Afterword
Multiplying Loyalties
THE ACCUSATION OF BETRAYAL introduces a rupture into collective association; in doing so, it suggests the inadequacy of identity categories to represent subjects. The texts I have engaged here use sexuality to interrogate political alliance and expose the socially constructed and politically invested nature of affiliation. In proposing that identifications (and thus identities themselves) emerge through contestation, my inquiry inherently questions identity as a stable foundation for truth claims. This questioning is perhaps disappointing to those who, having noted the constituency my subtitle invokes, have turned to this book as a source of empirical data about Asian American women.
While writing this book, I was reminded of how this desire for hard facts underlies a traditional sense of liberal education, bringing to light the seemingly antithetical intentions of teaching and criticism. In a commentary column of the student paper, a freshman biology major in my class on Asian American literature urged fellow students to take humanities courses like mine as a corrective to what had been left out of their educations. Emphasizing the importance of knowing a repressed history, she wrote, “[This class] is about reading an eclectic collection of stories, plays, poems and essays and becoming a more informed and cultured person.…In my opinion, everyone should take at least one humanities class here at college. After all, it is the best deal you could get. Where else are you going to find an English, history, anthropology, sociology and psychology class in one?” (Parul Khator, “Humanities Classes Reveal Unknown History.” Miami Hurricane, 30 April 1999).
I was gratified by her validation; I want my students to be those informed and cultured persons that my teaching might help them to be. But I also want them to think critically about how history is represented, to be aware of what has been selectively disseminated for the record and how rhetorical arguments inform that record. Her comments invited me to think about my goals in teaching and writing about a literature with a clear investment in the material world.
The texts analyzed in this book have one thing in common beyond their various treatments of the shifting and at times treacherous nature of loyalty and allegiance; they all engage realist strategies for storytelling. This may not be surprising given that the marketplace for ethnic literature was initially governed by a desire for ethnographic reportage, making autobiography a standard genre in the field. Many of the works I have addressed also share an activist intent, whether as an insider's account of history or as critical commentaries on continuing sociopolitical conflict. This emphasis on political intervention creates a specific challenge for interpretation. Because realism has the appearance of being documentary, its methods of persuasion can often remain invisible as the details and drama of events drive the narrative forward. Invocations of a world in crisis can subordinate rhetoric, rendering communication seemingly transparent and unmediated. When a text converges with history, accuracy and authenticity are more often at stake than the ways narrative structure creates a text's persuasive appeal.
Suggesting that rhetorical analysis is not always vigorously applied to the evidence that documents oppression and resistance, Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol call for an interrogation of the “realist strategies that continue to secure legitimacy for certain truth claims” (Hesford and Kozol, 5). In the opening essays of Feminists Theorize the Political (1992), Joan Scott and Judith Butler attempt to reconcile the activist premises of, for example, Women's Studies, against postmodern recognition of the discursive nature of experiential evidence. Put another way, is a loyalty to realism necessarily a betrayal of postmodern skepticism? In mediating between the discursive and material, Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion is concerned with literary portrayals of women's experience, but more specifically with the gendered nature of women's political appeal. This book attempts to locate the social intervention of Asian American women's literature within its methods of rhetorical persuasion. My emphasis on how the scaffolding of narrative structure itself produces meaning has been intrinsic to my strategy of reading.
Yet my own critical endeavor might be said to deauthorize subjects in an ironic parallel to the way in which the accusation of betrayal itself undermines the subject's authenticity. As Butler notes on claiming “queer” as a political identity, “[T]he terms to which we do, nevertheless, lay claim, the terms through which we insist on politicizing identity and desire, often demand a turn against…constitutive historicity.…As much as identity terms must be used,…these same notions must become subject to a critique of the exclusionary operations of their own production” (Butler 1993, 227). As Butler implies, the challenge is to articulate theoretical positions that question the emergence of the subject and relieve it of foundationalist weight while at the same time presuming a subject who acts. This book has thus sought a method of reading that acknowledges literature's commitment to the material world—and the real women who people it—while being sensitive to the contingencies of its own production and reception. I hope this work has established an argument for the term “Asian American women” even as postmodern skepticism marks the use of identity categories as a necessary capitulation. I have thus insisted on highlighting texts by women as a way of marking their activist commitment and as a reminder that the stakes for generating gendered discourses are higher for women. However, the broadest suggestiveness of my readings cannot circumvent the historical specificity of each ethnic context, nor would I want to effect bland pronouncements on Asian American women as a constituency. Emphasizing rhetorical convergences across Asian ethnic texts is not meant to sidestep issues surrounding the inevitable insupportability of invoking this broad pan-ethnic category. Rather, I hope to inscribe Asian American women's agency, for one, as an authorial practice of textual manipulation not in order to privilege intentionality, but to situate Asian American writers as agents of ultimately political acts, acts that in turn exhibit awareness of how women have too often been positioned as mere objects of history.
I also want to mark a feminist reading practice that refuses to locate discourses of gender alterity on the side of unequivocal resistance even as it acknowledges the risks that speaking from the margins entails. I hope this practice of reading signals a wariness about situating gender (as well as racial) alterity as always challenging to dominant narratives. Pointing to the ways that sexuality works to resolve a crisis of citizenship provoked by racism, for example, may itself constitute a betrayal of the activist aims of Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies. Yet exposing the pervasiveness of ideology by naming the way in which hegemony functions is as equally a crucial and politicized endeavor as naming the ways it can be countered. Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes,
I do challenge the notion “I am therefore I resist!” That is, I challenge the idea that simply being a woman, or being poor or black or Latino, is sufficient ground to assume a politicized oppositional identity. In other words, while questions of identity are crucially important, they can never be reduced to automatic self-referential, individualist ideas of the political (or feminist) subject. (Mohanty 1991, 33)
The same caution applies to narratives wherein discourses of race, class, and gender are presumed to work in concert rather than competition, and is particularly applicable given the association between women's literature and affect. On the equivocal nature of sentimentality, Lauren Berlant writes, “in order to benefit from the therapeutic promises of sentimental discourse you must imagine yourself with someone else's stress, pain, or humiliated identity. The possibility that through the identification with alterity you will never be the same remains the radical threat and the great promise of this affective aesthetic” (Berlant 1998, 648). Betrayal and Other Acts of Subversion attempts to delineate the contours of that promise, particularly as sentimentality is deployed as a means of international intervention. It is also a meditation on the way in which this identification becomes a means of eliciting domestic consent and how speech from the margins must be legitimized by cultural norms in order to obtain a forum. Nevertheless, a question opened by these chapters as a parallel inquiry might be, can a more radical feminist vision emerge in Asian American literature given the terms I have engaged here?
I have argued, for example, that the posture of hyperfemininity is positioned as a requirement of (qualified) national citizenship and public being. In contrast, can masquerade and identification initiate a collectivity beyond the national? Literature does inscribe an alternative possibility for masquerade in portrayals of a seemingly transhistorical bond between women that enables them to claim ethnic solidarity beyond a First and Third World division. Instances that depict Asian American women's “going native” express both a desire for women's connection based on diasporic peoplehood and test the authenticity of that connection. Mimicry in this sense is a form of national passing that entails the deliberate erasure of sexuality as a sign of First World association. A means of trying on identities, masquerade is not a strategy of integration or asserting civic presence as in Chapter 2, but a means of establishing ethnic-, gender-, and class-based alliances.
Andrea Louie's depiction of a Chinese American woman's spiritual quest in China in Moon Cakes, for example, raises the question of whether ethnicity trumps nationality. Attempting to pass as one of the masses, Maya strategically chooses cheap, ill-fitting Chinese-made clothing and ventures out into the hotel lobby:
I stare at myself in the mirror, my body clad in these poorly made and slightly scratchy clothes. Do I look Chinese? It's the same me. I wish I were paler, thinner.…I feel the bellhops looking at me. What must they be thinking?…Do I look the part? Do I look like I belong here? (Louie 1995, 221)
Her masquerade expresses a desire for racial connection that surpasses national citizenship; Maya “goes native” as a test of her Chinese authenticity. Performing Chineseness necessitates class passing; her intent is to signal material deprivation (“poorly made” clothes, appearing underfed). The childlike uniform attempts to subsume her sexuality: she wipes off her lipstick and chooses a conservatively feminine blouse with a Peter Pan collar. Like Julia Kristeva's moment of self-reflection before a group of Chinese women, “Who is speaking, then, before the stare of the peasants at Huxian?” in About Chinese Women, and like Mukherjee's anticipation of how her adolescent, sari-clad self appears to a local underclass, Maya attempts to project her image from the bellhops' point of view as the site of authentic witnessing. Paralleling Spivak's point that Kristeva's reflection is evidence of obsessive Western self-centeredness in the face of its Asian “Other” (Spivak 1988, 137), this instance can likewise be read as a Westerner's negotiation of subjectivity in the face of a foreigner's impenetrable gaze. Yet her passing intends to confirm her sameness to them, to confirm a racial bond. This desire for native likeness, to apprehend the self not through negation but through affirmation, is also a desire for a sense of self beyond nationality and beyond the artifice of (Western) femininity. Nevertheless, while this masquerade is in part a demonstration of sexlessness, her question, “What must they be thinking?” both affirms the power of the (Asian) male gaze to approve her new status at the same time that it fixes them as fundamentally alien to herself.
This instance of masquerade is not, as I have argued, a path to American integration but appears later as a means of testing women's alliance. A trivial exchange with a stranger who bumps her accidentally offers a sign of the success of Maya's “disguise”: “Duibuchi, jie jie,” she says to me. Excuse me, older sister, she is saying. “Meiguanshi,” I whisper. “Don't worry about it, I reply in Mandarin” (222). Appearing unremarkable to a Chinese woman is the proof of her accomplishment; the address reassuringly interpellates her into China's gender and generational hierarchy. In contrast to Houston's and Mukherjee's portrayals, Maya's act suggests alternative possibilities for transnational connection in its evocation of diasporic ethnic belonging; interestingly, it suggests that ethnic incorporation necessitates deforming markers of culturally coded femininity, here, transforming the sexual into the familial.
Depictions of passing also expose the limits of global solidarities based on race and mediated through gender performance: as Amy Tan's Chinese American heroine embarking on a personal quest to China remarks, “Even without makeup, I could never pass for true Chinese” (Tan 1989, 312). The comment raises the question of whether or not the “traits” of First World femininity can ever be adequately masked even as they appear to be products of self-conscious art. Marie Hara's short story, “Old Kimono,” establishes Japanese women's bonds across divisions of history and territory at the same time that it implies that connection's contingency. The story depicts a Japanese American, Hawaiian local who finds a used kimono at a rummage sale and intends, to the disapproval of the elderly women who sell it to her, to use its fabric in one of her own fashion creations. Her intent to create a culturally hybrid entity would involve, in part, the destruction of the kimono. Despite her resistance to tradition (“I don't wanna wear dis kine old-fashion stuff”), upon trying on the kimono in front of the mirror, she undergoes a momentary transformation—she experiences herself as a traditional Japanese woman and takes on her mannerisms, posture, and philosophy: “The line of her back now had some starch to it, and her face grew masklike as if dreaming deeply. Erasing her individual expression, she had traded it for something more adequately female” (Hara 1994, 43). The protagonist is momentarily seduced by her own now ultrafeminine image, by a sense of likeness and connection (if not also eroticized self-love) created in mimicry. Unlike Proust's madeline, the kimono does not return her to a prior memory but evokes a presumably latent diasporic connection to Japanese women. This link to heritage is not portrayed as in The Joy Luck Club as dormant “in the blood” but is instigated by the outward trappings of femininity, the external attributes—clothing, posture, movement, attitude—that visually invest one with a gendered social identity.
In the story, this epiphany is fleeting: her mother comes in and efficiently informs her that she has the kimono on backwards: “Anybody who know anyt'ing—all da people who see dat—dey gonna laugh at you” (45). The story speaks to, in Lisa Lowe's terms, the infidelity of translation, to the impossibility of refashioning what is locally Hawaiian and Japanese American into what is authentically Eastern (Lowe 1994). The protagonist's moment of kinship is ephemeral because, like the vase of red anthuriums (tellingly described as “boy flawahs”) on her bureau that look so crudely robust and thus natural, she is too unapologetically local to be wrested into another feminine context. The story ends ambivalently, at once celebrating the protagonist's connection to Japanese women across the expanse of time and questioning whether this transnational identification can be sustained or is, in fact, desirable. The story suggests a potentially empowering view of femininity as cultural performance at the same time that it may situate this performance as particular to Japanese culture, its heightened sense of aesthetic feminine perfection. However, by exposing femininity's outward artifice, the story implies that what can be put on can also be, like the kimono at the end of the story, taken off and discarded. Masquerade here initiates women's connection while revealing it to be inextricably valenced by history and context.
In neither of these vignettes does identification with the “native” Asian woman necessarily express a desire for class solidarity. From scenes of diasporic longing, then, I turn now to the domestic realm in which class divisions form a barrier to women's unity in spite of shared gender oppression. While I have suggested in Chapter 2 that identifying with the phallic woman promises access to the national imaginary, Nellie Wong's poem, “Woman in Print,” hints that women's identification with one another may produce a different result, the politicization of consciousness. Evoking uncertainty, denial, and empathy about kinship based on class and gender, the poem finds its speaker poised at a moment of breakthrough to a collective identification initiated by the halting recognition of likeness. The poem centers around the image of an aging prostitute who becomes the catalyst for the speaker's own reflections about herself and her social position.
Woman in Print
In the coffee shop I see a woman in a print dress.
It is 38 degrees outside, but she wears no coat.
She merely sits quietly,
alone
smoking a cigarette,
her gray hair combed back.
I have seen this woman, always coatless,
walking by a construction site.
I have watched construction men watching her
and I assume
she descends their darkened stairs.
She is as naked as any woman I have ever seen
or do my eyes deceive me
in this downpour?
I am a woman.
I wear a coat.
(N. Wong 1977, 28).
The recurring sight of the older woman in a thin cotton dress in winter causes the speaker to assume that she is forced to prostitute herself as a means of survival. The final two lines of the poem indicate the doubleness of the speaker's relationship; as a woman she is subject to the same gender “construction” yet her class background shields her from the necessity of bartering her own sexuality so literally—she wears a coat because she can afford one. The tension between the literal and the figurative reflects the duality of the speaker's feelings: she identifies as a woman but speculates on the difference between them. The woman is in a print dress, yet committed to print by the speaker's words; the woman is both nakedly or easily read and she is naked because she wears no coat. The men work a construction site, yet also construct through their sight—the male gaze forces the feminine body to submit to a gendered specularization that erases her individuality and replaces it with the mark of sexual difference. Placing the woman “in print” and thereby forcing her to conform to the speaker's speculation sets up a complicity between the “construction” men and the writer, a complicity that disrupts the gendered likeness of the two women.
The form complements the duality of the meaning—the final two lines are separate but form a sort of couplet. The absent conjunction between the lines signals the disjunction between the subject and the speaker: the speaker is a woman, but she wears a coat. The tonal flatness and decisiveness of the two declarative sentences counter the very undecidability the lines initiate. Likewise, the concrete simplicity of the images—“gray hair combed back,” “38 degrees”—is undercut by the speaker's uncertainty, which renders even the representation of the image speculative: “do my eyes deceive me / in this downpour?” The overall movement of the poem is one of connection and distance; the speaker identifies with the woman's condition (“I am a woman”) at the same time that she is aware that their class positions distance them (“I wear a coat”). The end of the poem finds the speaker both poised at a moment of collective recognition and aware of the differences between women that inhibit collectivity.1
For the speaker in Wong's poem, the question is not so much “Who is the woman in print?” but “Who am I (not) before this woman?” The process of speculation implicates the self in multiple categories of identity, power, and authority in ways that deny easy oppositions. The poem locates in gender likeness the seeds of a more radical, although still ambivalent solidarity not based in national community but in the shared experience of women. Like Hara's story, which portrays a moment of identification enabled by masquerade, the poem depicts witnessing women's constructed femininity as the means through which women imagine alternative identifications, multiple loyalties. Engaging the same dynamics of performativity and witnessing discussed in Chapter 2, but to different effect, these portrayals highlight the ways in which a seemingly transhistorical femininity enables women to claim other forms of community beyond the national.
These vignettes thus offer one means of bridging the divide between domestic and transnational literature that, as I discuss in the introduction, has attained the status of a paradigm shift in Asian American Studies. In affirming collectivities not based on relations between nations, they multiply sites of potential connection and allegiance to situate this divide as merely one arena of concern within Asian American literature. However, this book contributes to the debate on the “postnationality” of the literature not through an attempt to confirm or refute whether Asian American groups maintain ties to Asia and successfully shuttle between loyalties as a testament to cultural hybridity. Rather, one focus of this work is the mutual investment between the United States and Asia as the First World precepts embedded within Americanized gender norms are deployed in literature. I emphasize not so much a commonality of women's experience that binds them across ethnicities and cultures, but a commonality of the authors' modes of persuasion that I suggest are readily influenced by their awareness of these cultural norms. I have deliberately chosen to balance texts associated with the early formation of the discipline with lesser known texts to demonstrate not only rhetorical convergences across ethnicities but also across time periods. On one level, these norms can become graphed onto—or willingly appropriated by—the Asian Others as a means of reconciling or “domesticating” racial difference. On another level, like Wong's and Hayslip's goodwill messages, Asian American women's literature can unintentionally serve the interests of American diplomacy and capital abroad. In Cheong's and Law-Yone's novels, the discourse of human rights marks a particularly contemporary American means of representing Asia. In drawing a direct connection between domestic discourse and postcolonial politics, this project reorients discussions on the globalization of culture, on whether transnational cultural exchange is a reciprocal process or dictated by U.S. global hegemony, what Pico Iyer has called the “Coca-colanizing forces” of American culture (Iyer 1988). Literature bears a direct if muted role in this exchange if what travels across national boundaries is not only labor or commodities but rhetoric itself, which conveys American values and precepts as readily as popular culture. However, I am not making an argument about the impact of Asian American literature overseas as much as about the ways it potentially contributes to American understanding of Asia in terms that are readily accessible to American audiences.
In examining literary advocacy, I have argued that gender discourse is one means of accessing First World ideas of fairness, equality, pacifism, and justice without self-consciously marking a First World investment. My emphasis invites other avenues of literary inquiry that might likewise blur the distinction between Asian American literature as a domestic or a transnational body of work. Does the rhetoric of infidelity appear in literary treatments of postcolonial sites that I have not addressed, for example, appeals to Korean unification or critiques of American military presence in the Philippines? Does what I have noted as a gendered universalist discourse structure other calls for American intervention into purported human rights abuses in Asia?
Such questions move beyond literature, pushing us to think about the use of women as boundary markers in a world where national borders are seen to be eroding. I began this study with two postwar examples of ethnic Japanese women who embody the site of rupture between two competing affiliations and whose notoriety is a result of their troubling homosocial compacts. What their examples reveal is that the processes of imaginary identification are most perceptible when the bonds that these identifications forge are traumatically severed. Like that of Japanese American internment, Tokyo Rose's case demonstrates how effectively the state can mobilize its resources to unify against a common “enemy.” As the state pinpoints the traitor within to legitimize a political program or justify increased internal surveillance, those marked by racial difference become vulnerable; this is particularly true in the case of Wen Ho Lee, who has been accused of spying. To consolidate or refigure alliances defined by region, religion, or ethnicity, or as consortiums between nations, invoking disloyalty is a strategy that exceeds the confines of the state. It can also be deployed against the state's interests, whether by the internal ethnic groups who petition it, workers who labor within or outside its boundaries, insurgent armies who wage war against it, or nongovernmental organizations that claim a politics transcendent of territorial interests. As I hope to have shown, such tactics bear specifically gendered resonance as concepts of fidelity, patriotism, peace, or ethics become harnessed to the figure of the traumatized or treacherous woman. Asian American women's writing challenges us to recognize how women solidify alliance in the service of both local and larger loyalties. As the rhetoric of allegiance comes to govern the dynamics among individuals, ethnicities, and nations with increasingly violent consequences, the more necessary it becomes to understand how gender regulates group belonging.
My first-year student's testimony as to how reading Asian American literature contributes to her education reminds me, then, both of what I am glad that she takes away from my classroom but also of what I need to impart more forcefully. I want not merely to replace what was previously unknown with empirical knowledge, but to question the very ways in which language produces meaning and how positionality and context are intrinsic to that production. My goal as a teacher and a reader of texts is to expose literature's political investment, and in doing so, give students the tools to do the same. My student's comments remind me of the dual goals of interpretation and also push me to define what I hope the reader takes away from this book. I have chosen to highlight Asian American women's putative betrayals in order to analyze how lines of affiliation are drawn and, indeed, policed. To be outcast from any collective is to come face to face with its terms of inclusion, to confront the internal dynamics that render it coherent and stable to its members. Asian American women's literature eloquently attests to the stakes behind the maintenance of these lines, particularly for those who transgress them. In doing so, it reveals that the question of identity is also invariably one of loyalty. As literature produced by Asian women in the United States engages assumptions about the First and Third Worlds and confronts competing conceptions of the gender role, it betrays an American ideology infused with global concerns, wedding the national and the transnational. Urging us toward an understanding of the processes by which identifications and thus identities emerge through contestation, Asian American women's writing offers us utopian possibilities in an imperfect world as well as calling that world into account.