Notes
Author's Note: All book reviews, interviews, personal communications, newspaper and magazine articles, and miscellaneous popular media sources have been cited in the text or discursive endnotes.
Chapter One
1. Fluxus originated as an avant-gardist art movement in the 1960s, a loose affiliation of international musicians, visual artists, and poets who were known for staging “Events” or performance art pieces involving audience participation or task-oriented activities. Ono's association with the Fluxus movement began in 1960 and included a concert of performance events at Carnegie Recital Hall in 1961.
2. This is not to say that hostility against her no longer exists; see, for example, the oddly anachronistic website, “Me Against Yoko Ono,” inviting surfers to logon if they agree that Ono broke up the Beatles. The site is subtitled, “Yoko Ono: She's everywhere you don't want her to be.” http://www.toptown.com/DORMS/SGT.PEPPE/yoko.htm
3. Ono cited in Barbara Haskell and John G. Hanhardt, Yoko Ono: Arias and Objects (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1991), 5. Lennon cited in Jonathan Cott and Christine Doudna et. al., The Ballad of John and Yoko (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982), 115.
4. See Jon Wiener's “John Lennon Versus the FBI.” Jon Wiener, Professors, Politics and Pop (London: Verso, 1991). The INS concentrated its efforts on deporting John Lennon in the summer of 1972 out of fear that he would hold a political rally to disrupt the Republican National Convention where Nixon was to be renominated. Wiener notes that Lennon's application for permanent residency would be approved in 1975, after it was conceded that such targeting was part of the Nixon administration's obsession with New Left activism. See also Jerry Hopkins, Yoko Ono (New York: Macmillan, 1986).
5. Other comments were more direct, as in Paul's, George's, and Ringo's purported jokes about Ono being the “Jap Flavor of the Month” and having a slanted vagina (Hopkins 1986, 80).
6. For the history behind the arrest of Tokyo Rose, see Harry T. Brundidge, “Okinawa Deal Led War Correspondents to 'Tokyo Rose' Find: Brundidge, Lee Reach Jap Capital Before Occupation; Quiz Radio Siren,” Nashville Tennessean, 9 May 1948, 1. Cited in Nathaniel Weyl, Treason: The Story of Disloyalty and Betrayal in American History (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1950), 387. Cited in Russell Warren Howe, The Hunt for 'Tokyo Rose' (Lanham: Madison Books, 1989), xvii. See Masayo Duus, Tokyo Rose, Orphan of the Pacific, trans. Peter Duus (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 12, and Stanley I. Kutler, “Forging a Legend: The Treason of 'Tokyo Rose,'” Reprinted in Asian Americans and the Law: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, vol. 3, ed. Charles McClain (New York: Garland, 1980), 434.
7. Cited in Clark Lee, One Last Look Around (New York: Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1947), 85, and Harry T. Brundidge, “Arrest of 'Tokyo Rose' Nears,” Nashville Tennessean, 2 May 1948, A14.
8. For example, while awaiting charges in a military prison during the American occupation, she discovered that a contingent of visiting congressmen was granted permission to ogle her while she bathed (Duus 1979, 98).
9. The story does not leave this difference between them unchallenged. The woman on the train disconcerts the narrator by the sensuality of her next act: she loosens her hair in what to the narrator is an act of seduction that psychically reconnects her to the erotic, nostalgic pull of the women of her youth. The narrator's smugness in interpreting the woman's class, caste, and conjugal status is confounded by the fact that the woman can, by this simple action, subvert the narrator's assessment.
10. Rich's essay, “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia,” attributes the phrase to antilynching activist Lillian Smith (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1979 [New York: W.W. Norton, 1979], 284).
11. As Sau-ling Wong astutely comments in a footnote, “Paradoxically, another cultural consequence may be…the rise of various forms of fundamentalism worldwide, with their insistence on purity, absoluteness, and inviolable borders” (Sau-ling Wong 1995, 21).
12. For example, see Masao Miyoshi on the loss of national sovereignty to multinationals in “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,” 1993.
13. Or, as Robert Wade simply states, “Populations are much less mobile across borders than are goods, finance, or ideas” (Wade 1996, 61). On the erosion of state power, see also Linda Weiss, “Globalization and the Myth of the Powerless State,” 1997.
14. See Deniz Kandiyoti for a discussion of these stakes. As long as Third World women are used as symbols for the preservation of national, ethnic, or religious collectives, she writes, “their emergence as full-fledged citizens will be jeopardised, and whatever rights they may have achieved during one state of nation-building may be sacrificed on the altar of identity politics during another” (Kandiyoti 1994, 382).
15. In contrast to Lowe's thesis, it is interesting to note that Smith-Rosenberg excludes Asian Americans from her list of influential racial Others in exploring the transformation of Europeans into Americans, an exclusion based on the early historical presence of other groups: “[H]ow,” she asks, “did white Americans imagine themselves the true Americans, and imagine all other Americans—American Indians, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans (all of whom resided in America far longer than most white Americans, who are, for the most part, descendants of nineteenth and twentieth-century European immigrants)—as peculiar, marginal types of Americans?” (177). Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Captured Subjects/Savage Others: Violently Engendering the New American,” Gender & History 5:2 (Summer 1993): 177-95. Arguments on the centrality of domestic racial subjects parallel claims in feminist scholarship on the role of gender in American construction as well; reflecting Nancy Armstrong's point that the domestic woman was the first modern subject, Gillian Brown's Domestic Individualism argues that nineteenth-century American conceptions of individualism were created through a domestic ideology marked as feminine and interior, apart from the masculine public sphere. Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
16. For example, Rosemary Hennessy characterizes the tension thusly: “In some instances, questioning feminism's claim to speak for all women has led to fears that dismantling the identity 'woman' may well lead to the dissolution of feminism itself. At the same time, the myriad forms of violence against women, the persistent worldwide devaluation of femininity and women's work, and the intensified controls over women's sexuality and reproductive capacities are daily reminders of the need for a strong and persistent feminist movement” (Hennessy 1993, xi).
17. As Kumari Jayawardena notes, “those who want to continue to keep the women of our [Asian] countries in a position of subordination find it convenient to dismiss feminism as a foreign ideology” (Jayawardena 1986, ix).
18. See, for example, Kandiyoti 1994; Enloe 1990; Peterson 1995; and Lois West, ed., Feminist Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997). These scholars note the ways in which gender issues further the cause of nationalism whether through, if not feminism per se, traditional gender representations of women as “nationalist wombs” (Enloe), of the emancipated woman as a symbol of progress (Kandiyoti), or more generally the ways in which women have been situated in regard to national processes (Peterson).
19. Lois West's typology connecting ethnic cultural nationalism and nationalism bears significance for this link. In her suggestion that feminism and nationalism coincide under three types of social movements, as internal identity rights movements, as national liberation movements, and as movements against neocolonialism, West ties the consolidation of group identification to gendered state politics (West 1992).
20. See my article, “ 'For Every Gesture of Loyalty, There Doesn't Have to Be a Betrayal': Asian American Criticism and the Politics of Locality” in Who Can Speak?: Authority and Critical Identity, ed. Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 30-49.
21. Angela Gilliam, for example, has noted that the “analysis of sexuality as it relates to national liberation is different from the questions that U.S. women are accustomed to formulating, i.e., in this [Third World] context sexuality is understood within the context of economics and politics, rather than simply male domination” (Gilliam 1991, 230).
22. Tan's comment comes in reference to her objection to having Asian American literary works reviewed together because they may have “nothing in common except for the fact that they are written by Asian Americans”(7). Amy Tan, “Required Reading and Other Dangerous Subjects,” Three Penny Review (Fall 1996): 5-9.
23. The phrase is Eric Sundquist's, used to express the relationship of African American literature to the European American canon (Sundquist 1993, 22).
Chapter Two
1. Antiprostitution movements fueled anti-Chinese sentiment. Using Census reports, Lucie Cheng Hirata estimates that 85 percent of Chinese women in San Francisco in 1860 were prostitutes. “Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 5:11 (Autumn 1979): 3-29.
2. See, for example, Gatens 1997 and Iris Marion Young, “Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship,” in The Citizenship Debates, ed. Gershon Shafir (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 263-91.
3. Nira Yuval-Davis writes, “Ursula Vogel (1989) has shown that women were not simply latecomers to citizenship rights, as in Marshall's evolutionary model. Their exclusion was part and parcel of the construction of the entitlement of men to democratic participation which conferred citizen status not upon individuals as such but upon men” (Yuval-Davis 1991, 63).
4. This equation is emphasized in the film version. While the biographical novel embeds the man/nation association, the film focuses on Polly's romance with future husband Charlie Bemis as a contrast to her relationships with the Chinese men who end up abusing, controlling, or deserting her. Near the end of the film, Polly rides out with the rest of the Chinese being driven out of the territory by anti-Chinese hysteria but in a dramatic moment she turns back to Warrens and presumably to Charlie. The decision is represented not only as the fulfillment of romantic love, but as the determiner of her national identity. The only woman in a group of displaced Chinese men, she is the only one allowed the luxury of return.
5. My emphasis on narrative is not to invalidate the fact that, as studies on the internment trauma have shown, internment produced lasting psychological effects. See, for example, Nagata and Takeshita 1998, and Donna K. Nagata, “The Japanese American Internment: Exploring the Transgenerational Consequences of Traumatic Stress,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 3:1 (1990): 47-70.
6. After internees protested, question 28 was rephrased,“Will you swear to abide by the laws of the United States and to take no action which would in any way interfere with the war effort of the United States?” As a result, 98 percent of issei responded, “Yes” (Weglyn 1976).
7. Among the War Relocation Authority (WRA) photographs documenting internment, Wendy Kozol has noted a startling set of images depicting Japanese American children in blackface performing a slave auction. Identified only as a play for a “Harvest Festival Talent Show” performed at Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona in 1942, the photographs raise questions about what it means for one racially stigmatized group to put on a masquerade that is so historically loaded. As Kozol notes, the possible resonances can be contradictory: while blackface may enact a form of resistance by invoking slavery as a critique of Japanese American incarceration, it may also merely make a bid for national acceptance by participating in the subordination of African Americans (Kozol, forthcoming).
8. Jeannie's flair for public performance can be read as a tribute to and challenge of the masculine role-playing of her father, a talented mimic, and brother, Woody, whose postwar profession is touring the country with “Mr. Moto,” a Japanese wrestler, portraying “his sinister assistant Suki” (18). While the selfconsciously artificial venue of professional wrestling may signal parodic intent, it is ironic that Woody willingly plays up the very racial fantasy that led to the internment.
9. I am approaching masquerade here in a way distinct from Traise Yama-moto's discussion of masking in the same text. For Yamamoto, masking refers to a specific reticence or tonal flatness in Japanese American autobiography that she argues is a means through which Japanese American women reclaim agency (Yamamoto 1999).
10. Prefiguring Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity, Riviere makes no distinction between “genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade’ ” (Riviere 1986, 38). Butler nonetheless questions where Riviere's concept of masquerade leaves lesbian women if desire is presumed to originate in masculine heterosexuality and does not allow a female object of sexual desire (Butler 1990).
11. Jeannie's circulation is also a sign of her father's economic-as-sexual impotence specifically in relation to her mother's history. Houston tells us that “Mama was worth a lot” (38) on the Japanese marriage market in the United States, a worth that the text reveals is largely squandered in her love match with Jeannie's father. If the phallic daughter cannot possess her mother, she must attempt to redress her degraded position through her own sexual commodification.
12. Elsewhere Mura implies that his addiction to pornography is the result of sexual abuse. See David Mura, A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1987).
13. I am indebted to Daniel Kim for this reference.
14. Or more succinctly in the publisher's note that accompanies Irigaray's text, mimicry is an “interim strategy for dealing with the realm of discourse (where the speaking subject is posited as masculine), in which the woman deliberately assumes the feminine style and posture assigned to her within this discourse in order to uncover the mechanisms by which it exploits her” (Irigaray 1985, 220).
15. As Bhabha notes concerning the racial stereotype,“the black is both savage (cannibal) and yet the most obedient and dignified of servants” (Bhabha 1994, 82).
16. The redress movement initiated by the Japanese American Citizen's League (JACL) in 1978 resulted in lump sum payments of $20,000 each to adult survivors as well as an official apology in 1990. See Roger Daniels, “Redress Achieved, 1983-1990,” in Asian Americans and the Law, ed. Charles McClain, vol. 3 (New York: Garland, 1994), 389-93; and John Tateishi, “The Japanese American Citizens League and the Struggle for Redress,” in Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress, ed. Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986), 191-95.
Chapter Three
1. For example, Shirley Lim's Among the White Moon Faces locates immigration to the United States as a move from alienated rootlessness toward communal belonging, in effect, a movement opposite to the one I am naming here.
2. While Rio's account suggests the gendered narrative I am tracing, the postmodern ending implied by Pucha's competing version of events throws into question the authenticity of Rio's narration. In answer to my own question, the novel offers multiple and competing models of complicity and resistance: in Joey's narrative, “America” functions as a means of enforcing passivity through utopian promises. Daisy Avila's narrative provides an alternative model to Rio's immigrant conclusion. Nevertheless, Hagedorn herself has noted, “Perhaps what I value most in Western culture has been this profound sense of 'freedom' as a woman—a freedom of movement and choice that is essential to any human being, and certainly essential for any writer” (Hagedorn 1994, 175).
3. Robyn Wiegman's American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender is a notable exception. In exploring the analogy between “blacks and women” to reveal both their differential and complementary uses, she asks, “What does it mean that in discourses of civic inclusion and political rights, the social marks of gender have often provided the rhetorical means for constructing as well as depriving the slave's common humanity?” (Wiegman 1995, 62). The “analogic wedding of 'blacks and women,' ” she notes, has been historically asymmetrical, emerging in both politically resistant and complicit contexts in the nineteenth century.
4. Elaine Kim reads Wong's “desire for personal success through aquiescence” as understandable, but ultimately accommodationist (Kim 1984, 72). Writer Frank Chin dismisses her “propaganda-as-autobiography” as a “snow job” (Chin 1974, xviii).
5. Chow is, in this case, discussing the native, who “in the absence of that original witness of the native's destruction, and in the untranslatability of the native's discourse into imperialist discourse,” is always already wrested away from her “authentic” precolonial context. The critical desire in contemporary cultural studies to (re)place the native in her historical, “original,” context is therefore suspect (Chow 1993). My analogy to a Chinese American “native” is thus inexact: there is no originary home for Wong. The narrative's attempt to register difference as per the dictates of Wong's self-conscious intention is mediated by the necessity of rendering likeness.
6. I make a distinction between the author, Wong, and her representation of Jade Snow, the character who plays out Wong's dramatization.
7. Critical desire to seek a more oppositional voice for Wong underlies interest in, as mentioned in Aiiieeee!, the two-thirds of the original manuscript excised by her editors. It may be easy to romanticize what is missing as the source of a more critical vision of American culture.
8. Milkman suggests that the impact of World War II on gender equity is somewhat overstated: it resulted in increased female labor force participation but not greater opportunity in male-dominated fields or wage equity. She attributes women's reincorporation into low-wage, low-status, gender-segregated jobs to postwar management hiring policies rather than either unsatisfactory job performance or the union-enforced seniority system (Milkman 1987).
9. She has not deviated from these beliefs fifty years later: according to Karen Su, Wong said in a convocation speech at Mills College in 1993, “Your work is going to be your intellectual satisfaction, but it will be your marriage and children who will fulfill you as a woman” (Su 1994, 15).
10. The repeal of these laws by President Roosevelt in 1943 occurred after an alliance with China and was proffered as “additional proof that we regard China not only as a partner in waging war but that we shall regard her as a partner in days of peace” (37). See The China White Paper, August 1949, vol. 1, n.p. Originally issued as “United States Relations with China: With Special Reference to the Period 1944-1949.” By 1950, however, the U.S. Navy was deployed in the straits of Taiwan.
11. Wong herself did not want to relinquish her belief in transhistorical collective traits and understandably so: her value as informant was based on her ability to interpret timeless cultural distinctions between Chinese and Americans. During her trip to the People's Republic in the early 1970s, her generalizations were met with incredulity. Speaking Chinese according to the conventions learned from her father, she is corrected: “As we left, the Chinese equivalent words for 'Thanks'— 'I am not worthy of this service'—came automatically to my lips. They replied indignantly, 'What kind of language is that? We do not know it'” (J.S. Wong 1975, 213).
12. Jane Marcus has pointed out her own need as a feminist critic to construct Gilbert and Gubar and Showalter as “daughters of anger” as an analogy to Vir-gina Woolf's invocation of Charlotte Bronte and Judith Shakespeare (Marcus 1988).
13. I experienced the deflation of the ideal recuperative feminist enterprise upon meeting her in 1987. Although she agreed to speak with me, she stated flatly, “I'll give you ten minutes. You young people think you can just ask for an interview and I'm supposed to drop everything. I'm making a living here.” She was, however, interested in how I had come to my reading and while neither validating nor denying it assured me that she “wrote the truth—'Daddy's wife' ” (personal communication, 10 December 1987).
14. I am indebted to Daniel Kim for this reference.
15. See Denise Chong, “Emotional Journeys through East and West,” Quill and Quire 55: 5 (May 1989): 23. Ironically, Chong's own family memoir, The Concubine's Children: The Story of a Chinese Family Living on Two Sides of the Globe (1994), avoids the sentimentality of The Joy Luck Club. The fairy-tale quality of some of the Joy Luck mothers' stories stands in contrast to the realism of the economic struggle of Chong's Chinese Canadian workers trying to provide for extended families on two continents. While the focus is thematically similar to The Joy Luck Club—the degraded second wife, “lost babies,” and sibling recon-ciliation—The Concubine's Children details the ways in which changes in political landscape, labor opportunities, and immigration laws influence generational conflict and connection.
16. In pointing to multiple contexts in which Tan refuses this binarism, Malini Scheuller makes an opposing point. However, I would argue that maintaining the distinction America-choices, China-no choices in the mothers' stories works in conjunction with what must eventually be acknowledged as gender oppression's commonality in the daughters' stories by the end of the text.
17. According to Chodorow, the consequence of a feminine ego based on connection and relation in contrast to the individuated male ego is boundary confusion with others: if “mature dependence” characterized by a strong sense of self is not developed, “immature” dependence characterized by the need to look to others for self-affirmation and self-esteem follows (Chodorow 1974). Tan's mothers reflect this type of connectedness with their daughters, and all four daughters struggle with their ambivalence toward it. Significantly, however, the daughters' ethnic negotiation is posed in terms of their connection with and need to separate from their mothers.
18. See Bharati Mukherjee's essay, “An Invisible Woman,” for the ways in which Canada's policy of multiculturalism impacts segregation (Mukherjee 1981).
19. Sky Lee notes that Western concepts of lesbianism depend on a sexual definition: “On the issues of bisexuals being lesbian or not, I just can't imagine half of the world not loving another half of the world because, I don't know, because they're lesbian or het. I just can't imagine that world, and I don't want to believe in it. But in an Eastern sense, a woman's community is very interesting. Women love women in my sense of the Asian community, which has, as its source, the village where my mother came from.…But interestingly enough, in the Asian sense, women are allowed to be women, left to play or work together, probably because the relationships between men and women are often more taboo—more rules about how you relate to your uncle than how you relate to another woman, because that's the kind of patriarchal control of women's bodies which is important. Still, in my mother's community, of course women love women. So what is lesbian?” (S. Lee 1990, 122).
20. Tan eventually published the story, her first, in Seventeen, where it caught the eye of agent Sandra Dijkstra. With Dijkstra's encouragement, Tan wrote two more chapters, “Waiting Between the Trees” and “Scar,” and an outline of the others (one of which merely stated, “A woman goes to China to meet her sisters with expectations and discovers something else”), just before embarking on a trip to China with her mother to meet her half sisters (26). Upon returning to the United States, Tan found that she had offers on the yet unfinished book; she completed The Joy Luck Club within four months after the bid. Although she still thought of the work as a collection of stories “connected by theme or emotion or community,” she compromised with her publisher, who labeled it a “first work of fiction” (Barbara Somogyi and Dan Stanton, “Amy Tan: An Interview,” Poets and Writers Magazine, September/October 1991, 24-32).
Chapter Four
1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 17:1 (April 1994): 141-60 and is reprinted in Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real,” ed. Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol, forthcoming, University of Illinois Press.
2. In 1994, the secretary of state, Warren Christopher, met with the Vietnamese foreign minister in an effort to normalize Vietnamese-American relations, the first meeting between the foreign policy chiefs of Vietnam and the United States since 1975 (New York Times, 10 July 1994). Since 1995, the United States and Vietnam have established diplomatic ties but have yet to achieve full economic and trade normalization. An agreement pending in July 2000 is not expected to receive opposition once it goes to Congress.
3. The poll was conducted in March and April 1994 in Orange County, California, which has the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside Vietnam. Sixty-eight percent of Vietnamese American voters there were registered Republicans, “many believing it takes a harsher view of Communism” than the Democratic Party (Los Angeles Times, 13 June 1994, A24). Fifty-four percent approved lifting the embargo, and 53 percent favored full diplomatic relations with Vietnam (Los Angeles Times, 12 June 1994, A32).
4. Throughout this essay I make a distinction between Hayslip, the author who constructs the narrative, and Le Ly, the representation of herself as the character who plays out the action of that narrative. The fact that these entities are often presumed to be identical testifies to the strength of realism as a genre and the illusion of unmediated access to the subject of first-person narrative.
5. Although Jameson's comments are in regard to the novel, the generic distinction between fiction and autobiography is not relevant to my argument here. While it is true that as a genre autobiography more specifically reflects, in the words of Michael M. J. Fischer, a “commitment to the actual” than the novel, I am interested in the rhetorical structures that render autobiography novelistically. It is certainly the case, however, that Hayslip's narrative would not have received attention had it not been perceived as factual, especially in a genre such as Vietnam War narrative, where authority is so clearly aligned with a first-person experience of the war.
6. See, for example, Jayawardena 1986; Kandiyoti 1994; Peterson 1995; Heng 1997; Lois West, ed., Feminist Nationalism New York: Routledge, 1997); Yuval-Davis 1997; and Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., Woman-Nation-State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989).
7. In regard to other Asian American women's texts, this construction is most notably reflected in Helie Lee's Still Life with Rice: A Young American Woman Discovers the Life and Legacy of Her Korean Grandmother. While less overtly interventionist than Hayslip's autobiography, this as-told-to testimonio recounting a woman's life during the Korean Civil War draws on concepts of maternal bonding in its plea for Korean reunification. The text ends, “I wait, hoping, aching, for the political gate that separates my son from me to fling open. And when it does, I will run in laughing and crying and singing out his name. How do I know? I am Korean, and we Koreans have this unshakable faith, for we are a strongwilled people. History proves it to be so. For more than a millennium we have lived as one people and I am certain we will be united again. Unification is possible! I say this as a woman who has survived over eighty years of living; also, I say it as a woman who has given life” (H. Lee 1996, 320).
8. Reuters reports that since returning to the international financial fold in 1993, Vietnam has received $8.5 billion in development assistance (Adrian Edwards, “Rights Group Appeals to Donors over Vietnam Unrest,” Reuters, 10 December 1997). World Bank donors pledged $2.4 billion in aid for 1998, anticipating that Vietnam would not be significantly affected by the 1997 financial crisis in Asia, as it did not allow free securities trading and did not have a stock market (Edwina Gibbs, “Donors Pledge $2.4 Billion in Aid for Vietnam,” Reuters, 12 December 1997). However, the foreign investment pledges reaching $8 billion in 1996 plunged to $2 billion in 1999. Economic reform has been slow, frustrating even the most resilient multinationals, including Nike, Caterpillar, and Cargill, the major U.S. investors in Vietnam. Vietnam viewed trade liberalization warily even as an agreement to normalize trade between Vietnam and the United States was pending in July 2000 (Joseph Kahn, “U.S. and Vietnam are Said to Agree on Normal Trade: Little Resistance Seen in Congress After Four Years of Talks,” New York Times 13 July 2000, A1).
9. It may not be surprising that the former comment praising her forgiving perspective on the war—and by extension the sexual violence perpetrated by the men who waged it—was published in Playboy. Digby Diehl, “Books,” Playboy, July 1989, 26. Eva Hoffman, “A Child of Vietnam Grows Up to Write of the Horror,” New York Times, 17 May 1989.
10. For a discussion of Nike's labor abuses in Vietnam and elsewhere, see the website for Global Exchange at http://www.globalexchange.org.
11. Craig R. Whitney, “Hanoi Now, Meet Saigon, Then,” New York Times, 28 1997, 6. Of course, such comments in the American media may merely reflect a rescripting of the Vietnam War in which the United States, like Rambo, wins in the end.
12. Echoing the rhetoric of this “national covenant,” Hayslip's Child of War, Woman of Peace could easily be the focus of Bercovitch's assessment of Thoreau's Walden, which he sees as “a conversion narrative that fuses the laws of nature, reason, and economics with the spirit of America” (Bercovitch 1978, 185).
13. A reading of When Heaven and Earth Changed Places does, however, challenge Jeffords's privileging of gender over racial difference in her analysis of Asian women, a privileging she makes self-conscious in her statement, “it could be just as important to understand [Vietnamese women's] construction as 'enemy' in terms of their race” (Jeffords 1989, 178). Her analysis of Vietnamese women focuses on the way in which the “sexual difference between men and woman is used to defer racial differences,” rendering them mere vehicles for signifying power relations among white, black, Native American, Latino, and Asian men in a war zone (Jeffords 1989, 178). The centrality of Le Ly's point of view in When Heaven and Earth Changed Places does not allow a reading in which gender trumps race; the text reveals that both are integral to her self-conception as a Vietnamese woman and influence her representation of that positioning.
14. Viet Thanh Nguyen makes a similar argument in his discussion of how Hayslip's work serves the purposes of global capitalism through its appeal to a naturalized feminine body located in the “nostalgic fiction of Viet Nam as agrarian, precapitalist, and fundamentally stable and 'natural' in its social organization” (608). His work goes further to suggest how Hayslip's self-representation might also reconcile her to a Vietnamese audience through its convergence with classical literature. He notes that Hayslip's story resonates strongly with Nguyen Du's “The Tale of Kieu,” in which “ideal duty must be compromised in the face of contingency” (Nguyen 1997, 633) as the protagonist sacrifices bodily chastity in order to fulfill her filial duty; what redeems her as a nationalist heroine is her ability to retain a sense of spiritual chastity in the face of loss. My thanks to Sau-ling Wong for bringing this article to my attention.
15. Elizabeth Grosz's question characterizes this distinction: “Is the concept of sexual difference a breakthrough term in contesting patriarchal conceptions of women and femininity? Or is it a reassertion of the patriarchal containment of women? Is the concept essentialist, or is it an upheaval of patriarchal knowledges?” (Grosz 1989, 87).
16. Lois West also makes this point in noting the convergence of male and feminist nationalists on the centrality of the family and pro-natalist (antiabortion) stances to nationalist social movements: “Feminist nationalist criticisms of Western cultural values underlie their perception that Western feminists downplay or even undermine the importance of family and kinship relations” (West 1992, 574).
17. Trimmer notes that in fact Wurts merely elected to fly transport missions and never saw combat, landing in Vietnam once on a secured airstrip (Trimmer 1994, 34). Ironically, one can see how such a personal history would undermine Wurts's authenticity in a discourse where authority is assigned on the basis of action seen.
18. Trimmer notes, “Eventually Wurts and Hayslip agreed on a plot, conceiving the book as two journeys—a young girl's escape from Vietnam and a mature woman's return to her homeland. But to develop this plot, Wurts needed a new strategy for gathering information. He began compiling pages of written questions, asking Hayslip to remember the specific scenes and conversations he needed to complete the story of her two journeys” (Trimmer 1994, 34). Certainly Wurts's influence on the text can be surmised by the use of idiomatic English, for example, “She nudged my arm and I hopped to it” (When Heaven 12). But this influence may also be attributed to James Hayslip; Child of War, Woman of Peace recounts that the first book was originally written in longhand in Vietnamese so that Dennis Hayslip, who disapproved of the book project, would think his wife was merely writing letters.
19. Following the controversy that David Stoll's Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans generated, Menchu herself was initially willing to attribute any inconsistencies in her text to the influence of her collaborator, Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, whom she deemed “officially the author of the book.” The controversy surrounding the facticity of her autobiography only reveals the extent to which discourses of the real rely on individual embodiment as an authenticating precondition. See New York Times, 15 December 1998, A10.
Chapter Five
1. New York Times Magazine, 2 April 1995. See also Joye Mercer, “Morality in Investing,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 29 March 1996, A49-A51. I would like to thank Wendy Law-Yone and Fiona Cheong for speaking with me about their work.
2. In electing to retain the use of “Burma” rather than “Myanmar,” the name chosen in 1989 by the military junta, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), I follow the lead of the author whose text I am discussing. My decision is also based both on readers' familiarity and on political considerations in spite of the fact that the name change has been widely adopted by the media. Maureen Aung-Thwin and Thant Myint-U note that “Burma” is “merely another way of saying Burma in Burmese” (Aung-Thwin and Thant Myint-U 1992, 75). Journalist Michael Fredholm marks his choice to retain “Burma” more politically, stating that “Myanmar” means “strong” in Burmese, the language of the Burman ethnic majority, and therefore the name change is not accepted by all ethnic groups (Fredholm 1993, 7). However, original citations using “Myanmar” have not been changed.
3. The number of political prisoners is an estimate; SLORC has acknowledged the detention of 1,200 people between 18 September 1988 and 18 August 1989, according to Amnesty International (1989).
4. As The New Yorker noted, “Some demonstrators carried the American flag, and at one point, a group of students came to the front door of the Embassy and recited the Gettysburg Address word for word in English” (Sesser 1989, 80-81). It is unclear whether the use of English, knowledge of American history, or the feat of memorization was more astounding to the American journalist.
5. In suggesting that the American citizen has been defined in opposition to the Asian immigrant, Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts uncovers the ways in which Asian immigrants “have been fundamental to the construction of the nation as a simulacrum of inclusiveness” (Lowe 1996, 5). As Asian subjects in the United States are constructed partly as a response to U.S. economic and military interests in Asia, she writes, legal definitions of belonging are likewise constituted by various projections of Asian difference.
6. Detractors of Fay's punishment ranged from President Clinton, who called the sentence “extreme,” to those who saw flogging as a form of torture. Still others seemed far more outraged at the lack of outrage expressed by a complacent citizenry: as one journalist put it, “[Michael Fay is] going to be thrashed and bloodied in a foreign land, and America doesn't seem to care” (19) (Michael Elliott, “Crime and Punishment: The Caning Debate,” Newsweek, 18 April 1994, 18-22).
7. In addition to corporal punishment, there is a mandatory death penalty for murder, and trafficking in 15 grams of heroin or more brings the death penalty as does dealing in illegal firearms. There are regulations on hair length for men as well as prohibitions against fruit or flower picking on public land, noise after 10 P.M., and sidewalk or street dancing. Failure to report a change of address within two weeks could incur a fine of $5,000, five years' imprisonment, or both (915). (W. Timothy Austin, “Crime and Control,” in The Management of Success: The Moulding of Modern Singapore, ed. K. S. Sandhu and P. Wheatley [Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1989], 913-27).
8. During the 1996 conference on trade and economics involving twenty-five leaders of Asia and Europe, for example, members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China, Japan, and South Korea lamented that Europeans “only want to preach to them about human rights” rather than talk business (New York Times, 1 March 1996).
9. See, for example, Masao Miyoshi's “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,” which views transnational corporatism as a form of neocolonialism (Miyoshi 1993). In contrast, economists have noted that fears of the death of the state in global restructuring are overstated. See Hirst and Thompson 1995, Wade 1996, and Weiss 1997.
10. The term comes from Lenore E. Walker's influential study, The Battered Woman (1979).
11. Scarry notes that what the torturer desires in compelling confession is not information but confirmation that “intense pain is world-destroying” (Scarry 1985, 29).
12. Given the excesses of Burma's General Ne Win during his twenty-six-year term as leader of the military-dominated Burma Socialist Programme Party until his resignation in the face of mounting protests in 1988, Law-Yone's depiction of “Supremo,” head of the “People's Party Council,” required potentially little embellishment to convince readers of this irrationality. For example, in keeping with his belief in numerology, Ne Win wreaked havoc on Burma's economy by changing the denomination of larger bills to reflect his lucky number, 9, rendering the previous bills worthless. He once canceled an official state visit to France after interpreting an accident in his welcoming motorcade as an inauspicious omen (Fredholm 1993, 243-44).
Like other colonial independence movements, Burma's independence was furthered through an uneasy anti-imperialist coalition among diverse ethnic and political groups who experienced different treatment under British rule. The territories of the Karen and the Shan, for example, were administered as separate from the interior; both tribes' resistance to the new state arose from the feeling that they experienced greater autonomy under British control (Silverstein 1980). Perceiving that the newly independent state privileged the Burman ethnic majority under its state policy of “burmanisation,” and unable to reconcile themselves to the administration of the centralized state after independence, both the Karen and the Shan continue to wage active warfare, now against SLORC. But, despite this longstanding history of opposition, these groups have mounted a relatively ineffectual challenge to the sovereignty of the state or the rule of the military regime (Law-Yone 1989).
It is this history of increasingly token resistance that elicits condemnation from Irrawaddy's narrator, Tango: “Help was not forthcoming from any quarter as far as this eye could see—not from outside, not from inside the borders. Not from the only other men with the guns—those eternally bickering separatist groups…who couldn't set aside their petty quarrels long enough to gang up on [the general] for the ultimate kick in the head” (261). Her comment recasts insurgent armies with a long history of political causes—“self-rule, religious freedom, human rights” (128)—as squabbling siblings who, in addition to their failure to join forces to oust a despotic ruler, seem more significantly to lack a self-help movement, a point later resonant with Tango's disparagement of experientially based coalition politics in the United States.
13. Walker's The Battered Woman is one source of the phrase, “learned helplessness.” An obvious problem with this concept is that it marks the battered woman as tangentially complicit in her victimhood via a conditioned passivity.
This complicity also makes problematic translating the idea of “learned helplessness” into political analogy; along the same lines, links have been drawn between Burmese Buddhism and the longevity of Ne Win's rule. It has been said that the Burmese believe that the power of a ruler is a function of the merit he is born with; hence Ne Win's authority could be seen to be derived from the merit he had accumulated from a previous existence (Sesser 1989, 76). Of course, such an assessment may reveal as much about the West's fascination with Buddhism as about the existence of culturally conditioned passivity.
14. The substance of this 1962 report was the cause for a heated exchange between Law-Yone's sister, Marjolaine Tin Nyo, and Sao Ying Sita, “Princess of Yawnghwe,” in the 1988 editorial pages of the New York Times. Sao Ying Sita contested the representation of the takeover as “bloodless,” a description she felt was belied by the murder of her brother at the hands of General Ne Win's forces during the coup. Her letter charged Edward Law-Yone with cronyism, a point rebutted by Marjolaine Tin Nyo, who attributed the use of the phrase to The Guardian, another English-language daily (New York Times, 12 September 1988, A:20, and 13 August 1988, 1:26).
15. Reports parallel methods of eliciting compliance, including beatings, burning with cigarettes, sleep deprivation, social isolation, and withholding medical care; these converge most forcefully in methods of sexual torture—the insertion of objects into vagina or rectum, coerced sex acts, and rape. Mary Romero draws a direct comparison between tactics used on American POWs in Korea and battered women in “A Comparison between Strategies Used on Prisoners of War and Battered Wives” (Romero 1985). Diana Russell cites A. D. Biederman's schematic, “debilitation, dread, and dependency” to draw an analogy between tactics used to break down the resistance of prisoners of war and those used by batterers (Russell 1982). See also Boulette and Anderson's discussion of the “Stockholm syndrome” (Teresa Boulette and Susan Anderson, “Mind Control and the Battering of Women,” Community Mental Health Journal 21 [1985]: 109-18) and Tifft's use of Elaine Scarry's discussion of torture (Tifft 1993).
16. This is an imperfect example of what Scarry might see as torture's decon-structive ability; after all, the inverse of pain is not pleasure, but the cessation of pain.
17. Scarry writes, “When, for example, one receives a letter from Amnesty in the mail, the words of that letter must somehow convey to the reader the aversive-ness being experienced inside the body of someone whose country may be far away, whose name can barely be pronounced, and whose ordinary life is unknown except that it is known that ordinary life has ceased to exist” (Scarry 1985, 9, emphasis mine). Her comment unwittingly reveals that international agencies such as Amnesty International locate the West as an implicit center for human rights activism.
18. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has viewed Khun Sa, former leader of the Shan United Army, as an opium drug lord. Khun Sa claimed to be fighting for an independent Shan state, but the DEA alleged that he had raised a personal army to protect his heroin business (Reuters World Service, 15 May 1995). In contrast, the Karen apparently fund their activities by taxing goods smuggled into Thailand (Sesser 1989, 74). Based on SLORC's record of human rights abuses, the United States is now reluctant to lift its arms embargo on Burma, even to fight the “War on Drugs” in the region between Burma, Laos, and Thailand known as the Golden Triangle and cut drug enforcement aid after the events of 1988 (see Mathea Falco, “Don't Make a Deal,” New York Times, 17 July 1994; and Peter Reuter, “Myanmar's Drug Habit,” New York Times, 3 April 1995). Ethnic groups claim that the government was using antiopium herbicides on insurgent armies' food supply (Law-Yone 1989; Sesser 1989).
19. The novel could not foresee the factionalization of the Karen movement two years later. The Karen National Union was divided by a progovernment Buddhist group, the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army, who forced some refugees to repatriate from camps in Thailand (New York Times, 23 February 1996).
20. For example, this from Time: “Gentle in gesture and speech, the Karens do not seem capable of nurturing hatred. Nor do the guerrillas seem capable of dispatching their children to the front lines to fight, and die, alongside the men. But they do” (Alessandra Stanley, “Burma: Junior Rambos,” Time, 18 June 1990, 41). The New York Times has been consistently fascinated by a radical offshoot of the Karen cause, God's Army, which staged a suicide raid on a Thai hospital, taking eight hundred hostages. More noteworthy to the Times, however, is the fact that God's Army is led by gun-toting, cheroot smoking, twelve-year-old twins, Luther and Johnny Htoo, believed by their followers to be the reincarnation of ancient Karen heroes and imbued with supernatural powers. The Western journalist who visited their camp devoted as much space to their actual cause as he did to the fact that the boys do not know how to play (Seth Mydans, “Burmese Boy Rebels Languish in Jungle,” New York Times 19 July 2000 A12).
21. Eliza Noh's work analyzing the rhetoric of the international campaign, End Child Prostitution in Asian Tourism (ECPAT), offers an interesting contrast to my analysis of Law-Yone's “transnational” method of appeal. Noh reveals that ECPAT's Christian ecumenical representation of Asian sex workers enforces Asian difference from the West in the course of its activism, an approach that she suggests functions as a recolonizing gesture (Noh 1997). I see this method of representing Asian “otherness” as very much in force in U.S. media coverage of Asia, a point I make in the chapter's introduction. In contrast, however, one thing I am suggesting is that Law-Yone's treatment of gender (and later, Fiona Cheong's) appeals to likeness over difference through its evocation of domestic abuse. I am suggesting that this appeal may take on universalist overtones while being rooted in specific post-women's movement American context.
22. Members of the Soviet bloc of nations objected to a liberal construction of freedom that ignored group rights—the right to speak one's own language, ensure the protection of one's national culture, or guarantee the rights of national minorities. The Soviet Union put before the delegates a draft amendment reflecting group rights that was subsequently rejected (Yearbook of the United Nations 1948-49 (Lake Success, New York: United Nations/Department of Public Information], 535).
23. The statement is also reflected in Article 14 of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action disseminated by the United Nations, 15 September 1995. The conference's keynote address was delivered by Aung San Suu Kyi via a smuggled-in videotape (New York Times, 6 September 1995, A4).
24. Of course, one would only have to look at specific instances to show how this distinction cannot be sustained. Jenny Bourne points out as much in her discussion of how Jewish feminist identity politics in Britain fails to take a stand on Zionism (Bourne 1987).
25. Ironically, the push toward democratization, the First World cure-all to Third World turbulence, is a trope that appears in contexts other than that of international diplomacy. In a curious convergence, feminist studies of domestic abuse also speak of solutions to battery in terms of political systems. For example, Romero compares the tactics of domination used by wife batterers to those employed by the Chinese captors of American POWs in Korea in order to suggest that “deprogramming” victims “ought to include the resocialization to feminist values within a supportive and democratic environment” (Romero 1985, 545, emphasis mine). If, like the political despot, the male batterer inappropriately uses violence to maintain inequities in power, studies suggest that among other strategies, stopping domestic violence lies in equalizing the gender hierarchy that legitimates masculine entitlement in order to remedy the lack of consensual decision making found in more “democratic” relationships. See Tifft 1993. One of the problems evident in the analogy is that researchers of domestic abuse tend either implicitly or explicitly to place their comments within a comparative moral framework. For example, Russell notes, “Americans were recently outraged by the treatment of the hostages in Iran, even though…they suffered no 'systematic' or 'sadistic' beatings. Much worse treatment is going on every day and every night in many American homes” (Russell 1982, 273, emphasis mine).
In contrast, Romero's work explains the apparent disparity between academic attention to POWs and battered women in terms of ideological systems: “Strategies used on POWs were studied in detail because the possibility that United States soldiers could be converted to Communism was threatening to America, whereas wife battering may serve to support aspects of social control (e.g., the traditional family, male dominance, and other aspects of the American way of life)” (Romero 1985, 545). My intention in placing the discourses of political coercion and domestic abuse side by side is not to replicate such a hierarchy, but to note that they are mutually sustaining in their reliance on a conception of individual rights.
26. Law-Yone notes, “If you grow up in a society like the one I was trying to describe, the whole notion of introspection is different. Especially in a Buddhist society, the idea of self, the individual as the ego, is just not prevalent.…On the other hand it takes a certain kind of introspection to be an interesting character. Especially in the Western tradition, the whole direction has been toward telling secrets.…In Asia it is your job as an artist not to challenge, not to subvert, but to reproduce reality and make it palatable. The self is not important, it is the community that is important” (cited in Trescott 1994, C1). Law-Yone makes clear that she locates herself against this nonpolitical, nonconfrontational character of writing in Asia, thus situating her writing within a tradition of advocacy marked as Western (personal communication, 28 December 1996).
27. See Chua Beng-Huat 1994. This fear of libel suits may or may not extend to fictional representations of the regime. For example, The Scent of the Gods was available and reviewed in Singapore at the time of its publication; Cheong recalls her trepidation in anticipating official response but was not officially “scolded” for her portrayal in government-owned newspapers. She attributed this lack of response both to the literariness of the representation and to the relative newness of fiction about Singapore produced in the West (personal communication, 12 June 1998). As Shirley Lim notes, creative political critiques may be unlikely if only because, as part of the English-educated elite working in government-controlled institutions, Singapore writers have interests “inextricably bound with governmental, bureaucratic aims” (Lim 1989, 541).
28. Chia Thye Poh, arrested in 1966 for allegedly advocating armed struggle against the PAP government while a member of Parliament representing Barisan Socialis, was released in November 1998 after being held in a form of internal exile on the island of Sentosa.
29. Reflecting Homi Bhabha's recognition that “the production of discriminatory identities…secure[s] the 'pure' and original identity of [colonial] authority,” this structure of argument appears in numerous writings on the relationship between nationalism and alterity (Bhabha 1994, 112).
30. In commenting on the irony produced by defying democratic principles to ensure democracy, the novel reveals that the PAP dealt with this contradiction by drawing a distinction between Western “free” democracy and Asian “guided” democracy. Li Shin repeats the PAP line: “We were not like America. America was a free democracy, he said, because American people did not like being guided.” “How come we don't want a free democracy?” I asked. “Because we're Asians,” he said. “We don't always believe the same things as Americans” (50).
31. For example, Immanuel Wallerstein notes the dual use of ideologies of universalism underlying not only human rights as a form of international law, but science communities and principles of citizenship within sovereign states as well: “[I]t is precisely because there is in reality a hierarchy of states within the interstate system and a hierarchy of citizens within each sovereign state that the ideology of universalism matters. It serves on the one hand as a palliative and a deception and on the other as a political counterweight which the weak can use and do use against the strong” (Wallerstein 1991, 171).
32. Rey Chow also notes that human freedoms are themselves contingent. Freedom of the press, she writes in regard to American coverage of Tiananmen Square, is not “a basic existential condition to which all are entitled (though this is the claim that is made) but a network of demands, negotiations, and coercions that are themselves bound by historical determinants constructed on slaughter and bloodshed” (Chow 1991, 85).
33. The film reinforces the representation of the individual-as-collective in its depiction of the moment a beatific Aung San Suu Kyi single-handedly stands down a line of government soldiers during a mass demonstration.
34. The phrase is Enloe's (1990). See also Heng and Devan 1992; Peterson 1995; and West 1992.
35. See, for example, Wendy Brown's exploration of the limitations of Catharine MacKinnon's theory of sexuality as the eroticization of gender inequality. MacKinnon's concept of gender, she suggests, forecloses prospects for radical social change if there is no agency for subjects seemingly wholly constituted by dominant power (W. Brown 1995). Brown's comments are suggestive for Asian
American coalitional democratic participation, but such an inquiry is beyond the scope of this essay.
36. See, for example, Campomanes 1992. His positioning of Filipino American literature as exilic literature may blur an important distinction between the political statuses of the exile and the emigre. As Edward Said notes, immigration suggests the possibility of choice rather than banishment (Said 1984). Said, however, does not go on to stress political exile as a condition of banishment as a punishment enforced by the threat of violence where return is rendered impossible. For example, Wendy Law-Yone's stakes in representing false charges of conspiracy against the state are linked to her condition of exile. In addition to witnessing her father's detention and his subsequent participation in former Prime Minister U Nu's government in exile, she herself was held at secret police headquarters in Rangoon in the late 1960s after trying to leave the country illegally to meet her American husband, an act she recognized as “defiance amounting to treason” (Law-Yone 1994, 41). Moreover, Campomanes's distinction may also unwittingly imply that immigrant literature is characterized by an uncomplicated relationship to national culture.
37. Few reviews discuss Singapore's political climate. Although Howard Coale's review opens by acknowledging governmental repression, calling Singapore “a Stepford country” and an “Asian version of 1984,” he validates the fact that the novel “manages to avoid being overtly political” (Howard Coale, “Porcelain Dreams,” New York Times, 24 November 1991, sec. 7, 22). See also Baras 1991, and Christine Bell, “In Times of Trouble, A Search for Identity,” Los Angeles Times, 28 January 1992, E6.
38. The New York Times estimates the number at fifteen thousand. Many Karen remained in Thailand, fearing harsh treatment upon repatriation, but their welcome has been strained as Thailand seeks business opportunities with Myan-mar (BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 8 May 1995 and 13 May 1995). Despite fears that the Thai government would reverse its twenty-year policy of granting haven to Karen refugees, Thailand agreed not to force repatriation of 2,300 unarmed Karen. See Seth Mydans, “In Thai Camps, Fear of Burmese Troops Grows,” New York Times, 3 March 1997, and “Thailand Says Refugees Can Stay,” New York Times, 4 March 1997.
39. Heng and Devan write, “Cabinet ministers began to exhort graduate women to marry and bear children as a patriotic duty. Obediently taking their cue from the government, two (nonfeminist) women's organizations accordingly proposed, in a disturbing collusion with state patriarchy, that women be required to bear children as a form of National Service—the equivalent, in feminine, biological terms, of the two-and-a-half-year military service compulsorily performed by men for the maintenance of national defense” (Heng and Devan 1992, 348).
Afterword
1. My students invariably give an alternative interpretation of the poem. They read the speaker as envious of the woman's sexual freedom, her bravado in displaying her body.