Five

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The Gendered Subject of Human Rights

DOMESTIC INFIDELITY IN IRRAWADDY TANGO AND
THE SCENT OF THE GODS

 

Sister Katherine said that just because something
was imaginary did not mean it could not have
consequences in the real. She told us to write that
down, and that when we were older we would
understand.
    (Fiona Cheong, The Scent of the Gods)

IN 1995, the New York Times pronounced the emergence of a new South Africa, this time, in Asia.¹ Burma, now known as Myanmar, was reported to be the target of an international divestment campaign on the basis of its human rights and environmental abuses.² This shift from South Africa to Burma as recipient of the dubious honor of greatest human rights abuser arose from the events of 1988, in which the military fired on a crowd of prodemocracy demonstrators, culminating in the detention of an estimated three thousand political prisoners, including the house arrest of the National League for Democracy (NLD) leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in 1989.³

Although the events of the 8/8/88 democracy movement in Yangon (Rangoon) were displaced in the American media by reports of the massacre in Tiananmen Square the following year, the Burmese democracy movement gave the media one thing that the Chinese movement did not: a living and breathing goddess of democracy in the form of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Western-educated daughter of assassinated national independence leader Aung San. Like the papier-mache goddess erected in Tiananmen Square, Aung San Suu Kyi quickly became the emblem of what Burma lacked and a potent symbol of the collective desire of a people. After casting about for an appropriate analogy for Aung San Suu Kyi (Bhutto? Aquino?), the British press hit upon “Burma's Gandhi” in an attempt to describe a platform familiar to the West: nonviolent protest, democracy, human rights (Kreager 1991, 321).

These representations of Burma in the 1990s reinforce what has consistently been taken as Asia's difference from the West. Just as Rey Chow has suggested in regard to Tiananmen Square (Chow 1991), coverage of the Burmese democracy movement was likewise a spectacle of Asian lack—of democracy, freedom of expression, the right of assembly—and an occasion in which Americans could indulge in reports of their national symbols reproduced for global consumption, whether of hastily constructed models of the Statue of Liberty on the streets of Beijing or of the Gettysburg Address recited word for word in English outside the American embassy in Yangon.⁴ The construction of such differences, as Lisa Lowe has noted, serve specific American interests, not only justifying United States imperialism but producing the very idea of American national self-conception.⁵ Most recently, reports of Asian lack of basic freedoms and civil liberties serve as a reminder of what the United States is proud to export along with its now triumphantly touted brand of capitalism. For example, a democracy such as Singapore, once lauded as a model of postcolonial modernization and now enjoying Asia's highest standard of living after Japan, has gained media attention in the United States for abrogating social freedoms. While Michael Fay's caning in Singapore in 1994 was not an event comparable in magnitude to the events in Burma, it was nonetheless heavily covered in the U.S. media; his punishment was the occasion for comparison to Asian philosophy and governance, in this case, as a means of evaluating the American domestic “crisis” over juvenile crime.⁶ The American public was both entertained and shocked to hear about Singapore's “draconian justice” in which graphic descriptions of flogging supplemented reports of bans on chewing gum or smoking in public, and of fines for such offenses as littering ($625), failing to flush a public toilet ($94), and eating on the subway ($312) (Jay Branegan, “Is Singapore a Model for the West?” Time, 18 June 1993, 36).⁷ The caning incident both assured Americans that they have what Asia wants—individual freedom—and reminded them of what they once had and lost— discipline.

In spite of the seeming contrast between such representations of Asia invoked by Aung San Suu Kyi's quiet courage while under house arrest, Harry Wu's cribbing notes in the margins of a dictionary in a Chinese prison, or an American bad boy unduly punished, an underlying similarity emerges: both representations depend on the figure of an individual who suffers the abuses of a regime in the name of abstract rights. Such images portray not just the violation of democratic rights, but the violation of democratic rights as human rights.

With the Cold War dead, the War on Drugs taking an uncomfortably domestic focus, and fears of Asian economic competition complicated by reports of Toyotas being manufactured in Kentucky and diminished by the Asian economic crisis, human rights has emerged as a dominant framework in which the United States places Asia. A testament to the strength of such a narrative, the emphasis on human rights succeeds in reconciling for an American public the economic and political situations of countries as various as Burma, Singapore, China, and Vietnam. For example, in spite of their shared history as former British colonies, Burma and Singapore have taken opposite courses. Under the leadership of a military junta since 1962, Burma was named a “least-developed country” by 1987. In contrast, held up as an economic success, Singapore is known as one of Asia's four “dragons,” along with South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Governed by single parties whose tenure has lasted more than three decades, both Burma and Singapore have been called to account for alleged violations, although obviously to different degrees.

At best, this concern over human rights abuses in Asia represents an increased awareness of the repressive methods of state control, a vigilance acknowledged to be the shared responsibility of global powers. At worst, it is merely a form of spectacle suitable for entertainment—one season's The Year of Living Dangerously starring Sigourney Weaver becomes next season's Beyond Rangoon starring Patricia Arquette. But as labor standards and political freedoms are increasingly linked to trade and international diplomacy, human rights issues become levied as strategic bargaining chips, as not-so-subtle forms of punishment and reward.⁸ The selective sanctioning of nations on the grounds of human rights violations has been criticized as a form of Western hegemony as much as it has been hailed as an effective means of policing repressive regimes. “The Western community of nations presided over by the United States,” Edward Said writes, “has given itself an internationalized and normative identity with authority and hegemony to adjudicate the relative value of human rights” (Said 1993, 197). Human rights is not merely a theory of universal citizenship based on equality, but, as critics of the Helms-Burton law have charged, a means through which the United States furthers its own interest.

Underlying the critique of human rights as a mask of cultural imperialism is a postmodern suspicion of universalist doctrine. Such cautions become especially urgent as the movement toward economic globalization provokes warnings about the erosion of state influence.⁹ As Judith Butler has noted in regard to normative political philosophy, any position that “seeks to establish the metapolitical basis of a negotiation of power relations, is perhaps the most insidious ruse of power” (Butler 1994, 6). Such a recognition does not preclude the fact that metapolitical philosophy itself may be called on to interrogate insidious ruses of power. In asking its participants to speak on human rights, the Committee of the 1992 Oxford Amnesty Lectures noted the apparent contradiction between political commitment and postmodern philosophy. Its invitation to prospective lecturers posed the question, “Does the self as construed by the liberal tradition still exist? If not, whose human rights are we defending?” (Johnson 1993, 2). But philosophical suspicion of human rights' dependence on humanist ideals does not obviate the need for vigilance of violations such as state-sponsored torture, a violation that is, as Amnesty International notes, a “calculated assault on human dignity and for that reason alone is to be condemned absolutely” (Amnesty International 1984, 7). To paraphrase from Fiona Cheong's novel, The Scent of the Gods, just because the liberal subject is imaginary does not mean that it cannot have consequences in the real.

In affirming the universal rights of the individual, human rights discourse offers a specific ideologically invested rhetorical frame that can be deployed as a form of political persuasion “in the real.” This is particularly evident in Asian American literature, which, like the media, is a site where representations of Asia are reproduced for American consumption. Thus, one could question literature's investment in this recent narrative on Asia, particularly in regard to countries that, like Burma and Singapore, have been in the public eye for human rights violations. Do such representations merely serve to reproduce, as Chow suggests, Asia's difference from the West?

Just as figures such as Aung San Suu Kyi become a means of accessing Asia in American culture, Asian American literature could be said to create analogous figures of political advocacy, but for potentially alternative purposes. Both Wendy Law-Yone's Irrawaddy Tango (1993) and Fiona Cheong's The Scent of the Gods (1991) deploy the rhetoric of human rights in order to critique methods of governmental repression justified by the construction of national crisis. In representing violations such as torture and detention without trial, the authors expose methods of state control as a means of commenting on the contemporary national politics of their “home” countries. Irrawaddy Tango suggests a fictive solution to an ongoing historical conflict in Burma by appealing to the individual's sovereignty as protected by the discourse of human rights. The Scent of the Gods draws an allegorical parallel between home and state in order to reveal how the mandate to modernize was positioned as antithetical to individual rights; the novel shows the loss of civil liberties to be foundational to the “fledgling nation.” The emphasis is not so much, following Lowe's premise, that these fictional representations are constitutive of an Orientalized Asia that in turn create, sustain, or resist certain conceptions of Asian Americans (Lowe 1996). Rather, Asian American writers' placement in the United States enables them to produce critiques of postcolo-nial state politics that employ First World conceptions of individual rights. Moreover, as if in comparison to American strategies of ethnic homogenization, both novels connect postindependence promotion of internal ethnic disunity to securing the hegemony of single-party rule.

The overseas focus of both American novels appears to testify to both the “postnational” trend in American Studies and what Sau-ling Wong has called the denationalizing direction of Asian American Studies as it has shifted from domestic, immigrant models of minority group interaction with the dominant culture to emphasize global migrations and post-coloniality (Sau-ling Wong 1995). As I discuss in the introduction, marking a distinction between American minority and transnational modes of inquiry produces the perception of a paradigm shift in Asian American Studies. For example, while Susan Koshy acknowledges that “transnational is not antithetical to the national” in her critique of Wong's terminology, she nonetheless enforces such a distinction in a temporal argument that situates “old” sociological paradigms associated with early Asian immigration and dependent on linear models of acculturation against what she sees as the complex, nonstatic Asian migrations taking place in the era of transnational capital (Koshy 1996, 340). In suggesting that the discipline has failed to produce theories of literary canonicity that exceed an originary appeal to pluralist inclusion and pan-ethnic commonality, she argues that scholarship has failed to account for “the effects of transnational forces on Asian American ethnicity” as they appear in “newer” literary productions (331).

My goal here is not to reproduce the distinction between immigrant and diasporic, “new” and “old” paradigms, but to suggest one avenue through which literature reveals a mutual investment between American national and Asian postcolonial concerns; in this case, the works do not necessarily produce an account of Asian American ethnicity alternative to that located in the inaugural moment of the discipline, although they might well imply this. Rather, they suggest that what travels transnation-ally is not only labor and capital but rhetoric. What one witnesses in Law-Yone's and Cheong's depictions of Asia is the deployment of “universal” notions of individual rights in service of commentaries on current Asian national leadership. Significantly, such narratival configurations are not only nationally inscribed but gendered according to First World precepts about injury, women's rights, and individual redress. The force of both writers' commentaries depends on constructing a female subject of state reprisal—the repression of political dissent is depicted as the regulation of female sexuality. In keeping with the work of international feminist scholars who explore the role of gender representation in reproducing and securing nationalist imaginaries, Asian American women's literature reveals that gender difference is a means of signaling mechanisms by which affiliations are formed and consolidated, often against territorial, ethnic, or national allegiances. Interrogating the conflict between ethnic group interests and national unity via a gendered appeal, both works raise pressing questions about human rights' necessary subject.

The Discourse of Rights: State Torture and the Battered Woman

 

Officials tortured an ally of Aung San Suu Kyi to
death as part of a campaign of arrests, torture
and intimidation targeting opposition leaders, a
dissidents' group said Tuesday. Hla Than, 52,
died at a hospital Aug. 2 from internal injuries he
suffered during torture in prison, where he has
spent the past six years, the Washington-based
National Coalition Government of the Union of
Burma said, citing unidentified sources in Burma.
    (Miami Herald, 7 August 1996, A9)

 

[W]e don't like hurting other people. We refrain
from killing. We refrain from doing what you
might call unpleasant things.

(Colonel Ye Htut, State Law and Order
Restoration Council, Myanmar cited in New
York Times, 17 September 1996, A8)

Under house arrest for a period of six years until July 1995, Aung San Suu Kyi became a mobilizing force for a people living under a military-controlled dictatorship since 1962, when General Ne Win came to power in a coup d'etat against the civilian government of Prime Minister U Nu. The catalyst for international attention for her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), Aung San Suu Kyi is the embodiment of Burma's prodemocracy platform, a single subject who voices collective desires, suffers the abuses of the regime, and receives the accolades of activism as well. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 while still incarcerated, she continues to speak on behalf of the NLD platform, which advocates freedom of assembly and speech and condemns the junta's continuing measures against democracy supporters. In Irrawaddy Tango Burmese American Wendy Law-Yone gives us a more ambiguous national heroine than Aung San Suu Kyi, one who solves the political ills of her country in a way that her real-life counterpart cannot—she assassinates the military dictator, who is also her husband. As the embodiment of the abstract subject of political torture, Tango bears a specifically gendered relationship to the state; the novel's critique rests on configuring state power not as the failure of benevolent paternalism but as conjugal abuse.

In the course of creating “Daya” as a counterpart to Burma, Law-Yone provides a utopian solution to what was in 1993 and continues to be a political impasse: the National League for Democracy won the 1990 election, but the military junta known as the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) refuses to relinquish the reins of power. As the daughter of the late Edward Law-Yone, a leading journalist imprisoned after General Ne Win's coup, Law-Yone has firsthand knowledge of methods of Burma's domestic repression. In representing the rise of a despotic and eccentric general whose xenophobia and strong-arm tactics give rise to increasing dissent near the end of his rule, her novel references specific elements of Burma's postcolonial history to suggest one avenue of political change. Rather than providing a forum for the student-led democracy movement, the novel addresses another form of organized dissent in its portrayal of ethnic insurgent armies along Burma's borders, the hill tribes who have sought autonomy in one form or another since Burmese independence in 1948. Yet, one aspect of the novel's representation of dissent in Daya and Western media attention to Burma remains constant: both center on the figure of a woman who becomes the singular subject of state reprisal, a body whose actions must be forcibly controlled for the continuance of the national status quo.

In the case of U.S. media representations of Aung San Suu Kyi, one could ask, what does it mean that a single subject comes to both incorporate and displace the more graphic image of the fired-upon masses? It is the same question one could pose about the image of the lone Chinese man standing down a row of tanks during Tiananmen Square, an image rapidly becoming iconographic. It is clear that the most generally accepted concept of human rights requires an individual for whom attention, concern, and then outrage can be channeled into activism. As the central figure for the NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi is the body through which political protest is made intelligible. Literary representation deploys similar strategies as a mode of rhetorical persuasion—the center of Irra-waddy's not-so-thinly veiled critique of Burmese politics is its portrayal of the state-sponsored torture of its female protagonist, Tango. As in the media's emphasis on Aung San Suu Kyi, the novel's commentary is produced not through a direct appeal to a collective movement, whether prodemocracy or ethnic insurgency, but through an appeal to the figure of a woman. Although Aung San Suu Kyi's political legitimacy was first derived from her position as the daughter of Aung San, assassinated leader of the anti-imperialist coalition, the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League and her activism might be marked as a form of filial inheritance, Burmese state politics have not perhaps relied on gendered images to secure the country's national self-image. As a case in point, Burmese officials would no doubt fail to see the irony in the fact that their delegate to the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was a male army general. The gendered convergence in American media and literary representations of Burma thus speaks to the power of the women-as-nation allegory so often invoked in the service of postcolonial nationalism.

In its strategic use of gender, Irrawaddy dialogues with other Asian American women's writing in figuring women's political alliance as a matter of sexual betrayal. Despite one reviewer's characterization of the novel as an account of a woman's “sexual adventures,” it is not merely a form of female picaresque but deploys sexuality to signal shifting collective allegiances (Jacqueline Trescott, “Tango of Emotions: In Wendy Law-Yone's Fiction, a Revelation of Dreams,” Washington Post, 16 March 1994, C1). As critic C. Lok Chua notes, Tango is a cross between Eva Peron, Patty Hearst, and a black widow; her marriage to the dictator is clearly the Faustian bargain of an ambitious small-town girl with “potential,” and her subsequent counterinsurgency only seems to come about via another sexual alliance as mistress of the leader of an oppressed hill tribe. But, as important, the novel's emphasis on the single, tortured female body reveals the gendered structure of the novel's political appeal as it resonates with contemporary discourse on human rights—it exposes the dictator's irrational despotism as it is waged not against a national body or ethnic group but against his wife. In the novel, the military's unfitness to rule appears as abusive dominance in the home, hence as a violation of women's rights.

This domestic-as-national parallel seems to rely on the discourse on domestic abuse popularized after the women's movement in the United States, linking the novel's First World placement to its international advocacy. For example, as if to suggest “Battered Woman's Syndrome” as a form of popular psychology, the novel portrays the dictator's crisis of mastery as a series of possessive behaviors and physically enforced demands for obedience followed by extravagant promises of contrition and future reform.¹⁰ The fictional general's beatings of his wife initiated by charges of infidelity are significantly couched in terms of national representation as Tango's desirability comes to represent a form of international recognition:

I saw the way that American son of a bitch had his big hand on your flesh, there where the back of your waist was bare. Did it feel good? Tell me how it felt and don't lie. Did it make you itch? Did you feel that nerve running down the center of your crotch swelling and twitching? Were you thinking what it would be like to have a huge American prick up you for a change?…I'd give him the low-down he wanted. I'd describe step by step, from foreplay to climax, the imagined infidelity. (104-5)

The accusation of infidelity initiates a false confession of betrayal, the purpose of which is not to provide information but to provoke his desire through the process of narration, a function only fulfilled as long as the narrative remains avowedly fictive. As an act, Tango's confession is without content—like rape, it has not to do with substance but with transmission: rape, we are told, is not about sex, but about (his) power. The “confessions” prefigure the scenes of political torture by unmasking the idea that the need for information during interrogation is the motive for cruelty; as Elaine Scarry writes about the structure of torture, the content of the prisoner's answer may be inconsequential, but “the fact of his answering is always crucial.”¹¹ The episodes end in a reminder that power is ultimately the ability to control meaning: he jerks her head back by the hair to pose the question, “Love me?”—an inquiry that, given its context, has but a single answer.

The use of this discourse on wife battery as gendered political appeal allows Law-Yone to reflect on complex notions of victimization and resistance, shifting from the battered woman as a single agent to a national or ethnic minority population undergoing despotic and irrational mistreatment. The novel depicts domestic violence throughout the trajectory of Supremo's violent rise to power as it is linked to suppressing ethnic insurgency; Tango's belated recognition, “My God, I'd married a maniac,” might also be the national sentiment.¹² The dual meanings of the word “domestic” conjoin: just as the police are often reluctant to interfere in domestic disputes, roughing up groups within one's national borders is not a global, but an internal, affair. Just as Burma's policy of isolationism places its treatment of ethnic insurgency beyond the realm of international intervention, the parallel suggests, batterers' enforcement of social isolation secures their partners' dependency and prevents interference in the relationship. Tango's mixture of quiescence, calculation, disgust, and accommodation provides a partial answer to why there seems to be no more than token resistance to political despotism: one can only hope that certain accommodations will prevent the escalation of mistreatment.

It is thus that the novel sets up a suggestive link between what in the discourse of battery has been called the “learned helplessness” of women's social conditioning and the inability to resist despotism. Law-Yone's conjugal-national parallel resonates through explanations of why battered women do not leave based on a conditioned acceptance of naturalized masculine authority; the power of the despot is likewise always already legitimated by the fact that he occupies the position of author-ity.¹³ Of course, to ascribe lack of resistance to the pathology of a people, as the narrator does, is akin to blaming the victim for her own abuse. Political rule, after all, is a condition of military backing, not merely a failure to act decisively, or the “learned helplessness” of a diverse people. The analogy ends as the answer to why there has been almost a half century of authoritarian rule in Burma can be conveyed through a simple explanation about the use of force. The novel makes these tactics of power clear in reporting the apparent lack of resistance to Supremo's rise to power in a “quiet” coup—Tango's assessment that “nobody resisted” is ironized by her subsequent acknowledgment that all members of the cultural elite have been “detained.” Law-Yone's fictional representation of the coup resonates with General Ne Win's takeover in 1962, an event reported by her father, Edward Law-Yone, editor and founder of the Nation prior to his own five-year “detention” as a political prisoner.¹⁴

It is perhaps not such a great leap to suggest that the methods of submission employed by the state easily mesh with forms of conjugal violence: feminist work on domestic abuse in the late 1980s in fact engaged studies of state-sponsored torture to describe the psychological and physical tactics used by domestic batterers.¹⁵ Both discourses rely on sedi-mented First World conceptions of individual sovereignty, injury, and pop psychology; Law-Yone's novel plays on these conceptions in its graphic representation of sexualized state violence. In employing such a discourse, the novel potentially reinforces both humanist constructions of self and traditional parallels between women and nation even as it engages a gendered form of advocacy. The accusation of treason after Tango's capture as “rebel queen” marks her political betrayal as indistinguishable from adultery; her torture comes at the hands of agents of a husband whose authority is that of the state. What is treason, the novel seems to imply, but infidelity on a larger scale?

If, as Deniz Kandiyoti suggests, women are controlled “in the interests of demarcating and preserving the identities of national/ethnic collectives,” the female body is the site of policing transgressions of affiliation and loyalty (Kandiyoti 1994, 382). Thus, the instrument of Tango's political punishment is fittingly represented as a reflection of her “crime” of infidelity: she is raped with the barrel of a gun in a version of Russian roulette. Reflecting the Maoist axiom that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun, the novel's use of a substitute penis to represent the instrument of state power associates masculinity with a naturalized but arbitrary hierarchy of rule. In this case, Tango's sexual violation with a weapon carries further national resonance: if the word for Daya also signifies “wound,” an injury in which the skin or other external surface is pierced or broken, her penetration evokes the nature of the crime, the penetration of the national body by ethnic insurgents along its border. The punishment for abetting the violation of national sovereignty is thus the violation of the boundaries of the individual subject, but with specifically gendered resonance. Amnesty International defines torture as an act intended to destroy one's humanity; the intention behind torture is the dissolution of the subject through the infliction of pain (Amnesty International 1973, 30). A means of embodying the authority of the state, rape is a specific form of torture that reduces the female subject to her defining bodily orifice, confirming the subject position that woman inhabits as the negation of man. In substituting a symbol of state power for the phallus, rape as torture confirms Scarry's point that “pain is a pure physical experience of negation” (Scarry 1985, 52).

In writing about torture, Scarry begins with the premise that physical pain not only transcends signification through its incapability of being shared, but actively destroys it, “bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned” (Scarry 1985, 4). This deconstructive process represents “the loss of the world” as pain obliterates meaning. The novel's depiction of Tango's torture reveals that political power is the ability to control meaning, not just in the sense that official propaganda can be exposed as a form of doublespeak, but that absolute power is the power to subvert meanings assigned to signifiers. “We're shaving you so you won't worry about getting hurt,” Tango is told in prison. “We don't hurt nuns; good Buddhists never hurt nuns, see?” (173). Such an assurance is rendered meaningless prior to her rape, as she is told both “Didn't we tell you we don't fuck nuns?” and “Especially we don't fuck whores!” (177). The distinction between nun and whore, purity and defilement, no longer matters; the torturer's power is not just the ability to reassign meanings within systems of classification, but to render such classification superfluous.

Similarly, when common household objects are used as weapons, as instruments of pain, they become divorced from their referents, demonstrating the ease with which the mundane can be rendered diabolical. When Tango becomes the assassin and makes use of such innocent items as duct tape and an electric fan to kill, the token of her power is not only the violence of her act but the fact that, like the torturer, she transforms the banal into an agent of pain. The novel configures narration as a form of political power, revealing that torture indicates not merely the state's power to induce pain, but, as Scarry notes, to unmake the world. While incarcerated, part of her punishment is to anticipate varieties of torture from a fellow prisoner apparently driven mad by torture, a narratival form of punishment meant to induce extreme dread. The woman's story of involuntary orgasm during genital torture with electric shock implies that the torturer has the power to undo meaning, to transform pain into pleasure, erasing agency: “you can't avoid what happens, Little Sister. You have—how to say it? A climax. A low moment for a woman. But what can a woman do? Nothing” (177).¹⁶

The novel's portrayal of torture elicits horror and sympathy for the abused female body, thereby appealing to human dignity as a fundamental right. Significantly, it reflects the translation of global human rights violations into terms familiar to an American audience. If the effectiveness of agencies such as Amnesty International depends, as Scarry notes, on their “ability to communicate the reality of physical pain to those who are not themselves in pain,”¹⁷ this familiarity in part explains how the discourse of wife battering can work to expose foreign political repression. Simply, the appeal is effective if offenses against female political prisoners are defined as somehow more heinous than those against men. Given that women are perceived to be more embodied, they may be more easily imagined as threatened in their bodies by playing on traditional conceptions of sentimentality and women's vulnerability. Moreover, women's association with the domestic, “nonpolitical” realm signals the state's violation more acutely. But there are more complex resonances: the novel's collapsing of distinctions between treason and adultery, political torture and domestic abuse, allows Law-Yone to engage the concept of individual and collective rights simultaneously. The belief that “women and children have an absolute right to live free from bodily harm” (Jones 1994, 5), for example, is one way the concept of group rights has entered an American lexicon. Irrawaddy appeals not just to the abstract human subject of human rights, but to an individual who is also part of a collective group—a woman.

Tango is apparently tortured for advocating the sovereignty rights of an ethnic minority. In making her a spokesperson on behalf of “the Jesu,” Law-Yone has chosen to model her fictional hill tribe on the Karen, a Christian ethnic group on Burma's eastern border with Thailand who have been involved in a secessionist war with the central government since 1948. Although the Shan have also been involved in an armed struggle for sovereignty, like the Kachin, their human rights cause in the West may be compromised by their alleged involvement in drug trafficking.¹⁸ By modeling the Jesu on the Karen, Law-Yone focuses on an ethnic group whose secessionist claim can be represented most forcefully as the right to religious freedom.¹⁹ This choice of ethnic group among the many represented in the hill regions thus does not muddle the question of who should have “rights”—the Karen can be represented as freedom fighters rather than drug smugglers. The emergence of human rights as a concern in Southeast Asia might have given the long-standing armed insurrection new urgency had it not been supplanted by mass demonstrations for democratic reform, an event the novel vaguely refers to as a “spectacle of protest and massacre” (247). The Karen's armed struggle against the central government has garnered little attention in the West aside from some media coverage of the threat of their forced repatriation from refugee camps in Thailand. Ironically, one way the Karen came into Western perception was through their conscription of children into the army, a circumstance implicitly portrayed as a violation of human rights—a form of child abuse.²⁰ Such a portrayal only highlights the ease with which appeals to moral universals can be deployed in support or criticism of specific political causes. My point is not to draw one-to-one correspondences between historical events and literary depictions, but to highlight the similarity between fictional and media representations of, in Scarry's terms, the lives of those “whose name[s] can barely be pronounced” (Scarry 1985, 9) as a means of accessing an Asian “over there” in terms that are very much “over here.”²¹

By invoking the body in pain to highlight both the ethnic right to self-rule and the more general stance against despotism, the novel affirms the individual necessary to the concept of human rights as it is currently understood and that each human subject has intrinsic worth because of his or her uniqueness. In contrast, the idea of sovereignty and self-rule as human rights cannot be reconciled to liberal ideals, a point debated by delegates to the United Nations charged with ratifying a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.²² That the novel ultimately makes its appeal to the Karen-as-Jesu sovereignty movement through Tango may suggest that gender is a form of group identity perhaps more easily reconcilable to the concept of individuality than racial or ethnic group affiliation.

This reconciliation is echoed in Hillary Rodham Clinton's anxiously anticipated comment at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing: “If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights, once and for all.”²³ Virginia Woolf's famous dictum on women's ambivalent allegiance to patriarchal nationalism—“[A]s a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world” (Woolf 1938, 197)—signals a similar belief in woman as global citizen whose naturalized humanitarian concerns transcend borders. Intended as a statement against the recent record of human rights abuses of the conference's Chinese hosts, the First Lady's direct condemnation was internationally applauded, indicating that issues referenced in the speech such as bride-burning, the rape of POWs, female infanticide, domestic violence, genital mutilation, and coerced abortion or sterilization somehow obviated previously contentious debates on cultural practices versus the rights of women-as-individuals transcendent of context. That such issues maintain the appearance of universals suggests that liberalism can encompass women's rights as a form of group rights more easily than ethnic or racial rights, except perhaps in cases of genocide. “Woman” can appear as a collective entity unvexed by issues of territorialization, allowing for a subject who is not wholly individualized.²⁴

Yet, the novel's portrayal of human rights as a method of soliciting international attention is both self-conscious and cynical, a cynicism that extends to the efficacy of coalitional identity politics in the United States. What brings Dayans, “that most minor of minority groups,” into the American spotlight is not the spectacle of protest but “another disaster, far more newsworthy than anything the internal affairs of our country could have generated: the disappearance of an American rock star in the wilderness of our northern jungles” (247). Law-Yone comments on the fact that political concern is based partly on self-interest, and that recognition of the collective must be concretized through individuation—or better, celebrity. In this ironic aside on the hapless rock star—not the massacre—as the reason for Daya's return to international visibility, one cannot help but think of media focus on Aung San Suu Kyi, indicating perhaps that the politics of caring keeps a cause in public memory better than disembodied issues. But this is, in effect, a strategy the novel deploys as well; the sovereignty issues of the Jesu—“self-rule, religious freedom, human rights” (128)—are conveyed to the reader and the fictional world through a single female spokesperson. Tango resists this role as collective representative in a direct repudiation of the very appeal in which the novel engages:

I didn't want to be an activist or a born-again crusader for human rights and other civil liberties or to go on the torture circuit.…Even for a good cause, I wanted no part of it. Even if the point was to educate the humanitarian American public on inhuman practices in other parts of the world. Even if the public could then get involved by writing to their congressman or calling an 800 number to pledge support. (248)

While this resistance to public confession might be read as an individual's logical response to trauma, it is more significantly a rejection of democratic politics as it appears to be practiced in the United States as a form of identity politics, a rejection of, as Lauren Berlant has noted, the moment in which “private life” becomes indistinguishable from notions of citizenship and civic responsibility (Berlant 1997). In repudiating the salutary and politicizing effects ascribed to consciousness-raising through public confession, Tango refuses, as Wendy Brown puts it, “the steady slide of political into therapeutic discourse” (Brown 1995, 75). In its resistance to using experience to mobilize for change, the novel foregrounds the ineffectiveness of coalitional democratic representation for influencing diplomatic policies in the “Turd World.” The novel portrays coali-tional politics as mindless caterwauling: from within the United States, Dayan exiles are “neutralized” as one of many special interest groups naively lobbying Washington for attention and aid in the manner of Ber-lant's infantile citizen who optimistically believes in the utopian promises of the system (Berlant 1997).

While Tango's outsidedness upon immigration to the United States echoes Asian American portrayals of expatriate alienation, it is also part of the novel's refusal to locate the United States as a model political system and an expression of impatience with its perhaps undeserved reputation as global interventionist.²⁵ In spite of—or perhaps because of—the National League for Democracy's support within and outside of Burma, the novel refuses to portray the democracy movement as an effective form of resisting a military regime. References to such a movement are noticeably absent, aside from Tango's belittling comments to the effect that “nonviolent protest” is deemed an “idiot phrase,” and the cry “What do we want? Democracy! When do we want it? Now!” a “mindless chant.” Moreover, the acronym for the novel's “Foundation for Asian Democracies” is “FAD.” In keeping with Lowe's situating Asian American literature as a site where the contradictions of American national promise are uncovered (Lowe 1996), the novel exposes the contradiction between American democratic rights as the fantasy of each citizen's equal influence on state policy and the United States as arbiter of human rights in the international realm.

Given that Irrawaddy Tango's critique of the military junta is not identical to an appeal to general democratic rights, does the novel's solution, as Barbara Harlow would claim for resistance literature, “insist on the collective historical consequences of individual experience” (Harlow 1987, 119)? The novel raises the question of whether Tango's act of violence represents a collective, political action or is simply an act of revenge. At one level, the novel seems to ask the reader to understand Tango's behavior as a psychological response to trauma; she murders not as a show of solidarity with the Jesu rebels or the Dayan people; rather, either her return to the site of trauma is a step in healing—a point she consciously rejects—or the assassination is a form of payback. One might easily inscribe Tango's actions in the familiar terms of the talk-show confessional she abhors—“women who kill: victims who turn the tables on their abusers.” Her question as she awaits the judgment of the rioting masses outside, “But I'd killed the beast out of revenge—nothing but revenge. Had I really serviced a nation?” (286), references the personal-as-political link invoked by the epigraph, “either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.” Yet, the epigraph asks that the novel be read allegorically whereas its protagonist resists collective association. While its emphasis on a lone heroine may be dictated by narrative convention, one consequence is that the novel can individualize tyranny as well.²⁶ It is as if Law-Yone is aware of Berlant's caution about the uses of sentimentality in the service of activist causes. Berlant notes, “when sentimentality meets politics, it uses personal stories to tell of structural effects, but in doing so it risks thwarting its very attempt to perform rhetorically a scene of pain that must be soothed politically” (Berlant 1998, 641).

Unlike Jessica Hagedorn's critique of the Marcos regime in Dogeaters, which condemns the tripartite collusion of big business, elected officials, and the military in the country's governance, however, Law-Yone's attention to character may present Daya's problems as too simply located in the actions of a single power-hungry individual, rather than in the systematic intertwining of civil and state methods of control. The open-ended-ness of the novel rests not on interpreting the collective implications of the individual's act of transgression, but in translating this act in terms of political systems. Ironically, Tango's act of individual aggression inscribes her within an American national ethos and her final thoughts are of Washington, D.C., where she has previously marked her alienation from American national symbols. Still, Irrawaddy stands out as a model of postcolonial commentary that resists advocating what the Third World is always presumed to lack; interestingly, it questions the current democracy movement precisely at a moment in which “democracy has…replaced development as the 'buzzword' of the 1990's” (Qadir, Clapham, and Gills 1993, 415).

Law-Yone's Irrawaddy Tango is clearly a commentary on the past despotism of General Ne Win and the ongoing abuses of a military-controlled state. The work might indicate that Law-Yone is no fan of the democracy movement; elsewhere she has suggested that what is lacking in Burma is not active resistance but a common agenda and unity among the many opposition groups—NLD leaders, fugitive students, and ethnic insurgents. As she rightly predicted in 1989, the NLD's call for multiparty elections did not assure a transfer of power (Law-Yone 1989). Rather than invoking the revered figure of Aung San Suu Kyi, known in Burma simply as “The Lady,” the novel offers a morally ambiguous heroine who, in knowing both how to fuck and how to kill, is no lady. In the end, it is not so much the nature of the solution envisioned that marks the novel's political commentary. Its message—“assassinate the dictator, free the people”—is not the most original vision of change; dispatching a fic-tive hitwoman to resolve a historical dilemma is not a blueprint for Burma's remaking. In transforming the national body into the body of the oppressed individual, the single body in pain who bears the brunt of state-sanctioned violence, the novel may ironize the work of human rights relief agencies, but ultimately it does not dispute their ability to focus public attention. Irrawaddy Tango's invocation of the discourse on battered women to expose methods of political repression inverts the relationship established by feminist studies that draw on reports of the treatment of political prisoners as an analogy to domestic abuse. The image that remains from the novel is not the shot-upon crowd, nor, in the end, the embattled ethnic insurgents. Rather, a wife is being beaten.

Such an argument is not meant to deflate the effectiveness of the appeal or to suggest the trivialization of a national call to action; rather, it highlights the ways in which Asian American literary expression utilizes the tactics of postcolonial nationalism linking gender and nation, but to subversive effect. International feminists have suggested some of these tactics in critiquing the ways in which, for example, images of emancipated women are made to signify postindependence modernization (Kandiyoti 1994), feminine sexuality is used to promote national industry (Heng 1997), or political parties use women's issues to broaden their appeal (West 1992). In this case, however, what I would foreground is the novel's First World investment, its use of what have become normative values in the United States concerning women's rights in the service of its Asian postcolonial commentary. Law-Yone's work thus exemplifies the gendered politicism of Asian American women's writing as it interrogates the juxtaposition of competing collectivities: women, ethnicity, nation. This interrogation reflects V. Spike Peterson's point that although women have been situated as ancillary to international relations theory through their association with the private sphere, this association places them as primary to the production of group loyalties, affiliations, and identifica-tory processes central to nationalist projects (Peterson 1995). Peterson's taxonomy of the relationship between women and nation suggests, following Kandiyoti, that women are often invoked to signify other group differences, “to delineate the boundaries of group identity” (Kandiyoti 1994, 132).

Such is the relationship explored in Fiona Cheong's The Scent of the Gods, which exploits women's association with domesticity to reveal the state's intrusion into the private sphere as it legislates new group loyalties upon Singapore's independence. The narrator's innocent rumination on the wooden fence separating “the family's property from the rest of the country” (122), that “a wind was coming soon which was going to blow on the fence just hard enough to topple the fence over” (135), metaphor-izes the novel's concern with the erosion of the border between public and private. Just as Homi Bhabha has noted that the “recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions” (Bhabha 1994, 9), the novel exposes the methods by which state-mandated affiliations are created and upheld by drawing allegorical resonance between civic duty and gendered associations with submission and self-preservation.

The Age of Consent: State Regulation in The Scent of the Gods

 

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and
who knows it, assumes responsibility for the
constraints of power.

    (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish)

 

It was May 1969.…The government had begun
to take care of everything.…We had peace now.
We had progress.…There was to be no more
poverty in Singapore, no more slums.

    (Fiona Cheong, The Scent of the Gods)

If The Scent of the Gods suggests a national allegory in its treatment of domestic space, it is the continual violation of the realm of the “private” that provides the force of Cheong's commentary on postindependence Singapore, violations that signify an encroachment on the freedoms of the individual. The divisions in Cheong's fictional family mirror the potentially volatile divisions of the state as ethnic loyalty competes with national duty at the moment that kinship and family begin to cede their functions of socialization to the public sphere. Yet, the family is not simply a microcosm of the state, nor is Scent's bildungsroman an allegory of Singapore's rapid modernization and development. From 1965 to 1990, Singapore went from being a small island with no natural resources to a metropolitan city-state with the highest gross national product in Asia after Japan. Dubbed the “Orient with plumbing,” Singapore has been taken as model society whose rise is largely attributed to the postindepen-dence policies of the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) led by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew from 1959 to 1990. Given its success, Singapore was held up as a model for economic development not only in the Third World, but in the West as well. Although the protagonist of Cheong's novel remarks in hindsight, “In a few years Prime Minister Lee would prove himself” (107), the work is not a celebration of Lee Kuan Yew's policies, nor is it entirely a condemnation of his three-decade tenure. Rather, in depicting the year of Singapore's expulsion from the Federation of Malaysia in 1963, the first anniversary of the republic in 1966, and the subsequent leadership of 1969, the novel reflects a 1990s concern with the erosion of civil liberties. Like Irrawaddy Tango, Scent's post-colonial commentary depends on a parallel between the repression of individual rights and the containment of feminine sexuality.

The Scent of the Gods reveals how the longevity of the PAP was secured both through legislated means of civil control and through the rhetoric of impending crisis, which secured voluntary compliance with the official mandates of modernization and “multiracialism” in the years following Singapore's “forced” independence from Malaysia. Instilling allegiance through the rhetoric of crisis legitimates authority and consolidates power, a point the novel mirrors in both the domestic and the national spheres. From the grandmother's point of view, “divine protection” provided by ancestors in the face of unspecified malevolence justifies traditional ethnically based filiation. Just as Grandma portrays the family as besieged by willful gods whose intentions remain cryptic, Singapore cultivated the image of a besieged Chinese isle within a hostile Malay region and of a democratic isle threatened by communist expansion. The novel reflects the PAP's potentially contradictory task in 1965: to invoke fear of the overseas Chinese influence among Singaporeans and to promote the progress-oriented interests of its English-educated Chinese population without seeming to encourage “Chineseness” as the cornerstone to Singaporean identity. Hence, the official discouragement of ethnic tribalism through the promotion of “multiracialism” served the purpose of differentiating two types of Chinese—red and loyal.

Like other Asian American texts, the novel exposes the general dynamic in which the production of an ethnic margin constitutes the legitimacy of the center. Paralleling yet distinct from Lowe's discussion of Asian American racial formation as it serves the purposes of American national self-definition (Lowe 1996), in this case the concept of difference exploited by the state could not simply fall along racial or ethnic lines, but according to loyalties to political and economic systems. As the novel reveals, the success of such ethnic management against the construction of an external enemy contributed to the longevity of the PAP and a highly stable polity that some now characterize as soft authoritarianism. Following both academic and mainstream media critiques of the loss of democratic rights in the wake of rapid modernization and three decades of single-party rule, the novel questions the methods of securing, as Esha, the narrator, notes, “peace and progress.” Although concerns over state influence on the dissemination of information and the general impression of lack of journalistic freedom, for example, may be a far cry from the methods of state control now employed in Burma, as Singapore's publicized use of corporal punishment reveals, the state has developed a significant civil apparatus for dealing with both dissenters and lawbreakers. The PAP has been particularly successful in using the legal tools of democracy as instruments of control: the deregistration of radical unions, the withdrawal of newspaper licenses, the threat of defamation suits, and selective prosecution for tax law violation.²⁷ While representations of prohibitions and penalties do not suggest that they are violations of human rights, other criticisms of Singapore law focus on the Internal

Security Act, an “emergency” measure allowing for detention without trial that originated out of fear of communist subversion.

In portraying the disappearance of Esha's Uncle Tien, who goes into hiding and presumed exile rather than face arrest when suspected of involvement with the Barisan Socialis, or Socialist Front, the novel highlights the use of the Internal Security Act in quashing internal dissent, a measure that meant, as Li Shin explains to Esha, “If the government suspected someone of being a Communist, that person could be arrested and sent to jail” (50). Originally the only party with the potential support to challenge the PAP, the Barisan Socialis had broken from the more moderate PAP in 1961 in order to campaign against a federation with Malaysia that had outlawed communism. Through the Internal Security Act in 1963, one hundred Barisan leaders and supporters were arrested and held without trial in what was dubbed “Operation Cold Store.” This sweep and the Barisan's boycott of the 1968 election effectively eliminated the development of a viable two-party system in Singapore, allowing for a PAP ascendancy that continues. At the time of the novel's publication, “detainees” from Operation Cold Store were still being held.²⁸ As Geral-dine Heng has shown, this authoritarianism has extended to women; the measure was deployed against the women's movement in the 1987 detention of two founding members of the feminist organization AWARE (Heng 1997).

In recalling the PAP's most blatant violation of human rights in the figure of Tien, the novel reveals the accusation of subversion to be a blanket charge to suppress dissent, an irony heightened by the implication that Tien merely supports the academic and personal freedoms associated with liberal democracy. In foregrounding the loss of civil liberties that occurs in the name of guaranteeing democracy, The Scent of the Gods links postcolonial history to a contemporary concern with human rights in global politics. Its portrayal reveals these losses to be not aberrant but foundational to the formation of the state. Yet, Scent's commentary is not simply to be deduced from a straightforward representation of historical events. Rather, its historical content is understated, filtered through the limited consciousness of a child moving toward adolescence. A form of bildungsroman, the novel is not overtly analytic; Esha's beliefs are still unformed and much of her thought is focused on moments in which she comes to some awareness of sexuality. History may appear at times as a backdrop to these flashes of recognition, but because Esha's maturation is always portrayed in conjunction with events that highlight reaction to governmental policy, it is clear that Cheong's specificially gendered genre serves to articulate her political commentary. In contrast to Shelley Sunn Wong's reading of the bildungsroman as a narrative of progressive incorporation into and identification with majority culture and thus an ideologically suspect genre for Asian American women writers, the bildungs-roman is the vehicle for Cheong's critique of the connection between maturity and the acceptance of the postcolonial state's disciplining authority (Shelley Wong 1994).

Female maturation is characterized by constraint; Esha is subject to a new set of prohibitions that are meant as both safeguards and messages to others about oneself: she must keep her knees together, keep her shirt on, and learn to walk like a girl. In witnessing the public humiliation of a schoolmate forced to stand in front of the class without her panties in punishment for displaying mildly pornographic images of “naked British people chasing one another around” (140), she learns that sex is not just secret but is, like masturbation, a punishable offense. Such warnings about self-discipline and proper behavior are meant to convey one message: to overstep the boundaries of decorum is to invite violation. Esha's interior reflection and the political terrain converge in the representation of Auntie Daisy's rape and subsequent pregnancy. Esha witnesses Daisy's virtual incarceration in the house when bars are placed over her window, bars she is told that “Auntie Daisy herself had asked for” (161, emphasis mine). The identity of the rapist remains unknown and the blame falls on her aunt for her previously “free” behavior. Esha's recognizes that the grown-ups need to blame Auntie Daisy for the rape because they cannot deal with a “horror without a source”; it may also be implied, however, that a horror without a source has potential uses: an undefined evil makes all the more urgent the necessity to discipline one's own behavior and to submit to protection for one's own good. Whereas the judicial response to rape often hinges on the issue of consent, within the framework of Cheong's gendered political allegory the question of consent bears relevance to Singapore's current state of affairs: Does Daisy consent to the curtailment of her freedoms? Are the bars designed to keep others out also meant to keep her in?

The fact that neither the woman nor the girl becoming a woman can object to measures taken in the name of her own defense resonates with sociologist Chua Beng-Huat's statement concerning the government's characterization of repressive measures as forms of civic responsibility: “Politically, the conflation [of government and society] rationalises and justifies all state interventions as preemptive actions which 'ensure' collective well-being and, as such, are measures of good government rather than abuses of individual rights” (663). Just as Daisy and Esha suffer the restriction of their movements based on a “caring” paternalism, so the populace appears to consent to a restriction of freedoms based on the assurance of the benevolent caretaking abilities of the state. The family's justification of Esha's seclusion in a convent after she gets her period is echoed without overt judgment by Esha herself: “In Great-Grandfather's house the family had to be protected. That was the law. It had always been. It would always be” (247). Her innocent commentary on gender role conformity implies that what now appears as sacrifice—a request to modify individual behavior—is justified by the payoff of future security: “Men were going to treat me according to how I behaved. One day when I was older, [Grandma] said, I would understand what she meant, and I would be grateful that she had taught me the proper graces” (9). As Grandma and the government both recognize, such feelings of gratitude can only be produced by transforming the representation of restriction from punitive to merely regulatory. The gendered contrast between Li Shin's desire to be a soldier and Esha's lessons in feminine behavior reveals the roles to be directed toward an identical purpose, that of instilling self-discipline. The roles are complementary and reciprocal—a duty to protect implies those who need to be protected. The idea of consensual behavior modification (the family's request of Esha) may be distinct from the threat of detention (the government's threat to Tien), but they operate under the same logic; an appeal to national citizenship and collective survival justifies the suspension of individual freedom.

If Esha is to stand in some measure as a reflection of Singapore's postindependence population, Cheong represents her as neither eager to acquiesce nor entirely passive or duped by authority. This balance is enacted through her portrayal of Esha's growing consciousness of sexuality: although she does not rebel against it, Esha reads beyond the adults' representation of sex-as-threat enough to understand that she is only receiving the authorized narrative. Thus, in seeing her cousin's penis, his “almost grown-up birdie,” for the first time, she is astonished at its soft helplessness. Its presence ruptures its prior characterization—what previously she cannot look at or discuss is revealed to be nothing fearful at all. Unlike Irrawaddy Tango, in which the penis-form becomes an instrument of state power, the analogy here is that like the unseen but potentially threatening Communists, the penis serves as the sign through which the appeal for modifications in behavior is elicited, a sign whose effectiveness is only assured by its nebulousness. As she matures, Esha is implicitly and explicitly warned about the dangers of sexual contact and the need for self-discipline just as the “grown-ups” are warned to submit to government curfews purported to protect them. Yet, in spite of attempts to convince her that sex is dangerous, Esha becomes emotionally aware of not just the beauty and deep intimacy of the sexual act, but of the power it wields over others. Cheong's gendered commentary thus plays on the very beliefs in women's vulnerability that international feminists have noted serve postcolonial national cohesion; as Cynthia Enloe notes, nationalist men often represented women as a resource in need of protection from outside influences, particularly from “progressive” Western exports such as feminism (Enloe 1990). Here, however, the nuanced connection between gender and nationalism relies on the analogy between communism and sex as they signal both illicit temptation and physical violation.

But it is not merely through grafting political resonance on to Esha's observations that Cheong's critique is derived; Esha's ability to comprehend the motivations of the adult world is limited, her knowledge is partial. Depicting a period where “meaningful answers were not spoken” (3), Cheong renders poetic the divide between feeling and perception as a commentary both on coming of age and on the climate of a specific post-colonial moment: “[T]here were things you knew,” Esha thinks. “There were things you did not know, too, but some things you knew” (38). The narrative is retrospective but rarely allows for retrospective awareness— the clarity of an adult perspective based on historical hindsight—to intrude on the partial consciousness of the child's narration. For Esha, meaning is always elusive and deferred until an unspecified moment in the future, a moment the adults assure her will come, if only as the rationale for keeping her now in ignorance: “[Grandma] was telling me something I was not expected to understand yet.…Someday all that I had kept of hers, all that she had passed to me, would be taken out, unraveled, and given away, and it would become useful. How this was to happen, I did not know” (100). One reviewer's comments reflect discomfort with the novel's insistence on maintaining the tension between knowing and not knowing, between historical “fact” and the consciousness of an eleven-year-old, seeing Esha's lack of “strong perceptive reasoning” as a failure of character development (Jonetta Rose Baras, “Writer Debuts in Tan Tradition,” Washington Times, 3 November 1991: B7). Yet, this evaluation fails to see that partialness is the point—and not only because Cheong's choice of narrative voice can be seen as a commentary on the way perception is conditioned and delimited by those in authority. Her use of the faux naif is not like Hisaye Yamamoto's or Sandra Cisneros' coming-of-age fiction in which the reader is invited to read beyond what slips past the child-woman's awareness. Rather, Cheong's choice of point of view—Esha's lack of “perceptive reasoning”—carries specific historical resonance.

The narrator's (and ultimately the reader's) incomplete information on the deaths of her parents and Li Shin, the rape of Auntie Daisy, and the disappearance of Uncle Tien produces a climate of anxiety and confirms her subordinate place in the household. Her lack of access to the complete story parallels the situation of a populace whose acquiescence is assured by a state of uncertainty, neither knowing if Communists might infiltrate the island nor, conversely, if the home will be infiltrated by the state. This connection between national and domestic space is likewise reinforced by Li Yuen's and Esha's growing suspicion of adults, which results in alliance between them, a circumstance reflecting the reconfiguration of alliances and loyalties along ethnic lines in the early stages of independence. The children's perpetual state of unenlightenment breeds paranoia about whom to trust: “We were only two of us, now. Anyone else could be an enemy, and we did not know what the grown-ups might do” (233). Although taught to obey the authority of adults, Esha and Li Yuen begin to draw a clear division between spheres, just as the adults themselves draw tighter ranks around the household against multiple, vaguely specified threats—the Malays, would-be rapists, Chinese Communists, vengeful gods, and visits from government men. In language pregnant with hints of conspiracy, Li Yuen warns, “Grandma hears everything” (189), as a caution about monitored behavior and the potentially punitive forces of the lawgiver; for the adults, it is becoming increasingly clear that “[n]o one escaped the government's eye” (81). Although the absence of definitive information in the faux naif certainly reflects a postmodern concern with the bias of knowledge production, in portraying the effect of siege mentality in parallel spheres, Cheong's use of limited consciousness as the narrative's point of view carries additional political meaning by reproducing the climate of the times.

As Sister Katherine confirms in a lesson about the equator, the imaginary does have consequences in the real; in Scent, several “imaginaries” are instrumental in securing the hegemony of the current regime, most notably that of a Singaporean citizen where there were once only Chinese, Malays, and Indians, and of the ever-elusive communist presence that unified through the threat of siege. In exploring the effect of government policy on one Chinese family, Scent reveals the ways in which national identity as “imaginary community” is often secured through the projection of both external and internal threats that define common affiliation; the novel's original title, Soldiers, underscored this point but was rejected as unmarketable by the publisher (personal communication, 13 May 1998). In signaling the politically invested interests in which identifications are formed and consolidated, the novel engages the theoretical dynamics noted by numerous scholars concerned with difference as a constitutive element in national cohesion, a dynamic reflecting Stuart Hall's assertion that Englishness, for example, “was always negotiated against difference…in order to present itself as a homogenous entity” (Hall 1991, 22).²⁹ Thus, in discussing the novel as a form of historiography, I am less concerned with whether the threats of communist infiltration and ethnic disunity were actually imminent than with the uses to which such claims of crisis were put. What becomes clear in the hindsight of the novel's writing is that the “Red scare” served both as a source of common interest for a populace divided by generation, ethnicity, and class and as the PAP's initial justification for the abrogation of civil liberties and the implementation of social controls in the civic realm.

The Scent of the Gods exposes the ways in which the “Red scare” served the purpose of nationalism, but it does so without condemning the abuse of power as clearly as does Irrawaddy Tango; its nostalgic tone reflects an ambivalence about what sacrifices are necessary for progress. In regard to her family's deliberate forgetting of her ambiguously murdered cousin, Esha reflects: “I understood why the names had to disappear, put out like flames of unwatched candles that might burn down a house. It was not punishment for the dead. It was protection for the living. But Li Shin I had loved” (226). The family's manipulation of history is not overtly questioned; Esha “understood why” future security requires a willful disregard of the past. Nonetheless, even as the novel portrays the state itself as more threatening than the increasingly nebulous enemy, her comment seems to support strategic “forgetting” in the political realm, where individuals are sacrificed for the collective good. Love is the surplus of such forgetting, a sentimental excess of the drive toward futurity. Intimacy is an attachment that has no place unless redirected toward the affiliations produced and regulated by the state.

Although the government claims that policies enacted in the years following independence such as multiracialism, bilingualism, integrated government housing, and modernization are responsible for producing “social harmony,” one can as easily say that they have succeeded in turning Singapore into the embodiment of the Panopticon in which discipline is enforced, if not by constant surveillance, then by the internalization of surveillance. The enforcement of social control in Singapore does not appear as absolute tyranny because, as Foucault writes in regard to the Panopticon, its end is not power itself but the strengthening of social forces “to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raise the level of public morality; to increase and multiply” (Foucault 1979, 208). If acceptance of the loss of democratic rights in the name of the public good and social evolution becomes internalized, it is because technologies of power are not merely repressive but productive and the loss comes to represent a fair exchange for a higher standard of living. And, given the thirty-four years of single-party rule in Singapore, as David Brown notes, “Once government equates the maintenance of social and political stability with its own dominance and legitimacy, then the concept of democracy becomes redefined so that it begins to refer, in effect, merely to the degree of public acquiescence of government and its policies” (D. Brown 1985, 1008). It remains to be seen whether the affluent middle class will initiate the call for more freedoms, or whether its own dependence on the state will preempt a move for greater democratic participation. In light of this contemporary context, Scent lays out for critique the suspension of individual rights in the name of the collective; its depiction of Singapore's history highlights transgressions ironically justified by the need to guarantee a political system meant to ensure those rights.³⁰

As the means of their advocacy, both The Scent of the Gods and Irra-waddy Tango represent the years following independence as the source of contemporary political conflicts linking 1960s postcolonial nationalism to a 1990s concern with human rights as it had become part of an American cultural idiom. In highlighting tactics that secured the rule of specific regimes, the works represent postindependence history as continuous with the policies of the present, past repressions with contemporary abuses of power. Both novels focus on human rights abuses as if to highlight Weber's definition of the state as the agent of a set of institutions specifically concerned with the enforcement of order, and as such, the holder of a monopoly of legitimate violence. The works point to complementary methods of social control; what Foucault would call the “traditional, ritual, costly, violent forms of power” employed by SLORC have been superseded in Singapore by a “subtle, calculated technology of subjection” based on corporatist population management (Foucault 1979, 220). An appeal to human rights gestures toward one agency of potential policing not bounded by the state, and one effective for soliciting international attention.

But, just as standardized measures of time and space can be said to represent a move toward globalization, the philosophy of universalism underlying human rights is itself subject to questions of influence.³¹ The Oxford Amnesty Lecture Committee's question, “Whose human rights are we defending?” is itself a response to philosophical suspicion of a subject transcendent of history. But as Judith Butler notes,

To take the construction of the subject as a political problematic is not the same as doing away with the subject; to deconstruct the subject is not to negate or throw away the concept; on the contrary, deconstruction implies only that we suspend all commitments to that to which the term, “the subject,” refers and that we consider the linguistic functions it serves in the consolidation of and concealment of authority. (Butler 1994, 14)³²

The invocation of human rights and its necessary subject implies not a suspension of commitment but a call to intervention, one overtly intended to oppose oppressive authority. If the idea of human rights is recognized as a necessary fiction, a “contingent foundation” on which activism is mobilized, the question becomes not “What is the status of the subject of human rights within postmodernity?” but “How can this individual subject be deployed as part of a collective appeal?” Moreover, Richard Rorty invites us to reconceive “universal” notions of justice as matters of loyalty, asking, “Should we describe such…moral dilemmas as conflicts between loyalty and justice, or rather, as I have suggested we might, as conflicts between loyalties to smaller groups and loyalties to larger groups?” (Rorty 1997, 47). Hence, human rights would no longer assume the aura of transnational morality, but be recognized as an expression of loyalty to Western conceptions of justice.

Irrawaddy Tango reflects this consideration of competing loyalties by questioning whether an appeal to activism based on a woman's torture is equivalent to an appeal to ethnic sovereignty rights or national reform; its portrayal mirrors American coverage of Burma's ongoing state of affairs, which depends on a female subject positioned in opposition to a military-controlled state, an appeal meant to extend beyond the single body. The fact that Burma's national self-image may not be particularly gender-invested only reveals the extent to which specific configurations of gender difference can be mobilized within the United States in service of critiques of Asian leadership. For example, like the novel, Hollywood's 1995 portrayal of the democracy movement in Beyond Rangoon engages a female point of view to depict its protagonist's political involvement in Burma as a response to gendered trauma—the loss of a child, attempted rape, and murder. The protagonist's psychic healing culminates in a commitment to humanitarian, non-national activism as she joins a doctors-without-borders-type outpost in the jungle.³³ In contrast, as Geraldine Heng has shown, Singapore's ruling party harnessed gender representation to postindependence mandates for national unity, from its conditional support of the women's movement to its utilization of eroticized sexual allure in the form of the “Singapore girl” to sell its national airline (Heng 1997).

As international feminist scholars have cautioned, yoking gender to the promotion of nationalist imaginaries does not always reflect the best interests of Third World women, particularly as such representations often fall into traditional appeals to women's reproductive duty or women as “nationalist wombs.”³⁴ Women are also called on simply to symbolize the nation's relationship to modernization to signal degrees of either pro-gressiveness or precolonial authenticity. As Aiwah Ong has pointed out, even feminist studies of women in development fall into a reductive bi-narism by evaluating gender inequality along this single opposition among modernization and tradition. The only distinction, she writes, is that “feminists mainly differ over whether modernization of the capitalist or socialist kind will emancipate or reinforce systems of gender inequality found in the Third World” (Ong 1988, 82). Moreover, as Kandiyoti notes, women's symbolic use as boundary markers among national, ethnic, or religious collectives may jeopardize their emergence as full-fledged citizens (Kandiyoti 1994, 382). Thus, it is important to emphasize that the gendered advocacy of these two Asian American novels does not reflect a feminist commitment to Asian women as much as an understanding of how the gender tropes that saturate American culture can be put to use. One could argue that Law-Yone's appeal to the injured female body plays on traditional ideas of women's victimization by reinforcing limited concepts of empowerment from injury.³⁵ Similarly, Cheong's coming-of-age narrative relies on gender-differentiated models of agency and passivity to parallel the state's methods of soliciting loyal citizenry: feminine submission to protective custody becomes the analog to masculine conscription.

These literary representations linking women and political advocacy speak to the potency of gendered metaphors in American national consciousness and their potential efficacy in eliciting sympathetic awareness of what inevitably is shown to be the patriarchal heavy-handedness of Asian governance. While this certainly reverses colonialist portrayals of a feminized Orient, both novels may reinforce the notion of Asia's absolute difference from the West—Law-Yone through representations of barbarous and inept Asian military rule and Cheong through implicit comparisons between Asian “guided” and Western “free” democracies. In reproducing Asia through differentiation, as Lowe suggests, these portrayals may sustain the narrow characterization of the always alien Asian American subject. Significantly, however, both works' emphasis is not on the contestation of Asian inclusion or exclusion in the United States. Rather, in keeping with Lowe's and other Americanists' general thesis on American nationalism discussed in Chapter 1, the works reveal the processes of ethnic management to be endemic to the nationalist enterprise—here, under postcolonialism. Moreover, Cheong reverses presumptions about the West's construction of the East to show how Singaporean nationalism itself relied on distinctions between East and West to secure its sense of Asian ethnic cohesion. Gender difference becomes the vehicle for exposing how postindependence regimes constructed ethnically differentiated internal and external “enemies” as predicates of national unity and the legitimacy of their own rule.

As gender is positioned as a sign that secures group cohesion, it mediates the formation of collective identifications in the state's re-formation of affiliations and roles and becomes a means of defining group loyalties. As I have suggested, the rhetorical connection between women's sexual transgression and national betrayal is one bridge across the presumed divide between ethnic American and transnational perspectives in Asian American Studies. Just as Third World nationalists may position feminism as an imported Western corruption of indigenous tradition or female figures as betraying national collectives, so too have ethnic cultural nationalists represented gender concerns as a betrayal of ethnic American solidarity and continuance. Here, gendered discourses familiar to an American readership (spousal abuse, women's rights as civil rights) work to intervene in postcolonial Asian politics. This is certainly in keeping with Lowe's view of literature as one site where “the individual invents lived relationship with the national collective” as he or she becomes “immersed in the repertoire of American memories, events, and narratives” (Lowe 1996, 5).

But rather than wholly realizing the oppositional nature of Asian American cultural productions that Lowe envisions, this immersion can also produce a strategic replaying of American national narratives, as I suggest in Chapter 4, a staging of values normative to the First World. Thus, an emphasis on the uses of gendered appeal is one means of displacing the distinction between exilic and immigrant sensibilities in Asian American art, given that it focuses instead on an interrogation of how U.S. investments influence representations of “home” or vice versa.³⁶ This is not to imply Asian American cultural enfranchisement as much as a familiarity with, for example, gendered rights as a tool for advocacy; there is, of course, a certain irony to my point given the tradition of valuable scholarship showing that civil rights have not historically extended to, or do not currently extend to, populations within the United States marked by class, race, or sexuality. Asian American positioning suggests an immersion in—and an ability to manipulate—First World ideologies and discourses, an ability particularly significant for writers who continue to have stakes in reenvisioning the governance of their countries of origin.

Highlighting literature's investment in the national thus speaks to Sau-ling Wong's compelling caution about the shift in focus from domestic to diasporic perspectives in Asian American Studies, a movement that potentially elides the class and coalitional history of Asian Americans that motiviated the formation of the discipline. Certainly, as Koshy notes, new Asian American literary production cannot be conceptualized simply within national boundaries; however, rather than a strategic forgetting of, in her terms, “outmoded identity politics,” it is important to recognize how literature advances political advocacy in terms reflective of the rhetoric of rights intrinsic to the inception of the field (Koshy 1996). Of consequence is not so much that the texts I discuss here inscribe modes of Asian American subjectivity, although they may well do this, but that their narratives are partly authorized by, in Sau-ling Wong's words, their authors' “land of residence” (Sau-ling Wong 1995a). Conversely, if Asian American literature is singularly situated as American minority literature, it can be erroneously positioned in opposition to postcolonial literature as interventionist political allegory. This opposition is implicit in reviews that found Scent's historical contextualization an awkward intrusion; one concluded that Cheong was “not as brilliant as Tan or Kingston.” Such an assessment suggests that an association with the canon of “minority” literature, at least in mainstream perception, leads to a misreading and would relegate the history of social upheaval in such texts to a backdrop for narratives of identity quest. This association would position Scent's bildungsroman not as the vehicle for commenting on political developments, but as a genre merely concerned with maturation and the “intensity of a young girl growing up in a lush and beautiful land,” as one review noted, or the cultural conflict between tradition and modern val-ues.³⁷ Although less an issue for Irrawaddy, emphasis on the novel's use of the picaresque (“a woman's sexual adventures”) can displace a reading based on Tango's relationship to the state as a shifting collective alliance motivated by sexual activity.

Rather, in both novels “identity quest” becomes the vehicle for revealing the role of the state in conditioning the bounded expressions of identity and structures the authors' national commentaries. Both reconcile hard-and-fast distinctions between “minority” American literature and postcolonial literature by revealing that the gendered configurations of ethnicity, family, and nationality that figure into expressions of hyphenated identity are also vehicles for postcolonial critique. Both means of situating Asian American literature converge in a specifically gendered rhetoric that comes to structure political advocacy.

Wong's call for historicizing the push to globalize Asian American cultural criticism can be seconded by a need to historicize literature's simultaneous investment in global activism and domestic values. With this assertion of investment comes a necessary caution: although my discussion of the “universal” concept of human rights highlights literature's appeal to a transnational means of governance predicated on the rights of the Enlightenment subject, such appeals may carry implicit Western ideological agendas even as they advance ideals that seemingly transcend American national interests. Far from rendering Asian American literature post-national, an emphasis on a national rhetoric of gendered rights reveals the literature to be imbued with potentially hegemonic First World values.

Scarry has noted that Amnesty International's effectiveness depends on its “ability to communicate the reality of physical pain to those who are not themselves in pain” (Scarry 1985, 9). While the novels engage situations of differing urgency, both narrate the body's pain and the trauma of loss as a reminder that the “collective task of diminishing pain” does not end with independence from colonial domination. In Burma, the status quo is uneasily maintained as SLORC (now self-designated the State Peace and Development Council) continues to isolate Aung San Suu Kyi and disrupt assembly outside her home. Ironically, the ethnic secessionist struggle for Kawthoolei, a Karen homeland, now lives on in fiction after suffering a historical setback: Radio Myanmar reported the fall of the Karen National Union central headquarters in Manerplaw, forcing thirty thousand Karens across the border into refugee camps in Thailand in early 1995.³⁸ Scents portrayal of the PAP's implementation of “emergency” measures such as curfews or the Internal Security Act in the years following independence reveals the crisis surrounding communist subversion to be the initial justification for the suppression of internal dissent, which continues into the present. The tactic of invoking national crisis to elicit consent for state mandates continued into the early 1980s: as Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan note, in 1983 Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew charged educated (ethnic Chinese) women with a failure to regenerate the population in proportions equivalent to the moment of the nation's founding; theirs was a dereliction of the patriotic duty to reproduce a genetically superior workforce to secure Singapore's future (Heng and Devan 1992).³⁹ Both novels' representation of postcolonial Asian politics invokes the increasingly influential discourse of human rights as a reminder that the past is only rendered accessible in the terms of the present; and in doing so, they situate Asian American literary production as a medium of timely global commentary. As the treatment of political dissidents increasingly narrates the individual's relationship to the state, the more urgent the need to understand the ways in which “universal” concepts such as human rights transcend neither history nor context, but are deployed in the interest of specific political agendas.