line put by Asian regimes disposed to trample over the human rights of their people, who may not concur that, because they are Asians, they don’t have rights as humans. ‘If … we allow the proposition to stand that homosexual rights (or women’s rights, or worker’s rights) are matters for only one part of the world, the game will be lost before it has even begun.’
But there are a couple of questions to ask here. The language and conceptualisation of these various rights have developed from the developed world (the coincidence of words identifies the package). What happens to these concepts as they cross cultures? The Chinese phrase xitizhongyong, ‘a foreign concept given a Chinese application’, by which early modern Chinese reformers rationalised their absorption of ideas from the West, remains helpful in understanding China’s responses to the outside world. Jars of Nescafé are bought as cabinet display items; traffic control systems are imported for crowd control. So what does ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ become as an imported life? Can it be a form of dressing up? Whatever the answer, the discourse is on the move in translation.
If Edward Said has given his kind of Orientalism a bad name, there may be other places where something is to be said for the good old orientalist whose interest in China (for example) lies in its wonderful, weird, mystical, mind-boggling qualities, a China that has a place on no agenda. I know what I’m saying is heretical. But today’s Orientalism might be a matter of finding ways to understand another culture that have nothing to do with trading ambitions or geopolitics. Orientalism is a way of finding something to love, to be ravished or amused or appalled by, in another culture, for finding inspiration there in things that are quite oblivious to the standards of the contemporary West – kitsch or sublime.
There persists a linkage of the Asian and the non-straight-male. It extends into such public areas as the desire, expressed by Asian leaders, for Australia to display cultural sensitivity in response to Asian values. It is as if the Australian ocker is being asked not to be too rough with the tender oriental flower. Asia is set up as already sensitive, exquisite and vulnerable. It is perhaps here a case of Asians self-orientalising to their own advantage. This is ironical given the virile warrior assertiveness, at least in performance, that energises the roles many Asian leaders play for domestic consumption. There Australians are asked to respond with a sensitive Asian impersonation of our own.
Oscar Wilde has been in my thoughts as I consider the question of our connection or disconnection with China. Wilde went west in his mission to Beautify America – an uphill battle – and approached the painter Whistler, another orientalist, about an expedition east, to Japan and Australia in 1883. Sadly the plan fell through. I have a feeling that many things would have turned out differently if Oscar had toured Australia and Japan. His poem ‘Symphony in Yellow’, an orientalist piece replete with silk, butterfly, jade and a temple (the Inns of Court, actually), inspired an Australian magazine to quote him: ‘So they are desirous of my beauty at Botany Bay … whither criminals are transported to wear a horrible yellow livery. Even they are called “canaries”. So I have written for them a Symphony in Yellow …’ Wilde allegedly improvised a stanza:
And far in the Antipodes
When swelling suns have sunk to rest
A convict to his yellow breast
Shall hug my yellow melodies.
Australia was destined to remain for Wilde a parody place, a travesty Orient. He returned to England, eventually to dress himself in oriental costume as Salome, heroine of his own tragedy. Narrow England suffocated Wilde, or at least spurred him to conceive a defiant other world in which wisdom and wit were one and nothing human was alien – a vision he crystallised in epigrams of quasi-oriental inscrutability. As he wrote a hundred years ago, in A Woman of No Importance: ‘… the world has always laughed at its own tragedies, that being the only way in which it has been able to bear them. And that, consequently, whatever the world has treated seriously belongs to the comedy side of things.’ It might be a Taoist master speaking.
The Australian poet Harold Stewart is a dedicated orientalist, having spent a great part of his life in Japan. He now lives in Kyoto. As his part in the Ern Malley episode shows, he was a genius pasticheur. Stewart’s remarkable volume of poems, Phoenix Wings: Poems 1940–6 (1948), written in Sydney during the war, contains stunning oriental pastiche or impersonation in sumptuous, hieratic language that summons to mind the poetry of Alexander Pope in The Rape of the Lock, if not the decadent exoticism of Beardsley, Wilde and Firbank a century and a half later. At that time Stewart was writing modernist mask poetry, in an agonisingly self-conscious way reaching for epic, for history, for a cultural or spiritual realm beyond the malaise of Europe (Australia). The poems belong, in their place and moment, more with, say, Australian artist James Gleeson’s surrealism than with the expatriate fantasy to which they are usually relegated. Harold Stewart long ago discovered, in the way of a conscious and highly disciplined impersonation, an Australia-in-Asia space that enabled the transformation of the world he knew through the devising of another.
Eternal only is the Golden Flower,
That fervent peace and liberation brings
From bondage to the wheel of opposites
In man, conflicting with the world’s extremes:
The separate hells of action and its choice,
Tyrannic licence or disordering law,
The painful pleasure in the loving hate,
And evil reason against good desire;
Which tear the unbelieving mind apart
From the conservative and clinging heart.
Eternal only is the Golden Flower,
The solar petals of whose bowl comprise
The rhythmic union of all plural things;
Supreme and gnostic blossom of the power
And principle, which is not compromise,
But knows the chiaroscuro of the soul:
The conscious flame, the causal depths of coal,
And welcomes both, to live them as one whole.
(from The Ascension of Feng)
Who else was writing like that in 1942? These poems are indeed, as Michael Heyward says, ‘one of the secrets of the war’. The lines are quoted here from the original 1948 edition. Stewart has since substantially rewritten them, pending publication of a revised version of the work in his Collected Poems. During three decades of life in Japan, his work, which includes much translation and two epics, has moved far in the direction of simplicity and refinement. For Harold Stewart, the creative release he found may have led to exile and neglect, at least from the Australian literary scene. Or maybe his time has finally come around.
1994