Writing Chinese: Reshaping Chinese Cultural Identity

Writing Chinese

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Writing Chinese Reshaping Chinese Cultural Identity

LINGCHEI LETTY CHEN

WRITING CHINESE

© Lingchei Letty Chen, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–7129–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chen, Lingchei Letty Writing Chinese : reshaping Chinese cultural identity / by Lingchei Letty Chen. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7129–3 (alk. paper) 1. National characteristics, Chinese. 2. Cultural awareness— China. I. Title. DS721.C4754615 2006 305.895⬘1—dc22

2005053900

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For my mother and father Wu Chiung-chu and Chen Chia-pao

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Part I

The Debate

Introduction: Dis/Claiming “Chineseness” 1

The “Right” to Copy and the “Copyright”: Authenticity, Hybridity, and Cultural Identity

Part II 2

3 9

The Issues

Negotiating China’s Cultural Authority: Technology of Genealogy and the Self

29

3

Refashioning Cultural Authenticity: Taiwan

51

4

Hong Kong Androgynous: Embodying Cultural Hybridity

77

Chinese American? American Chinese? Community Building as Subject Making

99

5

Part III 6 7

The Vision

Chinese Diaspora and Transnationality: Envisioning Global Citizen/ship

125

Globalizing the Self: The Aesthetics of Hybridity

147

viii

Contents

Coda: Cultural Identity and Cultural Globalization

175

Chinese Names and Terms

177

Notes

181

Bibliography

205

Index

218

Acknowledgments

Writing Chinese originated from the dissertation I completed at Columbia University in 2001, and the book was finalized at Washington University in St. Louis. There are many teachers and colleagues at both institutions to whom I owe profound gratitude, especially, my two advisors at Columbia University, David Der-wei Wang and Ursula K. Heise, and my colleague and mentor at Washington University, Robert E. Hegel. I thank my friends Hui-ling Chou, Naomi Fukumori, Anru Lee, and Robin Visser for suggesting sources, raising questions, and commenting on the project at various stages. Parts of the manuscript were first presented as papers at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting in 1999 and 2000, and the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting in 2003. Portions of chapter 7 were originally published under the title “Rising from the Ashes: Identity and the Aesthetics of Hybridity in Zhu Tianwen’s Notes of a Desolate Man” in Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese vol. 4, no. 1 (July 2000). I thank the editor for allowing me to include it here. Grimm Summer Traveling Grant from Washington University in 2001 made it possible for me to refine the project. The sabbatical leave in 2003–2004 from Washington University, in conjunction with a postdoctoral fellowship from Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation and residence at the Chiang Ching-kuo Center for Cultural and Institutional History at Columbia University in spring 2004, provided me much needed time to complete the manuscript. Finally, I would like to thank my parents. Without their belief in me and unconditional support for all these years, this book could not have been possible.

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Part I The Debate

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Introduction: Dis/Claiming “Chineseness”

This project explores the question of cultural identity—of discovering, or more accurately, rediscovering, who we are as cultural beings. To recognize the need for rediscovering how our cultural heritage can or cannot represent who we are can mean several things: it can indicate an awareness of our cultural heritage and personal background; it can suggest a desire to challenge the establishments and the norms; it can also point to the beginning of an effort to reconstruct our cultural identity in accordance with our own experiences with our own inherited cultures as well as those adopted. This book is the result of a challenge that befell me some years ago. It forced me to think long and hard about what my cultural identity was or should be. My reflection on the question of identity is not about the subjective, psychological development of my selfhood; rather I focus on a set of questions that is related to more objective, societal constituents of identity such as one’s cultural heritage, tradition, nation, race, and ethnicity. But such a challenge of identity is no less personal than questioning the psychological make-up of selfhood. Therefore the quest for one’s cultural identity is in every way a search for one’s self-identity. Let me begin by telling my journey of coming to a better understanding of my own cultural identity. I was born in Taiwan in the early 1960s when Chiang Kai-shek was in power. The island was under martial law at that time. Growing up under the Chiang regime’s rigid system of ideological control and Sino-centric cultural policies in the 1960s and 1970s, I had never doubted that my cultural heritage was Chinese as we were all taught at school. I came to the United States in 1985, and missed both the historical moment when martial law was lifted (in 1987) and the subsequent period of ideological liberation. My sense of cultural self remained intact until I entered Columbia University as a doctoral student a few years later. It was in a seminar that my identity as a Chinese was challenged, and by none other than my mainland Chinese classmates. Then, and only then, did

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Writing Chinese

I begin to consider seriously my other heritage: the Taiwanese heritage. I did not need to struggle much with this shift to identify with my Taiwanese roots simply because both my parents are Taiwanese. In fact my paternal family is the third largest and one of the oldest families in Taiwan.1 So I accepted my cultural identity to be Taiwanese and not Chinese—at least I yielded to the idea that I was not nearly as “authentically” Chinese as my mainland Chinese colleagues were. But the fact that I came to accept my Taiwanese identity so readily and easily had a lot to do with a sense of pride and legitimacy I felt when I learned more about my family history. This feeling of pride and legitimacy, in fact, can be summed up under one concept: authenticity. I felt “authentic” by knowing that my family has a clear and long lineage on this island. It is this same feeling of authenticity that made my mainland Chinese colleagues feel so unequivocal about their cultural identity. But the fact that my ancestors were immigrants from China also makes me an “authentic” Chinese. The question then becomes, how far back should I look at my family history in order to determine my “authenticity”? Apparently lineage is not as indisputable a proof of one’s authenticity as it appears precisely because it can be manipulated. What, then, are the components of authenticity? The problem of authenticity became the first big issue for me to investigate. As that of a recent immigrant to the United States, my identity quest has become more complex. I have been living in the United States for about twenty years. In so many ways, I have become “Americanized” and this trait never fails to be recognized by my friends and relatives in Taiwan. As for myself, I also feel somewhat estranged from the place where I grew up. In the summer of 2003, I made a root-seeking trip all around Taiwan and visited close relatives whom I had not seen for more years than I could remember. I talked to friends with whom I had grown up and saw old family houses and cities in which I had lived. At the end of this trip, it became clear to me that I no longer belong to this place called “home.” Home has changed and so have I. For the first time in twenty years, I longed for my actual home in the States. This experience makes me wonder about how identity, or more precisely cultural identity, is constituted. Contrary to the popularly conceived notion of cultural identity as one that is determined by one’s inherited national history, cultural tradition and heritage, and even race or blood line, my investigation tells me that my cultural identity is tied most importantly to my experiences with cultures. Cultural identity thus should be more a personal identity than a collective identity. Understanding my cultural identity in the context of the States is further compounded with the minority ethnic politics in this country and my additional cultural experiences here. Now I am faced with multiple cultural and

Dis/Claiming “Chineseness”

5

social prerequisites: the imprint of Chinese culture that is embedded in my upbringing and prevalent in my daily life; my experience of growing up in Taiwan and my later imagined nostalgia for this “homeland”; the American culture and society of which I am a part; and the Chinese American community of which I am often regarded a member. The first two are imagined and spiritual—because I am both temporally and spatially removed from them—whereas the last two are real and present in my everyday life. Because of these elements, construction of my identity is complex. In relating to my original cultural heritage in Taiwan, I found it unsatisfactory to identify with either Chinese or Taiwanese culture; it needs to be both. In relating to my current cultural reality that is American society, there are two groups of people I need to face: the mainstream American and the Chinese American. In the United States, I am “Asian” because of my physical attributes. This categorization immediately places me squarely in the ethnic minority politics in this country. The painful distinction of “Chinese” or “Taiwanese” with which I have struggled so much would seem nearly irrelevant in this society; but to me, the struggle remains important. Apparently definitions of my cultural identity cannot be singular. It seems neither my race nor ethnicity has primacy in securing my cultural identity. What should be the building blocks of one’s cultural identity, then? Can the notion of cultural hybridity become the underlying principle of cultural identity construction for all people and not just a choice for people with a postcolonial or immigration heritage (even though my background can fit in either or both categories)? In addition, how does cultural hybridity weigh in with other more established notions of cultural identity such as national history and tradition, race and ethnicity? In addition to the problem of authenticity, I realized that I must also address the issue of cultural hybridity. As I delved deeper into the question of my cultural identity, the question became even more complicated. (Chinese) cultural identity is not only tied closely to the nasty issue of authenticity, it also has a lot to do with which “other” one faces, the location in which one finds oneself situated, and how one negotiates oneself through these various processes of identification. But, at the end, it is always the concern of “Chineseness” that sits at the core of all of my inquiries and negotiations. Why is it that this “Chineseness” simply does not go away? The answer has to be that something is at stake in being or not being able to claim one’s “Chineseness.” A recent conversation with Professor Aihwa Ong shed some important light for me on this query. What Professor Ong said to me was quite interesting; and here is a paraphrase of what she said: “Claiming ‘Chineseness’ is important only to those who see themselves as situated in the cultural center, like people in China and Taiwan. To those Chinese living in Hong Kong, Singapore, or Malaysia, the

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matter is much less serious. To them, cultural hybridity is an integral part of their reality and identity. ‘Being Chinese’, or being able to claim one’s ‘Chineseness’, is therefore assuming for oneself a kind of cultural capital.” So, to call oneself “Chinese” can be a way of claiming cultural capital and thereby cultural authority or power. The crucial questions to ask here, then, are: What constitutes “Chineseness”? How does one identify oneself or come to be recognized by others as “Chinese”? And how can that identity be established in this fluid environment where people, ideas, and products are constantly in circulation across real and imaginary borders worldwide? During my inquiry of my cultural identity, one factor that figured significantly is my mobility: my immigration to the States and my constant travel to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. No doubt the issue of cultural identity in our age is complicated by travel. The question of our cultural identity is more likely to fall upon us as we change location; also as the composition of a society changes due to population flow through national borders. The issue of “dis/claiming Chineseness” thus becomes the axis of my particular investigation of the nature of cultural identity in the context of global/local dynamics. To articulate a new conceptualization of (Chinese) cultural identity, I focus on the three quintessentially Chinese societies: China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and I also include the Chinese American and the Chinese diasporas. In this book I examine how the dialectical relationship between authenticity and hybridity is reflected and debated by writers from these communities. By placing these writers side by side in their common investigation of cultural identity against their local context, my intention is to bring out the inter-political dynamics existing in these five Chinese communities. Situated in their various cultural, political, and historical environments, these writers have particular questions to ask. For mainland Chinese writers to question their cultural identity or even to conceptualize an alternative cultural identity, they must inevitably deal with the claim of authenticity. How the individual is able to wrestle with tradition, history, and the collective or the masses, the main ingredients for “cultural authenticity,” becomes a central challenge for contemporary Chinese writers in reimagining their cultural identity amidst a more open society and market economy. Taiwan writers, on the other hand, must be confronted with the challenge of authenticity when contemplating their cultural identity, precisely because of the island’s postcolonial cultural condition (that is, post-Japanese colonization and Chinese nationalist rule) and its precarious political situation created by the powerful and persistent threat of Chinese takeover. By comparison, the Hong Kong Chinese do not have the luxury to contemplate their postcolonial identity, much less to construct one, only

Dis/Claiming “Chineseness”

7

because sovereignty over the territory recently changed hands from the British to the Chinese. The challenge of cultural identity facing the Hong Kong Chinese is twofold: how to maintain a cultural hybridity that blossomed due to its cosmopolitan environment during its years of British rule, and to find a space for it to continue to thrive under the hegemony of Chinese culture and nationalism under which it now finds itself. In other words, can Hong Kong culture avoid being increasingly assimilated by mainland Chinese culture? The same subject of hybridity, when it comes to what the Chinese American has to face, carries different politics and connotations. Claiming “Chineseness” is a double-edged sword: on the one hand it helps distinguish the Chinese American as a distinct ethnic group in the United States which is thus entitled to social/cultural/political representations; on the other hand, it is also what stereotypes its members and hinders them from being recognized by the mainstream America as Americans. For the Chinese diaspora2—those who are political dissidents and/or émigrés from China—the politics of representation takes on a different twist. What lies in their unique experience, I argue, is a rupture, resulting in a sense of loss that threatens to destabilize the foundation of their cultural identity. How can they compensate for this rupture and loss? The predicament of the Chinese diaspora is often not about struggling with issues of authenticity and hybridity but about the toil between remembering and forgetting. The challenge of cultural identity takes place in their memory of the traumatic past. The writing of the past is in a way the present attempting to imitate—to record or relive—the past in order to part with it. But what happens after the writing is over? How shall the diaspora find inspiration for a new and often hybridized cultural identity? However, at the core of these broader interests of nation, tradition, region, race, and ethnicity is the personal concern, which is probably the most essential and challenging of all: How can one’s cultural identity make sense to the person himself or herself? How do we bring personal cultural identity to the reconsideration of collective cultural identity, and vice versa? Thus to begin my research of cultural identity, I returned to my own two big questions: authenticity and hybridity. I was soon confronted with a more specific set of concepts, namely imitation and appropriation. While imitation and appropriation can be said to be endemic to literary practice and not particular to literature of recent postcolonial history, any form of imitation and appropriation of foreign cultures by a society might be seen as constituting a bid for legitimacy. In this case, they are also clear reminders of such a country’s often colonial past and its subsequent and continuous neocolonial present. The questions of authenticity and hybridity in relation to imitation and appropriation within the framework of postmodernism

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Writing Chinese

and postcolonialism thus become the focus of the theoretical chapter of this book, chapter 1. What is relevant to us is how imitation and appropriation are employed in our time. My investigation thus came to center around contemporary writers variously defined as “Chinese” who employ imitation and appropriation as narrative strategies in their dialogue with various manifestations of cultural authenticity and/or hybridity so as to arrive at a meaningful understanding of their “Chinese” cultural identity in local and global contexts. The six analytical chapters in this book present a range of considerations and illustrate perspectives from the postmodern, the postcolonial, the “authorial,” the cultural in-between, and the cosmopolitan diasporic. To conclude this comparative study, I propose employing an aesthetics of hybridity (via Zhu Tianwen’s works) to establish a new paradigm for redefining cultural identity. This new aesthetics gives us new eyes to see a hybridized cultural identity that is highly individuated. It also inspires our minds to imagine a kind of individuality and individualism that does not reject the world for the sake of the subjective self. The aesthetics of hybridity thus allows one to be both selfish and selfless: selfish because the self is the absolute locus of this hybridity; selfless because the essence of hybridity is a harmonious amalgamation of all sorts and it embraces humanity. The aesthetics of hybridity also guides us to look closely at the richness of the assemblage of cultural imprints on the individual. Below is a quote of the scriptural description of the jewel net of Indra from Huayan Jing (The Avatamsaka sutra) as an image representing the beauty that the aesthetics of hybridity may inspire: Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. . . . There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.3

Chapter 1 The “Right” to Copy and the “Copyright”: Authenticity, Hybridity, and Cultural Identity

The driving historical question is this: How has it come to be that the most perplexing moral dilemmas of this era are dilemmas posed by our skill at the creation of likenesses of ourselves, our world, our time? Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy Creating stability from this instability is no small task, yet all identity formation is engaged in this habitually bracing activity in which the issue is not so much staying the same, but maintaining sameness through alterity. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity

The reality and consequences of globalization1 are once again confirmed by the outbreak of Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome, otherwise known as SARS. It first began in November 2002 in Guangdong Province of southern China. Within the space of six months, SARS spread to more than twenty-six countries and created worldwide fear of this unknown and highly contagious virus. The Beijing city government’s misjudgment of this incident—treating it as a regional problem and underreporting the cases— quickly turned the Chinese government into the target of international condemnation. The Chinese government’s early reaction to and measures taken toward the disease when it first appeared in Guangdong are consistent with its past when faced with a potential source of social instability. It has

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Writing Chinese

been the political and historical instinct of the Chinese government to want to exert control on the one hand and to protect its international image (“to preserve face”) on the other. The Chinese government’s early decision to suppress the news might have helped maintain domestic sociopolitical and economic stability. However, the Chinese government overlooked the degree to which the world has been globalized and how closely China is tied to the global network. So, what seemed to be a safe decision at first turned out to be a horrible mistake that cost the Chinese government its credibility both domestically and internationally, as well as initiating an enormous economic setback. The unprecedented move of the Chinese government to publicly acknowledge its mistake—a formal apology delivered by Premier Wen Jiabao to other world leaders at the Bangkok emergency summit on SARS on May 1, 2003—was China’s first step toward restoring its international image and custom. According to the May issue of Time magazine, the spread of SARS, as a result of China’s initial cover-up, has “rocked Asian markets, ruined the tourist trade of an entire region, nearly bankrupted airlines and spread panic through some of the world’s largest countries.”2 The globally widespread effects of its own domestic political decision must have taken the Chinese leadership by surprise. The SARS outbreak certainly has taught China, if not also the rest of the world, one valuable lesson about how, like it or not, interlocked we are in this globalized world. But an even more valuable lesson is the realization of how fragmented and partial our comprehension is of the nature of this new condition called “globalization.” Since Deng Xiaoping opened China’s doors for foreign investment in the mid-1980s, China has become the world’s largest labor and production market; the World Trade Organization’s approval of China’s membership on November 11, 2001, has formally taken China into a new phase as it entered the global trading community. It is therefore a mistake to assert that the Chinese government lacks global awareness since China itself is an upcoming and active player in the global economy, the effect of which is felt in every strata of the Chinese society. One of the main reasons the Beijing city government decided to conceal knowledge of SARS is precisely the concern of economy: to keep its foreign investors from leaving. So why, then, did the decision backfire? What went wrong? One explanation stands clear, and that is: China miscalculated the human aspect of the working of the global economic system; China also failed to comprehend the power dynamics between domestic governance and what has been called “the force-fields of world capitalism.”3 But such errors are not confined to the Chinese case, as the authors of Empire would readily point out: the hosts of phenomena that we call “globalization” today are complex, paradoxical, and unprecedented in human

Authenticity, Hybridity, and Cultural Identity

11

history. The world has seen incident after incident, with the AIDS epidemic, 9/11 terrorism, and now the outbreak of SARS, that a globalized world is a dangerous one simply because one mishap can be felt immediately throughout the world—the Chinese government would probably tell us, after its experience with the SARS incident, that we no longer have the luxury of treating nation-state governance and economic development as mere “domestic” or “internal” affairs. The line that separates “within” from “without” is now completely erased. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri so poignantly and persistently argue throughout Empire, one of the hallmarks characterizing our globalized world is the new operating principle of world market in which capitalism dictates, and that “the capitalist market is one machine that has always run counter to any division between inside and outside. It is thwarted by barriers and exclusions; it thrives instead by including always more within its sphere. . . . In its ideal form there is no outside to the world market: the entire globe is its domain.”4 That is why in order for the Chinese government to protect its economic growth and to keep its foreign investments where they are, the Chinese government should have made the outbreak of SARS an international affair by engaging the World Heath Organization immediately to help deal with the virus. The move from the dialectic of the modern to the multiple matrixes of power of the postmodern, from colonial rule to worldwide decolonization and the waning of nation-state, as Hardt and Negri continue to argue, marks a paradigm shift in the contemporary world: “from the paradigm of the modern sovereignty toward the paradigm of imperial sovereignty” (137). The booming of postmodernist and postcolonialist theories in the 1980s signals the happening of this paradigm shift. Postmodernism has successfully deconstructed modernist binaries and dualism; similarly, postcolonialism has firmly established difference, hybridity, and the fluidity of borders as the current dominant modes of rethinking race, gender, class, and most of all, identity. Although Hardt and Negri predict that postmodernism and postcolonialism may have already reached the full capacity of their subverting power and may inevitably come to a dead end,5 these two cultural criticisms nevertheless have constituted an excellent ground upon which we can continue to develop new theories and methodologies for identity studies. Furthermore, the potential of hybridity actually goes beyond what Hardt and Negri call “a realized politics of difference” or “an attack” on modern sovereignty and colonialism (145). The notion of hybridity in the twentieth century has been regarded as both a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural phenomenon. Theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul de Man, Jacque Derrida, Homi K. Bhabha, and Stuart Hall have elaborated on the concept of hybridity as used to signify a

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dialectical process of cultural interaction and a model for subverting effects of colonial domination. When applied to articulating mobile and multiple identities, this new evaluation of hybridity gains particular vitality and promise because of its capacity to be flexible and inclusive. In nineteenth century Victorian England, as Robert J. C. Young points out in his systematic study of hybridity, the notion usually evoked images of biological and racial degeneration and infertility.6 A “hybrid” referred specifically to crossspecies breeding to produce animals such as mules, and as a physiological phenomenon, the term “human hybrid” was used to describe offspring by people of radically different races, usually between a white man-master and a black woman-slave (and it was rarely the other way around). Racial prejudice is clearly inherent in this nineteenth century definition of hybridity. As Young states: “As the (nineteenth) century progressed, the alleged degeneration of those of mixed race came increasingly both to feed off and to supplement hybridity as the focus of racial and cultural attention and anxiety” (16). Evolving into the twentieth century, discussions of hybridity gradually came to focus on the cultural, the sexual and, particularly, the identity politics between the dominating and the dominated and hybridity came to symbolize a force of subversion and transformation. Articulation of identity is always the recognizing and affirming of difference out of a confluence of influences and relations. Identity, therefore, is a constant negotiation of difference between the self and a multitude of others. It is this recognition and affirmation of difference that is the basic nature of hybridity. But the impulse of global culturalism seems to operate on sameness, not difference. Therefore, the challenge of identity today becomes: How to produce meaning in sameness as well as to assert individuality in an endless array of similarities. What identity politics has come to mean today is that the identity we talk about here is always cultural. When the word “identity” is uttered, it is always cultural identity that we speak of.7 Identity, when understood simply, means how individuals articulate who they are in relation to their immediate environment such as family, to the larger communities such as society and nation, and to more abstract notions such as history and tradition. But where information, mass media, travel, and multicultural experiences manipulate our self-knowledge, identity is and must always be cultural because culture accounts for the totality of all the elements that shape our sense of self. Cultural identity therefore is personal, sexual, national, social, and ethnic identities all combined into one. Culture encompasses all of our experiences and backgrounds; cultural identity as personal identity signals the dissolution of “inside” and “outside,” whereby individuals are left confronting the issue of identity on their own. The vision here is not to treat identity politics as performative identifications, or in Arif Dirlik’s words, “one big mall of identity transactions.”8 But rather it

Authenticity, Hybridity, and Cultural Identity

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is to conceptualize identity in such a way that the individual can be better equipped to understand himself or herself in a profoundly confusing world.

Sameness, Not Difference One commonality found in postmodern and postcolonial literature and art is the preoccupation with imitation and appropriation. The nature of this preoccupation is not merely aesthetic—what it reflects is more than just an artistic inclination or preference toward imitation and appropriation as the basis of innovating creative techniques. Taking literary works as an example, both postmodern and postcolonial writers’ interest in applying principles of imitation and appropriation reflects these writers’ attempt to engage themselves in a dialectical process with the forces of globalization. But at the same time, their applications must also be understood in their respective political and cultural contexts as well as the historical conditions that shape these two practices. To explore the reasons for and the effects of contemporary writers’ keen interest in and curiosity about the idea of replication is also to understand the force of global economy that has blurred the boundaries of all cultures and intensified a crisis of cultural identity in the contemporary world. The categories of the “First World” and the “Third World” of course have been losing their validity since the wave of globalization began to take force. As Arif Dirlik argues, “[p]arts of the earlier Third World are today on the pathways of transnational capital and belong in the ‘developed’ sector of the world economy. Likewise, parts of the First World marginalized in the new global economy are hardly distinguishable in way of life from what used to be viewed as the Third World.”9 Dirlik claims that the North/South division is a more effective way of distinguishing what used to be the three worlds, but what is really important is that, before we discard the old “three worlds” classification, we need to understand the reason to which Dirlik refers that has caused the need for reclassification: the coming closer to each other of the two (first and third) worlds in many societies. What is the drive within each world that has steeled them to cross each other? The first world, which is comprised of countries that are already in the stage of late capitalism, and the third world whose members are mostly postcolonial countries, are intersecting one another at many points within their respective cultural spheres. How are we to understand the commonalities found in the postmodern and the postcolonial cultural practices and artistic imaginaries? If postmodern literature’s self-reflexivity is the way the West looks within itself, and postcolonial literature’s “celebration of oneself as Other”10 is the attitude with

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which the non-West looks outward, then their common practice of imitation and appropriation as seen in visual arts and literary narratives may have created a connection between postmodernism and postcolonialism. How, then, will this relationship between the two cultural criticisms affect our consideration of the issue of cultural identity under the force of globalization?

Postmodern Anxiety: The Copy In his discussion of the replica, Hillel Schwartz points out that the correlation between hybridity and authenticity is derived from the correlation between what copy is to hybridization and what originality is to authenticity. The idea of something that is “the original” is not a given, the mythical First; rather—much against the grain of the Platonian a priori—it is generated from a process of making something into the original. Once that something is proclaimed to be original, it then can further evolve to being recognized as authentic. This process of constructing originality-authenticity, as articulated by Judith Butler in her conceptualization of what the very idea of construction entails, “not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms.”11 The norms in our case are the value systems and the ideologies that regulate our thoughts and behaviors in a collective that is the society. It is essentially a sociopolitical hegemonic discourse that assigns the supreme value to what we intend as original and authentic.12 Such a value assignment must produce what is opposite to the original/authentic: the copy, which is to be inferior, nominal, and mediocre. However, in this value system, there must be only one that is the Original which occupies the pinnacle of the pyramid. But what comprises the rest of the pyramid? The answer obviously must be the many imperfect imitations of the Original. Thus the formation of the pyramid— or to expand the idea further, the adherence of the collective such as a society or a nation—must depend on internal replication of the highest values, the Original. Relationship between the Copy and the Original thus is not simply one between the inferior and the superior, but a dependence on each other for their own validation—the Copy certifies the Original the same way the Original certifies the Copy. Schwartz argues that, “Cultures cohere in the faithful transmission of rituals and rules of conduct. To copy cell for cell, word for word, image for image, is to make the known world our own. . . . Such copying, inherently flawed, always begs for ratification even as we look to copies themselves for assurance of continuity, value, and authenticity. . . . It is within an exuberant world of copies that we arrive at our experience of originality” (211–12).

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But what of the identity of each copy? Does the copy have a rightful claim to an identity, or is anonymity its fate? Is it possible for the copy to have an authentic identity? And how can that be achieved? All these questions actually pertain to the two seemingly unrelated concerns that define the postmodern teleological narrative against the Enlightenment project and the postcolonial calling for rectification. As postmodernism originates, the postmodernist writers intentionally imitate and at times copy literary canons with the intent to dissolve the authorial aura of originality. This in effect creates a new movement that signals beginnings and opportunities for new identities. The postcolonial writers, on the other hand, face the challenge of reconciling the imbalanced interculturation between their native culture and the colonizer’s. The colonial writings always bear the burden of being an imperfect imitation of the colonizer’s writings. Inheriting their colonial literature, the postcolonial writers’ strategies of imitation and appropriation thus have subverting consequences similar to those of the postmodernist writers’ employment of the same strategies. But what differentiates these two discourses is their impact on the consideration of identity. Further aided by the forces of globalization, the characteristics of postmodern culture are found in a postcolonial society where the postcolonial drive for political representation inspires and encourages ethnic minority immigrants to strive for identity and recognition. In many societies of the twenty-first century, postmodern and postcolonial cultures are often found meshed together, as the writers of both have chosen to use imitation and appropriation as means and expressions of their anxiety about identity issues. These two artistic strategies thus reflect a common inclination toward accepting simulation as part of the experience of the Real in this technological and information age. By copying, the postmodernist writers are able to celebrate multiple identities and at the same time question imposed identities. Linda Hutcheon describes postmodernism as “the expression of a culture in crisis.”13 Behind this cultural crisis is an anxiety of identity. Resulting from mechanical reproduction of the modern and intensified by global circulation of the image culture of the postmodern, the prevailing practice of pastiche by the postmodernists, Fredric Jameson argues, is an indication of the “disappearance of the individual subject, along with its formal consequence, the increasing unavailability of the personal style.”14 This also helps explain the postmodernists’ impulse to reimagine the double so as to relocate the individual subject. Imitation and appropriation is a double-edged sword—on the one hand, they are the tools with which the postmodernists reveal and challenge prevailing norms; on the other hand, by their deconstruction methodology the postmodernists also displace meaning of any form of representation, including identity construction. Jean Baudrillard’s radical (and almost nihilistic) interpretation of the contemporary image culture negates

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any possibility of representation and insists that it is simulation that takes the center stage: “Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum.”15 The copy is a manifestation of the simulacrum; and digital and Internet technologies have brought the culture of the copy to its height. Now the copy is no longer a replica of the original; it is the copy of the copy of the copy. Copying the copy, not the original, is now the dominant mode of image reproduction. In his article in The New York Times, Jeff MacGregor laments the loss of the old Hollywood stardom to the contemporary celebrity society as he critiques the recent TV movie “The Audrey Hepburn Story.” The young actress Jennifer Love Hewitt only remotely resembles the old Hollywood icon, and because of copyright issues Hepburn’s famous costumes and clothes are not precisely duplicated in every detail. The copy here is an imperfect approximation of the original. And as Hollywood’s manufacture of celebrities moves in such a warp speed nowadays, the young actress who is to be the “Audrey Hepburn copy” appears with even less disposition of an old Hollywood superstar. However Hewitt portrays Hepburn, her performance is already a distant copy of the original. MacGregor comments: “Generational deterioration describes what happens when you make copies of copies of copies, an effect common in videotape (and the genealogy of Europe’s royal families). By the fourth or fifth generation the loss of quality is obvious, and one is left with only a dim facsimile, a blurred and colorless rendering of the original.”16 Naturally, remote approximation such as this only increases people’s longing for originality, which explains the big boom of autobiographies in the publishing industry or the current trend of “real life TV” or “reality TV” dramas from the early hit shows such as “Big Brother” and “Survivor” to later ones like “The Apprentice” and numerous others that have flooded the TV screen. Suddenly everyone wants to share his or her life stories with the public, but the more it is done, the more remote is originality because the reproducing of so-called real lives is only an attempt to fulfill the desire for authentic life experiences. What “reality TV” does is actually authenticate the imaginary, hardly a recovery of the authenticity of life. This brings us to the question of how authenticity and originality are viewed in the era of the postmodern. In the visual arts, these two merits have been the mark of how a work of art is defined and valued. The value of

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art is still withheld today, although it is only through copies of the original that artworks are able to have their commercial value, and artistic value (defined by originality and authenticity), in turn, matters less and less—at least the consumers do not seem to be concerned about it. The other side of this indifference to art’s originality/authenticity is the postmodernist artists’ interest in appropriating or copying well-known images and artworks. Of the many reasons in doing so, some of them may be to subvert or challenge the authority of modernist ideology and to critique the commercialization of the reproduced (not even the original) artworks. Ironically, such subversion also contributes to the proliferation of imitations and copies, reinforcing our technological age as the age of simulacra. In his commentary of the exhibition titled FAKE held in the New Museum in 1987, William Olander discusses the postmodernist artists’ utilization of “the fake” or “the counterfeit” to construct a discourse of authenticity—an endeavor most representative of the interest in postmodernist art as well as the reality of the postmodern world in general: “FAKE promotes a new practice that weaves its way through a multiplicity and incommensurability of works, from signs of paintings to simulations, from artifice to artificial intelligence, from the present to the distant future. FAKE asks the question: ‘What do we want of art today?’ and frames it against the forgery and the counterfeit, thereby interrogating the original and recognizing that such a dichotomy is wholly modern. And surely, one thing that we can be certain of is that to be modern is not what we want of art today.”17 Precisely because what we like art to be no longer follows the modernist celebration of authorial originality, the fake is able to assume a new value, as Olander proclaims in the beginning section of the same article: “The fake is enormously slippery—a strange commodity which, though possessing no value once it is revealed, retains another kind of life precisely because of its newly-acquired ‘authenticity’ as a forgery. It becomes a curiously auratic object, existing in a nether world of otherness” (6). This otherness of the fake—being the other of the original—is the basis upon which the postmodernist artists construct a new discourse of authenticity. Imitation and appropriation are the postmodernist artists’ strategies and tools to deconstruct the ideology of originality and to construct the postmodern reconceptualization of authenticity. But this is not to suggest that the idea of originality itself has lost its appreciation in our time of immense image reproduction. What is different now is that originality is built upon imitations and fakes—what attains the valuation of “being original” is not the work itself but the idea behind the work, that is, the idea that something that is a copy, a fake, a forgery, or a counterfeit, can be presented in such a way that it actually is an authentic piece of work. Elizabeth Ferrer, the curator of the exhibition titled The Art of Appropriation, states in her article for

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the event that, “it is those artists who appropriate—or borrow imagery from other sources—that are gaining recognition for the originality of their statements.”18 Thus what is called to one’s attention is not the artwork itself but the artist whose ultimate performativity is the primary content of the artwork he or she creates. No matter how closely the artwork resembles the original which it approximates, the artist always leaves a trace or two to remind viewers that it is they who are the creator of this artwork so that the authorship will never be confused.19 Although this conception of art is not a total departure from the traditional one, the achievement of the postmodernist artist still cannot be denied: “Consequently, her achievement is demystifying both the art from which she appropriates, and the act of appropriation” (Ferrer, 9). Self-reflexivity thus becomes the ethical principle of postmodern imitation and appropriation in artistic creations. It is because of this principle that the artwork, which is essentially a copy, can be legitimized and recognized as something of value; such value in turn gives the artwork an aura of authenticity. Thus being authentic does not necessarily have to be original in the sense that the original is “that which speaks to us in an unmediated way, an experience we seem to believe we have lost between ourselves, human to human” (Schwartz, 141). The communication between the copy and the viewer is certainly mediated at least through that other artwork that has been copied, if not also through the persona which the postmodernist artist assumes when she becomes both the appropriator and the creator all at once. In this tail chase of the original and the copy, there is something at stake: it puts the meaning of identity in jeopardy. It would seem that identity in the culture of the copy is an obsolete notion, but at the same time, the craze for originality allows the creation of identities a profitable business—we only need to look to the fashion industry and the commerce of New Age spirituality, for example, which focus on the making of identities and the confirming of our sense of individuality. Such a manufactured sense of identity and individuality is able to give us an instant illusion of uniqueness that is yet always revisable.20 The destabilization of identity through postmodern imitation and appropriation allows the formation of identity to be flexible, no longer confined to the traditional conception that is largely grounded on ethnicity and defined by nation. In Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig links our faculty of senses to mimesis and discusses the cultural implications of mimesis in all of its applications including imitation, copying, and the concrete contact of the subject who performs the act with the object that is being imitated/copied (21). Although the context of Taussig’s study is a colonial situation, his theorization of mimesis is also relevant to the postmodern condition. In this analysis,

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Taussig perceives the relationship between the copier and the copied as a metaphor of the intimate connection between the self and the other. Identity, which is the vision that we have created for and about ourselves, is essentially an act of imitating and copying the other. But what is important to Taussig’s theorization of mimesis is that the self and the other come into contact with each other in the act of imitation (which is partial copying) or copying (which is faithful duplicating). Using an eyewitness account describing a Colombian healer who lived near the town of Mocoa, Taussig illustrates how power not only can be exerted in the process of imitation and contact but also can expose the problematic of the copy. That is to say, the effect of the copy necessarily defies the fundamental definition of copy in that a copy is no longer a copy when it possesses the power to do something that the original cannot. The copy that Taussig has in mind is not just a physical, tangible object but an impression or a memory that is transferred or passed on, through our sensuous faculties such as seeing and hearing into our imagination and remains there. Upon that instantaneous moment of sensuous contact and mental registering, the copy and the original, the self and the other, thus become one. Such is the power of mimesis. The magical power to heal is similarly passed on to anyone who can share the vision, the “painting,” that comes to the healer. By yielding himself to this vision, the seer also gains the healing magic: “the perceiver tries to enter into the picture and become one with it, so that the self is moved by the representation into represented.”21 As the picture is now passed to the patient, the patient is then cured. In this example, the healer and the other seers are all copiers who in seeing the picture and yielding to the picture, then obtain the magical power to heal. The copy thus takes power from the original and becomes something more than the original. To copy is not just to create a likeness but to create power through the likeness; the likeness then becomes more important than the original. The manifestation of this “borrowed power” is the effect of the copy: “it is not so much a ‘faithful’ likeness that is captured, nor is it a ‘faithful’ likeness that is doing the capturing. What is faithfully captured is a power. . . . It seems to me [that it is] vital to understand that this power can be captured only by means of an image, and better still by entering into the image. The image is more powerful than what it is an image of ” (Taussig, 62). It is precisely the result of this “entering into the image” that the postmodernist imitation and appropriation generate their magical power to subvert the modernist ideology of originality. The aura (in the Benjaminian sense) that the postmodernist artists take out from the classical and the popular imageries is captured and “materialized” into a commodity fetish,22 inverting the auratic effect of the original to a completely different kind of effect belonging to the

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copy. This new effect is flexible and is manipulated by both the artist and the viewer because the old context no longer dictates what its meaning entails, thereby making radical interpretation possible. The highly ambiguous identity of the copied image is now flowing freely between the familiar and the strange. The ambiguity of identity occurs when the self and the other are blended together in their contact with each other. The ambiguity created in mimesis not only is utilized by the postmodernist writers but also by the postcolonial writers in their attempt to redefine their identity and to reestablish order. A major difference between the postmodernist and the postcolonial mimesis is that the former reproduces the copied image faithfully while the latter hybridizes the copied image with local or native elements. What lies in this distinction is that the postmodernist copy is its other because it is identical to the original and yet is not the same. The postcolonial imitation, on the other hand, is not the same as the original and therefore is a completely different entity from its other because there is an unbridgeable space or gap between the original (of the postcolonial imitation) and the (postcolonial) imitation itself. As the postmodernist copy is made with subversive intentions, its faithful likeness can easily cause confusion and anxiety toward its own identity. This identity, inherently ambiguous, is unstable because its other is always being corrupted in the mimetic process. The postmodernists’ desire to copy can be read as a manifestation of their excessive selfconsciousness toward the old discourse of identity formation: “Stable identity formations auto-destruct into silence, gasps of unaccountable pleasure, or cartwheeling confusion gathered in a crescendo of . . .‘mimetic excess’ spending itself in a riot of dialectical imagery” (Taussig, 246). One important element in our discussion of image copying is that the copy is mechanically—digitally—reproduced, and the image is circulated through the mass and print media in the global market. Therefore there is no fixed context in which such an image is to be interpreted. Looking from within the subversive artwork itself, the process of exact copying makes it impossible for the postmodernist to construct a stable course of relating the self to the other; stepping outside the frame of the artwork and looking from the broader context, the easy traveling of images and products in our era of global economy and Internet communication also makes the idea of a fixed alterity impossible. With borders disappearing, attempts at identity formation are a difficult task, more so when the erasure of distinction between the self and its other is internal, intentional, and total. The postmodern anxiety of identity reflects the identity crisis of the West. Many of Western civilization’s grand narratives no longer hold their credibility and validity, including the identity that was constructed via colonialism which had the primitive cultures of the non-West, namely, its colonies, as its others.

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Now the West cannot find any exotic others to be its alterity not just because of the bankruptcy of colonialism but also because the exotic other simply does not exist any more. Of course this is not to suggest that the West can no longer form any meaningful identities. Rather, any identity developed now will not be an identity in any grand sense, and this holds true for everyone, no matter where he or she is located. In spite of this, identity is still a necessity—we all need to have at least one kind of identity or another—but the question is how to find a solid basis on which to ground identity. The search for identity can only be a search for a stable surface at best. “Surface” because values and ideologies change too fast and definitions for foundations such as nation, ethnicity, and community are more contingent than ever. An identity built on a slippery surface is the most we can do within the postmodern landscape of endless simulacra. With the rapid appearing and disappearing of reproduced images in front of our eyes, the contact that Taussig has discussed becomes less lasting, so the foundation for a constant and stable relationship between the self and the other cannot be possible. In Taussig’s observation, not only the self ’s others are overwhelmingly multiplied and shifting, the self is also stuck with too much of itself because “the self is no longer as clearly separable from its Alter. For now the self is inscribed in the Alter that the self needs to define itself against” (252). Identity will never be secure, and that is a conclusion the postmodern world may have to live with for a very long time.

Postcolonial Desire: The Hybrid The flexibility and freedom to claim or disclaim any form of identity is a luxury of the West. For people of the postcolonial countries, such indulgence is simply unaffordable. To redefine their identities—personal, national, and cultural—is the primary task of the postcolonial society in reconnecting its postcoloniality with its lost heritage. Postcolonial identity formation is closely associated with nation building but inherently perplexed by the legacy of the colonial culture. One main characteristic of colonial culture is the imprint of the colonizing culture made not only by an external imposition of the colonizing power but also by an internal imitation of the colonized. The paradoxical power of colonial mimicry has been intensely discussed and analyzed in the discourse of postcolonial theories. A new issue that has been attracting many postcolonial theorists is the fact that many postcolonial societies are also postmodern in many aspects in their contemporary society. The challenge is how to understand this mixing

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of postcoloniality with certain cultural phenomena of the postmodern and yet at the same time not to lose sight of the colonial past as well as the power imbalance that is still prevalent in the political and economic overview of the postcolonial nation-state. In his article discussing how postmodernism should be properly contextualized and understood in conjunction with postcolonialism, Simon During remarks on the distinction of the “effects of postmodernity with a specific technological, economic and ideological frame, rather than an instance of that octopus ‘postmodernity’ or even ‘multinational capitalism’. What seems most deeply entrenched in these effects is the encroachment of Western power and technology upon the Third World.”23 Taking a similar stance but from an opposite perspective, Helen Tiffin points out that “[p]ost-colonial readings of postmodern discourse can compensate for this emphasis on the global by focusing on local historical and geographical specificities, situating postmodernism in relation to these practices rather than the other way round.”24 It is in this context that the textual practice of imitation and appropriation of postcolonial writings is to be understood. We must make distinctions between colonial mimicry and postcolonial imitation and appropriation, and hybridization—the common result of both practices—must also have different connotations and effects under these two separate conditions. The postcolonial hybrid, while continuing to be a growth of the colonial hybrid, must also be a new manifestation which is the postcolonial desire to resurrect its precolonial identity and still not forget the ambiguity inherent in its new identity. The hybrid is not the same as the original nor does it conform to the foreign element that has entered the genetic map, so to speak. The hybrid thus is not its previous self nor its other, but something different, and yet not quite. The hybrid is similar to the copy in that it is a partial replica of the original but not the original. An important difference, however, is that the appearance of the hybrid is not confused with the original’s because it is not a faithful copy—on the contrary, the hybrid is the unfaithful copy of its original. Inheriting from its previous colonial state, postcolonial hybridization is embedded with an ambivalent and unstable power relation with its previous colonial other. In his analysis, Homi Bhabha defines hybridity as “the name of this displacement of value from symbol to sign that causes the dominant discourse to split along the axis of its power to be representative, authoritative.”25 The hybrid thus is the concrete result of this split of the discourse of domination, a mutation of power, culture, and identity. The hybrid is the only kind of representation that the postcolonial subject can choose for its identity; nevertheless, the postcolonial hybrid is the embodiment of the fruit of the once-colonized people’s struggle out of the shadow of colonialism as well as their achievement in instituting a new

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cultural order and economic stability for their newly independent nation-state. Intense and intentional hybridization becomes the only if not also the most effective way for the postcolonial subject to forge a new subjectivity and cultural identity. For all realistic purposes, the postcolonial culture’s celebration of hybridity and glorification of hybridization are a matter of surviving and establishing itself. We cannot view the postcolonial hybrid as just a combined product of colonialism and market economy. The postcolonial hybrid is strategically constructed in a particular historical and political context. Thereby intrinsic in it is a critical nature that also has a principal presence in the discourse of postcolonialism. The postcolonial textual practice of imitation and appropriation is a necessary means through which hybridity can be articulated. In his analysis of reiterative quotation and intertexual citation employed in postcolonial literature, Stephen Slemon insists that these narrative strategies are to be distinguished from the postmodernist literary imitation and appropriation, such as parody, which Linda Hutcheon defines as the main characteristic of Euro-American postmodernism. Slemon’s poignant point, which I will quote at length in order to make clear his point, is thus: Far from articulating a simple “anxiety of influence,” however, this post-colonial textual reiteration is heard to be speaking directly to the struggle within colonialist ideology. . . . Post-colonial literary reiteration—or parody, or intertextuality, or quotation—is thus seen to be challenging directly a colonialist textual function; . . . It is not hard to see that these post-colonial strategies bear a close relation to the principle of intertextual parody which Hutcheon defines for post-modernism. . . . if the question of representation really is grounded in a ‘crisis’ within post-modern Western society under late capitalism, in post-colonial critical discourse it necessarily bifurcated under a dual agenda: which is to continue the resistance to (neo) colonialism through a deconstructive reading of its rhetoric and to retrieve and reinscribe those post-colonial social traditions that in literature issue forth on a thematic level, and within a realist problematic, as principles of cultural identity and survival.26

The fundamental distinction between the postmodernist employment of imitation and appropriation (to produce “the copy”) and the postcolonial utilization of the same textual strategies (to create “the hybrid”) is precisely in the (de)constructiveness of the application. The postmodernist’s challenge of representation is ontological in nature; it questions meanings of existence, of the world, and the ways in which we interpret these meanings. The postcolonial challenge of representation, on the other hand, is epistemological in its concern for the issue; it subverts values and truth claims as imposed by the colonial power, the end of which is to seek new meanings in a new existential condition.

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In the Bakhtinian categorization, postcolonial hybridity is arguably both intentional and organic. The intentional hybrid is a container of different elements that are not fused into one, whereas the organic hybrid is the result of blending together various elements and is itself a new form or entity different from its components. The condition in which Bakhtin considered the issue of hybridity is the intentional hybridization that sets apart certain linguistic discourses and cultural practices, which is why dialectic activities or dialogism remain the primary interest for Bakhtin in his study of hybridity. Postcolonial hybridization certainly is a dialogical process in which different cultural presences (the imperial and the native) negotiate a new power relationship. Postcolonial hybridity therefore must be both intentional and organic because it tends toward emergence, while at the same time “enabl[ing] a contestatory activity, a politicized setting of cultural differences against each other dialogically.”27 In artistic creation, the process of postcolonial hybridization involves juxtaposing different cultural artifacts, critically imitating, appropriating, and fusing Western cultural images with local images, and homogenizing various cultural effects into one single effect. Postcolonial hybridization thus can be regarded as a counter-hegemony to the West’s continuous (neo)colonial practice through its economic domination in the world market. But for the postcolonial hybrid to possess authority that can rebut Western cultural domination, it must be able to generate culturally productive effects that will institute an aura of cultural authority for itself. For this purpose, an independent identity for the postcolonial hybrid must be established. How can this be accomplished? To have an identity is not just a matter of proclaiming it to others; to have an identity also means it is recognized by others, to have a presence, so to speak, in the larger community. Such seemingly simple question and quest demand, in fact, complex answers and difficult procedures. During the colonial period, it is culture that sustained the political struggle of resistance and the eventual independence of the once-colonized people; in the present postcolonial state, it is economy that allows the postcolonial culture to proliferate and grow, but at the same time cultural production also helps the new economy to advance. Building postcolonial (cultural) identity is involved in this complex mutually generative correlation among culture, politics, and economy. But largely, to claim an independent cultural identity, the circulation of the image of the postcolonial hybrid is necessary. Our time is an era of image culture and electronic reproduction and circulation, and the postcolonial countries have to comply with this reality in order to open up a space for themselves. The hybrid must be conceived to be a fresh and inventive cultural entity with new self-understandings, beliefs, and practices. It signifies freedom and open-endedness; with its transformative power via imitation, appropriation, juxtaposition, subversion, and negotiation, it alters the established cultural

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dominant and forces the canonized to reconfigure its status and identity. In arguing for the incorporative value of multiculturalism, David Theo Goldberg recognizes hybridity as “the central value of this incorporative principle” with which “monoconceived Euro-American identity, culture, and material domination were confronted in ways that threw into question once and for all their apparent naturalism, revealing behind the seeming givenness of the monotonous voice the imposing force of a univocal institutional power.”28 The “unnaturalness” and “impurity” of the postcolonial hybrid thus exposes the falsity of the notion that a national culture is “natural” and “pure.” Also arguing for multiculturalism and specifically focusing on the issue of multicultural identity, Peter Caws observes that, to base one’s identity on one’s cultural origin (usually associated with one’s ethnicity) or a single culture is not a requirement of a personal cultural identity simply because no others will reinforce such a rule. Nor should identity be defined by ethnicity or any other group identifications: “an affirmation of ethnic particularity tends to weaken one’s sense of identity: the more reliance on the group, the less the development of the individual” (376). Identity for the hybrid, unlike the traditional conception of identity, which is based on a singular source, is not only multiple but also individually based since hybridity itself is not a stable condition and the mixture of different elements is also not fixed. In defining identity, Caws stresses the importance of the relation between the self and the world at large: “Identity, psychologically as well as logically, is a reflexive relation, a relation of myself to myself, but it can be a mediated relation: I relate to myself through my interaction with others and with the world. It is this last component that tends to be overlooked in the dialogical view of identity and whose importance, it seems to me, is seriously and even damagingly underrated when disadvantaged individuals are encouraged to find their identities in cultural identification alone” (378). For the postcolonial subject, the project of identity building is not simply a revival of the native culture and an affirmation of the colonized/ hybridized culture. In other words, it is not merely a negotiation with its colonial identity, but more importantly, the building of a dialogical relationship with the world at large. How to appeal to the world is probably a bigger challenge for the postcolonial subject than proclaiming the independence of its identity, as Caws plainly puts it: “But not having one’s identity acknowledged is not at all the same as not having it” (377).

Cultural Identity (Inter-) Contextualized The configuration and meaning of cultural identity varies from location to location, group to group, and individual to individual. What determines

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our cultural identity? When are we most aware of it and under what circumstances do we feel compelled to affirm it to others? Does our cultural identity change and stabilize itself like a dynamic process, or does it stay unchanged? More importantly, because identity is not conceived in a vacuum, what is that particular environment in which the individual perceives who he or she is as a cultural, historical, and civil being? To more precisely situate our discussion of cultural identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, what frame of reference does the postmodernists’ experimentation with the copy offer us in our understanding of cultural identity? How does the postcolonialists’ endorsement of hybridity challenge our existing definition of cultural identity? The copy and the hybrid are the fundamental condition in which the individual conceives cultural identity in a globalized and digitized world today. The copy reveals to us the current global cultural context, while the hybrid yields the local political situation where the individual negotiates, in his or her everyday life, an identity consistent with his or her experience. Consideration of cultural identity requires that the context be specific but not isolated from other contexts. By weaving together a network of contexts, we are then able to localize as well as intercontextualize the issue of cultural identity. Cultural identity is no longer a national and ethnic issue of the postcolonial and the diasporic. With the global flows of information, commodity, and cultural influences, and as we experience anew the meaning of boundaries (or lack thereof ) and rethink the signification of nation, ethnicity, and community, cultural identity has to epitomize a whole new set of ontological and epistemological questions facing us today. It is a central global issue precisely because it is also a personal issue.

Part II The Issues

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Chapter 2 Negotiating China’s Cultural Authority: Technology of Genealogy and the Self

Two decades into its development, the Chinese people witnessed Maoist ideology gradually fade and become replaced by capitalism’s insatiable appetite for accumulation and expansion. Today, China’s emergence as a superpower is certainly catching everyone’s attention. Not only is China gaining a new international status, the society itself is also going through tremendous transformation. The intriguing question here is: How do all these changes affect Chinese people, their value systems, their relation to tradition, and their sense of national and cultural identity? The spirit of iconoclasm is familiar to the Chinese people of modern times, recalling the May Fourth movement that ended several millenniums of feudalism and the Mao-led socialist revolution that completely altered the course of modern China. Both legacies champion a radical break with tradition; but is there indeed a rupture between modernity and tradition? When contemporary Chinese writers contemplate ways to reconfigure identities, the tradition and the integrity of Chinese culture remain essential factors. This chapter will address Chinese writers’ complex relation with the past from the vantage point of identity (re)construction and against the backdrop of China’s rapid economic development. The complex process of more than a century of reforms in China has been studied in terms of translingual practices, occidentalism, and semicolonialism,1 among others. One main thread that runs through these studies is the paradoxical relationship between modernization/westernization, nationalism and identity politics. My main focus here is to examine how this paradoxical relationship is being

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played out in post-Mao China, bearing in mind the historical memory of the May Fourth and the not-so-distant Mao era.

Commercializing Chinese Nationalism In his study of the recent rise of nationalism in China, Yongnian Zheng argues that the sentiment inherent in the nationalism of the Mao period is distinctively different from that of the Deng period.2 Whereas the former is a continuation of the anti-imperialist emotion from the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, the latter not only is a reaction to the international situation surrounding China but more importantly a reflection of China’s internal modernization project which, in the eyes of many Chinese people, is still very much a project of westernization. The rise of nationalism in the late 1980s is a result of a collective feeling of national identity in crisis. However, as Shu-mei Shih (The Lure of the Modern) traces back in history and examines the first wave of modernization/westernization of the Republican era, she argues that the May Fourth intellectuals actually viewed “modernization” and “westernization” separately. The humiliation brought on by foreign powers’ semicolonialization in China generated a collective feeling of national shame and people were convinced that China was not only technologically and economically weak, but also intellectually backward. The May Fourth intellectuals firmly believed that modernization/westernization could save China from disintegrating into a full colony of foreign powers. To put it simply, modernization/westernization was the solution to all of China’s problems.3 The anti-imperialist sentiment was therefore considered not in contradiction to the modernization/westernization project. Now a century has passed; Chinese society has put some distance between itself and the historical memory of the May Fourth period and has learned a few lessons from the previous modernization/westernization project. Although the 1980s modernization is still Western-oriented, the Chinese intellectuals and policymakers no longer view the emulation of Western institutions and cultural forms as the obvious course of action to take. It is no wonder that the second time around, China’s modernization project has a strong impulse to protect “Chineseness” in the process. Modernization must be, we repeatedly hear, based on Chinese nationalism, and it is imperative that a strong national identity be built (Shih, 47). But we must ask who and what apparatus are behind this advocating of “Chineseness” and nationalism—is it coming from the central government, or is it generated by the elite intellectuals? Who plays a bigger role? Undoubtedly the state has always used nationalism to maintain its authoritarian control—every policy,

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reform, or program is for the greater good of “the people,” and every foreign policy initiation is designed to maintain China’s sovereignty, citing that no foreign state can and should have the slightest interference in China’s affairs. The bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, by the U.S.-led NATO air forces on May 7, 1999, has been extensively used by the Beijing government to stir up antiforeign and nationalistic sentiments. This wave of nationalism, which started in the late1980s as propagated by antireformist politicians to recentralize power, rose to its height in 1999 supported particularly by university students and intellectuals. However, the embassy bombing is only a catalyst for bringing Chinese nationalism to its climax. Chinese intellectuals’ support of nationalism has been in the making long before the incident. The nationalism that rose in the 1980s and flourished into the1990s has a peculiar characteristic. It is intertwined with the consumer market resulting from the central government’s economic policies directed to create a “socialist capitalism in the context of global capitalism.” Dai Jinghua points out that the rise of nationalism which often manifests itself in commercialism, such as the fervor over publications like Zhongguo keyi shuo bu (“China can say no”) and a series of books with similar titles and motifs, should be regarded as a reflection of problems and sentiments existing in China’s newly emerging sociocultural order.4 As the majority of Chinese people go after financial success while the central government become less capable of maintaining its traditional ideological control, nationalism, in Dai’s view, becomes the most viable means for the central government to sustain the support of the Chinese people (Dai, 150). However, once the nationalist sentiment is overrun by the zeal for economic prosperity, “China” as the sign signifying political congruity and cultural hegemony can potentially become a reminder of a deep-rooted anxiety of cultural identity. If the sentiment of nationalism can be characterized as a masculine impulse to reinforce order, then the feeling embedded in the collective nostalgia for a deceased national hero-leader can be typified as a feminine desire to evince a certain intentionality to regain a lost order. However, what seem to be two opposing emotions actually reveal a common preoccupation with identity loss. Interestingly enough, what manifests itself in Chinese society in the 1980s and the 1990s is precisely these two sentimental tendencies. Accompanying the rise of nationalism during this period is the cultural fever of Mao Zedong—a widespread craze for any commercial products with Mao Zedong as the main motif or design. Suddenly China’s greatest “captain of the revolutionary boat” (geming hangchuang de duoshou)— the once feared and saintly Mao Zedong—becomes the flagship of contemporary Chinese society’s capitalist venture. The signifier “Mao Zedong” has become a guaranteed best seller in all kinds of commercial products and a

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favorite subject matter in popular literature, music, and visual arts. With this trend and the publication of numerous Mao biographies, “Mao Zedong” not only is transformed into a fashionable cultural icon but also undergoes a metamorphosis that brings him down from the political pedestal to an approachable human being (no longer a godlike figure), and a purchasable image. Most critics tend to take this Mao fever as nostalgia for the “good old Communist days” when order was in place and salvation was promised; Dai Jinghua believes that it is also a collective voyeurism into the forbidden realm of politics as well as dissolution of a major national myth and hero worship.5 But what really transpires in this collective frenzy is a struggle or an attempt to reconcile the fiction of the Chinese communist utopia and the reality of a deteriorating socialist structure in everyday life. Commodifying the untouchable Mao allows the fulfillment of a desire to affirm the ability to control their lives despite the fact that their newly acquired financial power really cannot give democratic freedom. Perhaps Mao fever can thus be read as a collective anxiety about the central government’s project to build a socialist capitalism. Indeed, what is implied in China’s socialist capitalism is precisely that the state will allow the people to accumulate as much capital as possible and use it to buy anything they want, but they would not be allowed sufficient civil rights, political freedom, and democracy. But this is not to suggest that the majority of Chinese people clearly desire a Western-style democratic political system. What is clear, though, is that they see what Mao and the Gang of Four have done to the society as destructive and do not wish to repeat this political, cultural, and social nightmare. From various recent cultural trends, we can discern that there is a growing awareness and desire for a more tolerant government and a more open and freer society where people are able to express their different views. At present, the commonly shared goal among many in China is to strive for financial success. Inevitably this puts such strivings in a political limbo: on the one hand, they realize that the old Maoist communist authoritarian regime is destructive and should be discarded; on the other hand, they cannot completely let go of this old, ragged “security blanket.” In other words, it is a dilemma between adhering to the old system which has been more destructive than constructive but at least is a familiar way of life, and striving for a new future although they only have a first glance at this “new future” through their recent experience with the unfamiliar capitalist system. Ambivalence toward the past and the future can be detected not only in the dual discourse of nationalism and Mao fever, but also in the revival of Confucianism and the rekindled passion for Western knowledge and technology during the cultural debate of the 1980s and the1990s.

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Technology of the Self The cultural debate in the mid-1980s was geared toward rebuilding and reenergizing a Chinese culture that had been “scarred” in the Cultural Revolution.6 What started as an apparent political move by Deng Xiaoping to set the mood for moving into a new regime—gaichaohuandai—in his encouragement of the expression of new ideas, the nationwide cultural debate eventually bifurcated in two directions. In the site of official institutions such as the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Beijing University, scholars and cultural leaders such as Liu Zaifu (with his theory on subjectivity and aesthetic autonomy)7 and Li Zehou (and his new formulation of China’s Enlightenment project which is a combination of Marxism, Neo-Confucianism, Kantianism, and scientism)8 attempt to inject positive values and beliefs into society by proposing new grand models for sociocultural reforms. But there are also doubtful and cautious intellectuals who refuse to look beyond history and memory to imagine a rosy future for the now modernizing China. These intellectuals bring into the cultural debate new methods and ideas to help bring history and memory closer to the present. In the site of semiofficial institutions, such as the Chinese Cultural Academy and periodicals and academic journals like Dushu, Zhongshan, Dangdai wenyi sichao, Wenyi lilun yanjiu, Wenxue pinglun, efforts are made to introduce new thoughts and experimentation on different modes of expression and creation from abroad. The scale of each attempt is small and fragmentary, but that may be what is really needed in a society where too many macro-reform models have been presented and too many hegemonic ideologies have been insisted upon. Against this backdrop, I want to return to the cultural dimension of China’s newly resurgent nationalism. The popular sentiment of nationalism itself indicates a symptom of identity crisis—both national and cultural. Judging from literature produced in the mid-1970s following the fall of the Gang of Four till the mid-1980s—scar literature, self-reflective literature, and root-seeking literature—it is clear that the legacy of the Cultural Revolution has left questions about the validity of Mao’s radical reforms and more broadly in Marxism-Maoism. Most importantly, many have felt a tremendous loss of culture. In addition, the Deng regime’s reneging on its encouragement of free expression, the crackdown on the Democracy Wall movement (epitomized in the arrest of Wei Jingsheng and other dissidents) in 1979, and the following two years’ further tightening the grip on freedom of speech and ideological control have only deepened people’s disillusionment with the central power and made more prevalent the society’s epistemological and ontological crises. The belief in socialist values, the

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legitimacy of national history, the predominance of “the collective,” hence the place of the individual and the like, have been cast into doubt. A series of debates and explorations on concepts such as zhenli (truth), xinnian (belief ), ren (man), history, culture, knowledge, and so on, all but reveals the beginning of a fundamental breakdown of the society’s value systems. In 1985, the famous Cultural Discussion (wenhua taolun) endowed by the Central Party Secretary was formed by the Academy of Chinese Culture. The involvement of the party indicates the “official” beginning of the direct participation of Chinese intellectuals in returning to the incomplete May Fourth project of modernization and enlightenment as well as in search for new knowledge and new ideas. Other “unofficial” cultural events also took place simultaneously such as conferences, forums, and the rise of journals and newspapers, and the formation and establishment of cultural institutes. Scholars generally take 1985 as the marker of contemporary Chinese literature’s turn away from the previous ten years’ reflexive, root-seeking, and soulsearching literature, to experiments with new techniques and aesthetic ideas, as well as a re-examination of the May Fourth literature’s iconoclasm, its relationship to Western literature, and the burden of history on the cultural consciousness of the people. The literary trend of this new era can be generally represented in two categories, avant-garde literature and new realism literature. The former capitalizes on techniques and explores the absurdity of the human condition, attempting to tackle the ontological crisis writers experience in China’s current cultural condition; the latter returns to realism to search for meanings in the mundane and to tackle the epistemological crisis embedded in everyday life. What also makes the literature produced after 1985 complex and interesting is the massive translation and introduction of theories, aesthetics, literatures of high modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism from the West and other non-Western countries. I would argue that what preoccupy writers of this body of literature are experiments with ways to articulate the self and its subjectivity. Again, following Jing Wang who situates the issue appropriately in its historical context where theories of postmodernism have begun to gain its currency among young Chinese theorists and writers, it is conceivable that the experimentalists have successfully dissolved the Revolutionary Hero. Although Wang critiques and questions the enthusiasm of some critics such as Xudong Zhang and Xiaobing Tang who believe Chinese writers are finally able to produce an autonomous subject, she herself does not question the very nature of the subject which, she describes, is facing the fate of mutilation (Jing Wang, 224–29). In fact, the quintessential question here should be: How is this subject constituted? Is this subject an autonomous individual, or the collective hidden behind the figure of the individual? If this question cannot be fully answered, it really does not matter what has been done to

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the subject—mutilated, erased, decentered, or alienated. So long as subjectivity remains vague, unclear whether it is autonomous or still collectivebased, any conceptual, practical, theoretical, or aesthetic “progress” is at best a pseudo-progress. The issue of subject/subjectivity and the question of identity are only beginning to be formulated by Chinese writers. In Han Shaogong’s stories, for example, what is being sought is not the subject but the basis upon which the subject is constituted. To claim the subject has been “mutilated” may be too hasty. What is more probable, instead, is an ongoing process of negotiation and dialogue with history, memory, and the cultural past whereby a new subject may emerge. “Guiqulai” (Homecoming, 1985) presents the individual’s growing sense of uncertainty regarding his own identity. As the narrator’s recognition of the immediate present becomes more and more vague and his memory of the past appears less and less clear, he finally loses his sense of self, even unsure of his own name. In Han’s other stories such as “Lan gaizi” (The Blue Bottle-Cap, 1985) and “Nü nü nü” (Women, Women, Women, 1986), there is a prevailing fear of confronting the inevitable loss of self—fear because when the subject confronts the inevitable loss of self, the subject thereby finds itself (paradoxically) discovering in that loss the self that is being displaced. Although it can be argued that in order to embark on a journey to search for one’s familial or cultural roots, the individual must first have a sense of self, a stable core that is the motivation behind the desire to seek out his or her roots. But what Han’s stories aim to reveal is the possibility that this core may be just a simulation of something that is not really there. Han Shaogong’s works seem to defy some Chinese postmodernist critics’ discourse on the “crisis of the subject,”9 proposing a different view that, what is really in crisis is not the subject but the realization that the subject is nowhere to be found because it has never really existed in the first place. Clearly since the mid-1980s Chinese writers are inclined to subvert or even disregard orthodox cultural ideologies. They ask how resources of history and culture are used to conceptualize identities; how the discourse of nation affects the imagination of the self; and how representation of such self is constituted by language. Every identity has its perimeter; and it is clear that the perimeter of Chinese identities has now shifted and it points to a trend of challenging those collective “Chinese” identities which were deeply rooted in the hegemonic Chinese cultural domain forged and reforged over thousands of years, and both appropriated and demonized during the past century of modernization and socialism. The conception of Chinese identities has begun to diversify in the late twentieth century. One of the essential questions here regards the effects China’s recent economic reforms have on the condition of contemporary

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Chinese culture and subsequently the perception of hegemonic Chinese cultural identity. Among contemporary writers in China, Wang Anyi best captures the collective ambivalence and anxiety toward the emergence of a new identity discourse. Tracing Wang’s writing career provides a clear trajectory of such attempts to break many social taboos after the fall of the Gang of Four and followed by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform programs. Wang began her professional career as a writer in 1982 with the award-winning short story, “Benci lieche zhongdian zhan” (The last stop of this train). Since then she has published a considerable number of collections of stories and novels, on diverse subject matters and in different styles. Wang Anyi’s ambivalence toward rebellion and conformity has its roots in the historical burden and the sense of moral obligation of Chinese intellectuals, as well as their participation and predicament in the sociocultural-political changes in China in the past two decades or so. The involvement of Chinese intellectuals in developing nationalism is grounded in the teaching of Confucianism. Notwithstanding that China in the first half of the twentieth century was immersed in various iconoclastic movements to denounce tradition and Confucianism, Chinese intellectuals remain unchanged in their commitment to the well-being of society. In China’s long Confucian tradition, shi (scholars or intellectuals) have been endowed with social and moral responsibilities to the dynastic world (or, in its modern equivalence, the nation) and the emperor (or the central government). Traditionally they are a unique social class not defined by economic standing but by a shared spiritual and moral impulse. But there is an inherent danger in Chinese intellectuals’ self-assumed and historically endowed “social-cultural-moral aura.” As Xudong Zhang points out, “Chinese intellectuals tend to speak for the ‘people’, and the ‘nation’ in a transcendental, universalistic posture, often without self-reflexive or self-critical thought about the legitimate violence their privileged position superimposes on social problems and social spaces, on heterogeneous and complex social relations.”10 Following Xudong Zhang’s criticism of the moral high ground taken by Chinese intellectuals, Jing Wang further points out that although in the 1980s the Revolutionary Hero/subject of the Mao era has been “liberated” and become an individual seen in the emergence of the self in the literature of the 1980s, this “individual” remains largely an universal, archetypal kind of individual—“a homogeneous configuration of the self that was no less formulaic than that portrayed earlier in socialist realism.”11 Although writers of various schools—self-reflective, root-seeking, humanist, or new realist—have made the inquiry into the nature of subjectivity their primary concern, such an inquiry is highly problematic. The individual of the 1980s remains an oppositional category to that of the collective; such an individual is not a “real” and private individual, but a

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mirror reflection of the collective that is the nation, the people, and the society. This “individual” would then always be vulnerable to being subsumed in the political logic of socialism.

“What is the plateau on which I shall find my identity?” (Foucalt) Wang Anyi, who belongs to the zhiqing (intellectual youngster) generation and is also one of the most influential writers in China today, is probably the best representative of contemporary Chinese intellectuals that I have discussed extensively in this chapter. Wang Anyi comes from a literary family. Her mother Ru Zhijuan is a writer of the scar literature and the self-reflective literature of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Wang Anyi’s earliest works such as “Yu, shashasha” (Rain, sha sha sha, 1981) and “Liushi” (Flowing away, 1982) can be best characterized as middle-brow romances in their subject matter. Works that won her great popularity are the romance trilogy (Sanlian), published in various times during 1986: “Huangshan zhi lian” (Love in a wild mountain), “Xiaocheng zhi lian” (Love in a small town), and “Jinxiugu zhi lian” (Love in a valley of splendor). In this trilogy, Wang Anyi ventures into the realm of corporeal passion and sexual desire, a subject matter considered controversial at the time. The trilogy won Wang a wider recognition, but she continued to experiment with different subjects and narrative techniques. What has remained unchanged, however, is her curiosity and concern for how the individual is positioned in society, tradition, and history. Departing from her previous works, Wang Anyi’s fiction in the1990s became more experimental. The first such attempt is “Shushu de gushi” (Uncle’s story, 1990). In this novella, Wang Anyi adopts the metanarrative frame to depict a middle-aged man, the narrator’s uncle, as both a mock hero of the Cultural Revolution and a parodic type of writer/intellectual whose predicament reflects that of Chinese intellectuals and writers in the post-Cultural Revolution period. The narrator, who is a writer of the younger generation, contemplates the destiny of a writer as he collects and then selects stories of his uncle’s for a novel. The uncle’s misfortunes during the Cultural Revolution is typical: as a well-known writer, he cannot escape the fate of condemnation and ideological reform, but his name is soon restored after the Revolution. The uncle’s stories, representing those of the writers of the older generation, become references to the narrator’s assessment of his and his contemporary writers’ new role in history. Another

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interesting issue the novella touches upon is the problem of representation. The narrator is clearly aware that his effort to record the uncle’s life stories is based largely on a deliberate process of selection of materials. But at the same time, he cannot help but think that he can project his own life trajectory by examining his uncle’s. The dialectical relationship between writing fiction and representing reality is one puzzle that the narrator-author cannot resolve. Later in 1994 Wang Anyi published Reality and Fiction (Jishi yu xugou), a full-fledged novel, the title as well as the content of which reflects precisely this intrigue.12 Reality and Fiction elevates examinations of the aforementioned issue to the level of history writing and elaboration of memory to replace reality.13 Here Wang Anyi attempts to lay down a new trajectory to trace the place of the individual within the powerful domain of Chinese history, thus reconsidering, from a very private and personal perspective, what it means to bear the cultural identity of China. The correlation between nationalism, history, and the individual’s sense of cultural identity is a critical preoccupation in Wang Anyi’s novel. To untangle such a correlation would mean to find a different way to envision history, a new conception with which to relate the individual to the nation, and a lucid articulation of cultural identity to mediate between history and nationalism. A novel and also a semiautobiography, Reality and Fiction is about the search for family genealogy. The form of semiautobiography immediately creates a dual role for the Wang Anyi who exists in the novel both as the narrator-author and as a character. The author’s personal information and experiences are used as a vehicle for folding the real into the imaginary. Reality and fiction are thus fused together. In this fusion, Wang Anyi can create a new image/identity for herself without transgressing the bounds of history. The interplay between subjectivity and representation which dominates the novel reveals a predicament of identity now facing the Chinese people. The narrator whose name is “Wang Anyi” (167) lives in China’s biggest cosmopolitan city Shanghai. In this city, non-natives such as Wang Anyi and her family are clearly marked and referred to as wailaihu, or outsiders. To further isolate the narrator Wang Anyi, both of her parents are either an orphan (her mother) or someone who knows almost nothing about the family background (her father) (283). As noted by David Der-wei Wang in the preface to the novel’s Taiwan edition,14 the narrative is developed in two parallel lines: the even-numbered chapters are the narrator-author’s construction of her mother’s family history; the odd-numbered chapters are about her personal growing-up experiences in Shanghai. Moving on this double trajectory, the novel presents the dialectical relationship between “fiction” and “reality” as paradoxical. It questions how much of the writing of history is based on historical fact and

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how much fiction is added onto fact more critically, it inquires what difference the mixing of fact with fiction will make at the end when historical writing is institutionalized as history. Instead of uncovering the forgotten family past, Wang Anyi’s real intention is to create a family history. She begins with her mother’s family name Ru15 by looking up the word in the dictionary. She finds seven entries under the word and the last entry explains that it is a family name belonging to a northern tribe, Rouran. With this clue, she checks with Tongzhi—shizu lüe (General annals: Summary of familial and tribal names) to confirm that Ru indeed belongs to the Rouran tribe. She also obtains another clue from a Japanese friend who tells her the word “ru” in Japanese means a kind of herb growing only in red soil, which leads him to believe that her ancestors must have rooted themselves in a place with red earth. Institutional validations such as ancient classics and folk knowledge henceforth constitute the basis of the narrator-author’s constructed genealogy. The first historical record of her ancestral tribe is linked with the founding of the Northern Wei dynasty (386–534 CE) by the nomadic people Tuobashi. There are a few intriguing issues embedded in the narrator-author’s “method” which, in the view of established historiography, also fits the very definition of antimethodical. First of all, the author-narrator believes that family genealogy is maintained by the passing down of family myths and legends (73), because myth and legend can transform the ordinary to the fantastical, endowing the former with an aura. Such an aura then provides the family with a feeling of uniqueness and hence a familial identity is established. At the same time the narrator-author also accepts the authority of orthodox historical discourse. Wang Anyi’s strategy challenging the institutional authority of history is less radical than one would expect. The incorporation of orthodox historical writings in her fabrication of a grandiose history indicates Wang’s reluctance to directly challenge the authority of China’s official historical discourse. She compromises by fictionalizing history and historicizing fiction—using a fantastical and at times romantic language to create the impression of subversion but in fact to disguise her reluctance. By choosing to pursue her maternal instead of her paternal genealogy, the narrator-author is taking up an unconventional position. To begin this genealogy, she chooses the moment her ancestors were conquered by the powerful Tuoba tribe. Her intention is rather curious: “It is clear that for an insignificant and weak group of people, being conquered by the powerful allows the weak admittance into the book of history more quickly” (78). The dawning moment of her ancestral history thus begins with the capture of the last member of this nameless tribe. A humble and humiliating beginning— characteristics certainly reminiscent of Mao’s early days in Yanan when

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the Chinese Communist Party was beginning to take shape—such a starting point has a certain psychological correspondence to the narratorauthor’s meager family background and her outsider status in Shanghai. What is more, she selects a non-Han tribe, traditionally considered by the Han-Chinese as “barbaric,” to be her ancestors. The language describing the physical and spiritual transformation of the founding member of her tribe is entirely romantic and subjective, devoid of historiographical writing’s objectivity and impartiality: My ancestor Mugulü is a tall and robust man. He has exceptional strength, extraordinary fighting skills and is always courageous on the battlefield. . . . To reward his contributions, Tubashi promotes him from a slave to a warrior. . . . Moving along with thousands of soldiers on the grand prairie, he experiences the power of the collective and the awesome thrill of group battle. He thinks to himself: when will I Mugulyu have my own armies, my own tribal flag fluttering in the wind? So just like that, my ancestor transforms himself from a barbaric, rustic-looking, nameless slave to a warrior with unparalleled courage (80).

What is significant is the “thick description” of this hero and his legend. Indeed, the narrator’s method of writing history is the piecing together of fragmentary references from official dynastic historical sources with her own imagination, interpretation, and occasional conjectures. Wang Anyi takes fragmentary references from official dynastic histories such as Nanqishu (The Book of the Southern Qi dynasty), Weishu (The Book of the Wei dynasty), and Nanshu (History of the South) to piece together the little recorded history of the tribe her ancestor had joined. As the narrator-author faces the history of the extinction of the Rouran tribe, she has to make a choice whether to accept history or to find a way around it. To record the annihilation of her ancestral tribe into her history book would threaten the validity of her carefully constructed identity. Once again, the narrator-author turns to official sources of dynastic histories to find some threads to continue this genealogy. From History of the South, she discovers a sentence that indicates that some of her ancestors had emigrated to the south. But she needs to work out some details in order to give this piece of history a logical explanation within the discourse of official history. Without the validity of an official history, her constructed family history cannot become “true,” and consequently her identity stands to lose its legitimacy. Naturally this requires some maneuvering and imagination; but this is also the point at which she decides whether or not to continue the theme of heroism: “I think before the Tujue kills all my ancestors, the entire Rouran tribe must have already fallen apart and some of them must have surrendered

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to the Tujue. When the Tujue people massacred my ancestors, they probably kept some of my ancestors in order to expand their tribe and to use them as slaves. Among these possibilities, which one will lead to me? . . . Now I have to choose from these whereabouts to lead myself onto the path of my own genealogy” (127). Her quest of a distinguished genealogy entices her to trace the record of the assimilation of her ancestral group by the Tujue tribe whose leader Kublai Khan would later establish the Yuan dynasty. Since being associated with a powerful tribe would guarantee the survival of her family bloodline, the rationale that explains the familial tie of her birth to the tribe of Rouran thus is sustained: “Before I find my materials, I have already decided to have a hero as my ancestor. I tend to lean toward the bloodline of the powerful, hoping to be its offspring. This tendency comes from the desire to affirm that my existence is an inevitable, not a lucky, accident. I hope the transmission of this bloodline is indisputable, that it can flourish wherever it goes. It will bear fruit everywhere, passing down the torch of life from generation to generation, until it reaches me. This hope can only be realized by a hero’s bloodline, an ordinary bloodline only follows the currents—it does not have its own direction” (129–30). So the “heroic” theme continues to unfold. The narratorauthor wishes to transform her identity from that of an obscure, marginalized, and ultimate stranger of her own city to one with a distinguished heredity. By developing an exceptional family history, she also builds within herself a sense of uniqueness and superiority, although it is achieved by choosing historical sources and imitating the historiographical discourse. Her original plan to write a glorious family history is compromised by her impulse to make her ancestors members of the Han-Chinese, as she herself is. Within her there are two conflicting forces that divide up her effort: the desire to be different in thinking of herself as the offspring of a peripheral tribe that rose to power against all odds, though briefly; and the desire to be the same as revealed in her attempt to incorporate her narrative into the official dynastic history in order for it to become a legitimate history. She is acutely aware of the hegemony of the Han-Chinese culture, the evidence of which is her current “indisputable” cultural identity: a Han-Chinese. This hegemonic cultural identity is rooted in the long, undisrupted Confucian discourse of Chinese history, which is why Wang Anyi has chosen “history” as the plateau on which to find her personal and cultural identities.16 But the value she attributes to the writing of history is ambiguous. She is hesitant in prescribing to history its power to determine an individual’s cultural heritage, to affirm the individual’s sense of self-identity and her identity in relation to the society at large—ultimately, to define who she is. Thus she frames history with myths and legends, intending to confuse the division of “historical facts” and “mythic creations.”

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Tracing her genealogy becomes increasingly difficult after some of the narrator-author’s ancestors were captured by the Tujue-Mongolian. The narrator-author has great difficulty in keeping the story line clear—it now becomes a detective work as well as a guessing game. Understandably, she turns her focus to the telling of yet another heroic legend, but sadly it is that of the master of her enslaved ancestors. The narrator-author continues to struggle between her search for an authentic identity and her difficulty in defying the powerful domination of national history over the individual’s cultural consciousness. In her account of the legendary Chinggis (Genghis, Jenshis) Khan who united all the Mongol tribes and established the Mongol empire, sacred myths are transformed into historical legends. Through and through, her narration of history corresponds to the structure of orthodox historiography, as Marshall Sahlins describes it, such that “the time of society is calculated in dynastic genealogies, as collective history resides in royal traditions.”17 In the narrator-author’s construction of her familial genealogy, time is chronicled in accordance with tribal dynastic power struggles. Despite her inclination to subvert the writing and construction of history with her improvisations of details, she still allows herself to be subsumed in history’s grand tradition. The identity of her ancestors is always subordinate to a powerful tribe, which makes it difficult for the narrator-author to maintain her track. Eventually she loses it and has to invent a mysterious “wise man” to bridge the gap: “I have lost my trail and stepped onto a wrong path. It is too late for me to turn back now. But I think among those of my ancestral groups which were assimilated into the Tujue tribe, there must have been a wise man who passed down the secrets of our Rouran tribe by telling them to one tribal member after another” (139). As her tracking runs into a dead end, she returns to the earlier part of her history when Rouran had its initial encounter with Tuoba and creates a diverting point where her ancestors split and went into two directions: one small group surrendered to Northern Wei dynasty (established by the Tuoba tribe), then emigrated to Jiangnan and became assimilated into the Han-Chinese culture. Others stayed in the great prairies of the North and when the Tujue tribe gained domination in the prairies, they were captured and eventually exterminated. But their ethnic identity is maintained beyond their deaths because the massacre would be recorded in the official dynastic histories. However, in order for the narrator-author to explain her ancestral roots, the bloodline has to continue, thus survival of some of her ancestors must take place. Clearly the narrator-author tries to find her self and cultural identity in a dialectical movement with two histories: one official and the other fictional. The fictional history that she creates—the tracing of her familial lineage—can be interpreted as her attempt to arrive at a certain degree of

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self-knowledge. This self-knowledge is superimposed with actual official historical records (hence “truth”) and regulated by rules of hegemonic historiography (hence symbolically “authentic”). Wang Anyi’s ambivalence toward “history” and “identity” is reflected in this contradictory approach of identity-seeking and formation. The kind of identity she finds would be a displaced identity at best because, despite her intention to subvert the establishments of “history” and its determinacy on “identity,” she still pleads for the recognition of the orthodox, patriarchal power. Wang Anyi’s struggle with the hegemonic discourse of Chinese history reflects what contemporary Chinese intellectual and urbanites face in the 1990s, especially in the cosmopolitan cities where there surges a new concern about adopting alternative cultural identities within the dominant discourse of orthodox history and national heritage. Can the Chinese construct cultural identities that are based on specific ethnicity instead of an overarching “Chineseness”? The final part of the narrator-author’s identity-seeking journey takes her to Jiangnan (the entire area south of the Yangtze River). There are several leads to the final location of her search, a place called Rujialou (Ru watervillage). Winding from one lead to another throughout her entire search, the narratorauthor finally realizes that her great-grandfather also did something she has done: fabricated history. Their shared goal is not to make history but to do away with historical truth and replace it with something more socially and culturally acceptable and respectable at their time: “My great-grandfather took other people’s ancestors as his own. This indicates his intention to change history. . . . I can see the heavy burden of history my great-grandfather had carried on his back. . . . I think they must have enthusiastically participated in the campaign to destroy family temples during the Cultural Revolution. It was a good opportunity for them to rid themselves of the heavy burden of history. . . . By taking part in the campaign, they could on the one hand relieve themselves from history, and on the other, they could also obscure traces of the past, creating a rupture in the family history” (254). Tracing more than one thousand years of history, the narrator-author discovers there are two Ru families in Jiangnan. One family, which was ethnically Han-Chinese, had a distinguished bureaucratic career during the Southern Song dynasty, and the other was headed by an ordinary basket maker who was a direct descendant of the Northern Rouran tribe. The former’s distinguished achievement satisfies the author-narrator’s fancy for heroism, but choosing it would mean the genealogy she has traced so far is a wrong one. The latter assures the correctness of her genealogy, but its ordinary background is too difficult for her to reconcile herself to. To choose between them is to decide the origin of her cultural identity: Han-Chinese, or the “barbaric” Rouran. Consistent with her tack of circumventing the task

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of taking a direct stance, she decides to combine both and ignores whatever errors there are in this “joint” history: “The closer she comes to her present existence, the more “real” her story would have to be: From describing the beginning of my family myth until today, I have journeyed for more than one thousand years. Moving from the cold northern deserts to the warm Jiangnan, this myth has gradually become more and more realistic” (284). Her final scheme is to give herself a segment of family history decent enough to prove that she not only is a genuine native Shanghainese but also one with a respected background. When this is accomplished, she will have the legitimacy to become a member of the majority, no longer marginal and “odd.” Thus, Wang Anyi has constructed a cultural identity that is both Han and non-Han. The problem is, this so-called Han-Chinese itself is a synthetic concept. It is a constructed object of representation of the majority of the ethnic groups living in the heartland of China. Thus it is logical to read Wang Anyi’s decision to combine the two lineages as her way of revealing the fact that the Han-Chinese cultural identity itself has gone through a long process of homogenization. It is only reasonable to imagine that every Chinese has some “barbaric” blood mixed in his or her “Han” blood. So, although her own cultural identity is based primarily on a contrived history, when compared with the fiction behind the synthetic concept of “the Chinese,” its validity is not much less than the historically designated “authentic” Chinese cultural identity.

Identity: Self versus (the Absent) Collective Other The odd-numbered chapters of the novel are about the narrator-author’s personal experience of growing up in Shanghai. Compared with the grandiose history she has constructed, her personal history written in the style of a journal or diary is filled with mundane details and fantasies of a girl growing up in a nuclear family with almost no relatives or family friends. She is anxious to find any kind of connection with the outside world so that she can situate her family and herself in society at large. The term “orphan” reflects best what she feels at heart: “the thought of Mother as an orphan occupies my mind—even at a tender age, I already sense that the loneliness of being an orphan is much stronger and deeper than the loneliness of being an outsider in Shanghai” (50). An orphan usually is a person who has lost family roots or history—hence making his or her personal identity questionable. The “Other” that an orphan needs to relate to in order to form a sense of self-identity is amorphous and massive. Because of this ambiguous

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relationship between the orphaned self and the Other, anxiety of identity crisis is constantly felt. “Orphan” thus names the existential condition of the narrator-author. This condition compels her, a writer, to find a logical connection between language, fiction (both in “fabrication” and “novel”) and history/historiography since language is her only tool wherewith to create meaning for her identity: “To tell the truth, everyone’s experiences are just ordinary experiences. History proceeds in the measure of hundreds of years; if one or two extraordinary stories happen in our short life, we should be grateful. How can we contrive a complete story based only on our own experiences? So novels are fiction. As soon as a novel begins, it is already a fabrication” (260). In her comparison of “the length of history” with an individual’s “span of life,” apparently she regards history as the authorial paradigm by which evaluation of the individual’s endeavor is made. But there is an antinomy in her reason: while history is the object of her desire, her way of attaining her object is by fabricating the object. However, her narrative apparatus depends on this antinomy. We only need to consider how Wang Anyi, the author-narratorcharacter altogether, tirelessly tells one story after another about herself and her imagined ancestors. Fredric Jameson characterizes this trait as “libidinal investment or authorial wish-fulfillment, a form of symbolic satisfaction in which the working distinction between biographical subject, Implied Author, reader, and characters is virtually effaced.”18 In the even-numbered chapters Wang Anyi builds a family genealogy in an attempt to constitute herself historically and thereby to affirm her selfidentity. Borrowing from Foucault’s investigation of the evolution of methods of self-government, or technologies of the self, Nikolas Rose points out that such a genealogy of subjectification is not a “ ‘historical construction of the self ’ but the history of the relations which human beings have established with themselves. These relations are constructed and historical, but they are not to be understood by locating them in some amorphous domain of culture.”19 In the even-numbered chapters Wang Anyi’s fabrication of a family history is precisely the exercise with which she strives to establish a relationship with herself. In the odd-numbered chapters, her intention remains the same, even though the mode of narrative is primarily realism (quite contrary to the fictionality of the even-numbered chapters) and the “historical” account is about her personal mundane life. Her building of self-identity is not based on difference, or an antagonistic relationship to the world in general; on the contrary, she focuses mainly on a reflexive relationship with herself. This is different from poststructuralist theories of identity which base the examination of identity primarily on the relationship between the self and the other. In a historical study of the origins of “self-knowledge,” Luther H. Martins concludes that such

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practices come from two opposing traditions: “The first, which is characteristic of the Western ethical tradition, might be termed an epistemological technology of self. This tradition emphasizes the activity of self-disclosure always in terms of an other. By disclosing oneself in dialogue, self was constituted. The second, exemplified by the Eastern Thomas tradition, might be termed an ontological technology of self. This tradition emphasizes the discernment of deciphering of what the self already is.”20 Of course this is not to suggest that Wang Anyi’s “technology of the self ” follows any one of the two traditions. Her method is to produce as much knowledge about herself as possible—gathering historical sources about her maternal family, filling all the gaps found in her research, recording her everyday life, and creating an interpersonal network among herself and people around her. But throughout all of these efforts, her primary focus remains on herself. In the postscript, Wang Anyi explains how she designs the two trajectories for the novel: “I fabricate my family history and use it as the vertical axle of my human relationships. . . . Then I fabricate my community and use it as the horizontal axle of my social relationships” (321). Essentially it is she who is at the axis: “I make up this story, that story; all stories require materials. . . . Now I realize my own weapon of fabrication is pointing at me, right under my nose. I have become my own material. It is so difficult to fabricate myself, because I am standing all alone between heaven and earth” (320). Ultimately the core that is the self cannot be fabricated nor deconstructed. The basis of identity thus rests on the individual, not the many manifestations of the collective. In Wang Anyi’s project of constructing her self and cultural identities, there are various Others—the skeleton history of her maternal family, her native Shanghainess as well as “tongzhi” (comrade) friends, and the city Shanghai. However, the traditional collective Other—nation, national history, the people—which have long occupied Chinese intellectuals’ minds is conspicuously absent from Wang Anyi’s self-Other dialectics. There are mentions of the Cultural Revolution and the fall of the Gang of Four in her personal accounts of her life, but these historically important moments bear little significance to her. The period of the Cultural Revolution is, to children and teenagers, a time full of “wondrous experiences” because “it destroys the traditional society’s logical organizational structure. Accidental incidents happen all the time, and they often have the power to change one’s fate. This society has no order, and we can simply do whatever we want” (147). What is considered to be modern China’s most traumatic period is to the narrator-author a time of personal adventures. Wang Anyi’s interest remains centered on her own personal encounters during this period of unrest. The meaning of national history is relevant in the context of patriotism but distant to the individual in her everyday life.

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On the trajectory of her realist narrative, she has the tendency to trivialize and personalize national history; however, on the other trajectory of her fictional narrative, the tendency is to “nationalize” private history, to bring every detail and every character to the level of myth and heroism. Between “reality” and “fiction,” the power of history—grand or petite—is undermined and demythified. Thus the individual’s self and cultural identities do not have to be determined entirely by his or her collective and personal cultural heritage. From her deliberate cancellation of the collective Other, Wang Anyi has made an important gesture signaling her stepping away from the traditional role that Chinese intellectuals have played as the moral guardians of the nation and its people. A more significant relationship that needs to be cultivated is one’s connection with oneself. Chinese intellectuals’ identityseeking has moved from going back to the cultural roots to entering into an imagined/imaginary community. The concern for Wang Anyi now is not to contribute to the creation of the collective subjectivity which is, in Benedict Anderson’s words, “census-fashioned, as bounded series.”21 Rather, she is interested in exploring the possibility for an individual’s subjectivity to be grounded in personal experiences and imagination. Taking from the census’ numeration and newspapers’ unenumeration nature, Anderson explains the concepts of bound seriality (as exemplified by the former) and unbound seriality (as exemplified by the latter) as follows: “Unbound seriality, which has its origins in the print market, especially in newspapers, and in the representations of popular performance, is exemplified by such open-to-theworld plurals as nationalists, anarchists, bureaucrats, and workers. . . . Bound seriality, which has its origins in governmentality, especially in such institutions as the census and elections, is exemplified by finite series like AsianAmericans, beurs, and Tutsis” (29). A nation’s collective subjectivity is made possible by both kinds of imagination, and within the limits of the frame of a nation, the imagination of a collective is an unbound serialization (like newspapers). When a collective identity—cultural or national—emerges, the collective subjectivity then becomes bounded. Wang Anyi’s fabrication of history has the power to shake the ground of the collective identity. Her fabrication strategy can endlessly go on and expand if she chooses. The discourse of her fictional history thus is an open series that liberates her from the burden of the collective. The official dynastic historical sources which she appropriates represent a formal binding together of disparate elements of ethnicity, culture, and political structures. She cannot overlook the authority of heritage manifested in the discourse of history. Therefore at the end of the novel she allows the two trajectories to meet, tangle, and become the Other. Her invented history comes to a closure with the demise of the family. This ending then leads to the beginning

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of chapter one. In her personal life, on the other hand, she is completely subsumed by the magical realm of language and fiction’s game of imagination and fabrication: “Now I finally understand that ‘she’ (“Wang Anyi” the narrator) is me (the author)! . . . She creates adventures in her mind while I create adventures on paper—both of us can only find satisfaction in fabricated stories and relationships, hoping maybe they will become real. . . . She has journeyed through the whole process of building houses on paper— my project. . . . I always insist on building paper houses, one after another, until I myself become a paper doll. And then, one day, this paper doll will walk out of her paper house, all packed and ready to go home” (279, 281).

The Long Arc of History Reality and Fiction presents two histories written by a woman without a clear identity. In the beginning, her investigation of her maternal genealogy seems to indicate a desire to situate and identify herself along the line of women, not the general category of “individuals” or ren. But in the process of pursuing and accumulating historical sources and knowledge in order to write (her) history and to create difference for her identity-building, she slowly leads herself into the male world. The figure of woman plays no part in her writing of history; instead it is the male figure of heroic qualities who overwrites her feminine discourse. Through and through, she bases the logic of historical continuity on the patriarchal structure of dynasty/nation which, as the source of authority, defines for the individual her proper identity. It seems that the specter of history, like Ban Wang’s “specter of the sublime subject,”22 hovers over Wang Anyi’s project of genealogy. So, what do all of these tell us about Wang Anyi’s project of seeking and building identity? In this novel, the issue of gender—of a woman’s identity in her community—transpires in the problem of history. In Wang Anyi’s view, the historical of historiography involves not only knowledge and genre, but also gender. The metalanguage of historiography as employed by Wang Anyi shows two types of time at work: time in memories of the past and time in the narrative of an official chronology. The dialectical relationship between these two types of time can be articulated in the opposition between histories and stories of the past and history as seen constituted in modernity and nation. The former belongs to her and her mother, while the latter belongs to the nation. Wang Anyi places the feminine sense of details of events within the patriarchal frame of chronology.23 It is her way to ask whether an individual’s personal history can be written like that of a nation’s. Her feminine

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sensitivity for detail has an ambiguous relation to the Grand History, even though such details are often dissolved in the discourse of revolutions and dynastic changes. Wang Anyi seems unable to raise herself from the historicity in which her “I” situates itself because she has yet to find an alternative historicity, a feminist historicity wherein to relocate her “I.” Thus her attempt should be seen as a confrontation, or “an enabling violation”24 which allows the subject to articulate its opposition, despite the fact that it cannot extract itself from this power relation. The birth of China as a nation goes hand in hand with Chinese modernity. As situated within the scheme of her identity project, Wang Anyi’s attempt to destabilize the link between history and nation-modernity with fabrication and appropriation reveals an attempted shift from national reflection to post-national reflection. Wang Anyi’s approach to the question of personal and cultural identity is only a preliminary exploration of the issue. She has yet to step beyond the perimeter of national history and heritage, and her consideration of personalcultural identity is still impounded by national-cultural identity. But the dialectical relationship that she tackles between reality and fiction can stimulate new conceptualizations of cultural identity. From her interconnected and allied discourses of a fictional history and a personal one, she makes the focus on revealing a relationship between cultural activity and a changed world order a relevant concern in contemporary China. The significant cultural differences within China will be recognized with an even stronger zeal when cultural globalization infiltrates China’s national culture. The debate about multiculturalism, the individual’s cultural identity, and “Chinese” national-cultural identity may then trigger a shift in the people’s perception of “China” as a common social system to a notion of China as a pluralist society. And when that happens, a reexamination of Wang Anyi’s novel may reveal to us its groundbreaking significance. Wang Anyi’s identity politics has a double edge: to assert one’s particular identity or one’s proper place within the social structure, and also to imagine a way to conceive cultural identity an individuated instead of a collective identity. But in Wang Anyi and many other contemporary Chinese writers’ explorations of identity, the concern for cultural authenticity has never surfaced. Even when they consider shifting identities, an underlying insistence on the right to assert cultural authenticity is clearly detectable. But will such sense of cultural authority be affected by China’s gradual integration into the global economic system and by Chinese people’s active engagement with foreign cultural influences?

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Chapter 3 Refashioning Cultural Authenticity: Taiwan

Grand Cultural China versus Small Polity Taiwan Making inquiries into cultural identity in Taiwan is a complicated endeavor because the culture is closely tied to many cultures—principally Chinese, but also Japanese and American—to identify just the most significant. Naming these cultural others and defining a Taiwan cultural identity requires consideration and discussion of the historical discontinuity and cultural hybridization that resulted from both external and internal political and cultural machinations. The disconnection from native culture through migration (e.g., the 1949 exodus from China to Taiwan) and the imposition of a foreign culture through the fifty-year Japanese colonial rule have created for the different groups of people in Taiwan a serious and complex problem in defining not only their own but also collective Taiwan cultural identity. It is a double-edged struggle to overcome cultural displacement and authenticate cultural hybridity. Cultural identity can rely on concepts and institutions such as ethnicity, familial tradition, religion, language, class, or marginalization. Though it is carried by the individual, cultural identity is in essence collective (the identity of a cultural community to which the individual belongs). Stuart Hall argues that the struggle for identity always takes the form of a struggle over cultural difference;1 Lawrence Grossberg similarly grounds his understanding of cultural identity in a cultural study analysis.2 The close link between identity and culture is particularly meaningful to people in an immigrant

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and postcolonial society such as Taiwan. What does it mean to be a “Taiwanese,” or to represent “Taiwan” as someone who holds a passport from there? The issues of ethnicity and cultural otherness have a predominant place with respect to the other elements of this identity. The tremendous presence of foreign cultures in Taiwan resulted directly from the colonization by the Japanese (18953 to 1945) and rapidly growing capitalism since the 1960s, which has opened the door to more foreign cultural influences, particularly from the West. Internally, for four decades since Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalist government (led by the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang [KMT]) retreated to Taiwan in 1949 and implemented the strict policy of ethnic homogeneity,4 the idea that all people living in Taiwan are Chinese was the subject of widespread propaganda until the 1980s. During the years of oppositional movements in the 1960s and 1970s, ethnicity was a key issue. Thus, when the government’s ideological control finally loosened, one of the first changes was the official recognition of the existence of multiple ethnic groups in Taiwan. The more open attitude toward ethnic diversity has precipitated a series of furious debates over issues of ethnic politics such as the China-Taiwan complex, independence versus unification, questions of provincial identity (shengji wenti)—Taiwanese (benshengren) versus Chinese mainlander (waishengren)— as well as a search for an acceptable definition of what exactly it means to be “Taiwanese.” Former President Lee Teng-hui promoted the concept of “New Taiwanese” (xin Taiwanren)5 and the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) former chairman Hsu Hsin-liang proposed the notion of transcending all ethnic categories to regard everyone in Taiwan as one new “rising people” (xinxing minzu) because of their characteristic energy and ability to thrive under hardship.6 But the concept of “ethnicity” remains an issue. Ethnicity cannot be taken as unproblematic because it is always constructed through discourse and the negotiation of power. Michael M. J. Fischer points out that ethnicity is not passive and static, something immune to the changes of time and space, but rather is “reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual.”7 The crucial question facing the various ethnic groups in Taiwan is not which group possesses ethnic “authority” on this island, but what the pivotal connection is between ethnicity and cultural identity in the contemporary world.

Identity Politics Post-1987 Beginning in the late 1970s and during the 1980s, Taiwan society at large underwent a series of social and cultural changes as well as massive political

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“Taiwanization” from the regional level to the core of the KMT-controlled government.8 A few years before the annulment of martial law in 1987 when the government finally allowed limited contact and communication with China, and after 1987 when activity between people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait accelerated, a strong sense of Taiwan identity started to take hold among people of the “Taiwanese” and the “Chinese mainlanders” alike. In the cultural sphere, such intensive contacts with the “motherland” have prompted Taiwan writers to reevaluate their position in the “greater Chinese” literary tradition. Facing an ambivalent tie with China—Taiwan’s cultural origin—Taiwan writers often demonstrate a playful and noncommittal attitude. “History” is replaced by “histories.” Confronting the master narrative of Chinese cultural and political discourses, Taiwan’s struggle for its identity is analogous to the dispute over the “copyright,” or the question of who can claim legitimacy on this island. Such reflection and reexamination of Taiwan’s identity and its tie with China have inspired some Taiwan writers to reflect on another of Taiwan’s significant cultural others, the West, and its cultural influences on Taiwan. Literature in Taiwan produced after the 1980s embodies prominent characteristics such as deliberate imitation and appropriation of Western postmodernist narrative techniques, aesthetic innovations, and theoretical concepts. A fundamental difference that separates fiction after the1980s from its predecessor is its conscious acknowledgment of “borrowing” literary styles and techniques from American metafiction, French nouveau roman, nouveau nouveau roman, and Latin American magical realism novels, to name only the most influential sources.9 The uneasiness about imitating foreign literary trends is no longer as strongly felt in the fiction after the 1980s as in the earlier fiction. The motivation behind imitating the West also differs. While many writers of the pre-1980s fiction (also labeled as modernist fiction) vigorously adopted Western literary concepts and diligently imitated new literary styles and techniques for the purpose of ideological transformation, writers of the younger generation do not, however, assume such idealism and are much more aware of Taiwan’s social-cultural condition in the post-martial law era. To articulate their critical reflection of intercultural influences, these younger writers deliberately parade Western intellectual products through a process of imitation and appropriation as means of parodying the politics of cultural and economic domination. By hybridizing the narrative, the power relations between intercultural elements can be renegotiated. Imitation and appropriation, in the hands of the younger generation of Taiwan writers, have become the means to express their political stance in the symbolic power struggle with the West. In many ways, it is a journey toward re-authenticating Taiwan’s essentially hybrid culture. As such, the new goal of authentication no longer is to just celebrate “originality” or

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“purity” but to recognize hybridity as the bearer of specific cultural-historical experiences that are no less unique.

The Burden of Culture: Zhu Tianxin’s Dilemma In her 1997 collection of stories, Ancient Capital (Gudu), Zhu Tianxin places the issue of ethnic homogeneity in the foreground as she explores the role foreign cultural dominance plays in the project of constructing a Taiwan cultural identity. Zhu Tianxin (born in 1958) is a veteran member of the group of writers, such as Zhang Dachun, Zhu Tianwen (her older sister), Ping Lu, Li Ang, Li Yongping, Huang Fan, to name just a few, who have dominated Taiwan’s literary scene since the late 1970s and early 1980s.10 Zhu Tianxin’s father Zhu Xining followed Chiang Kai-shek’s retreat from China to Taiwan and established himself as a prominent army writer. Her mother Liu Musha, a Hakka Taiwanese, is a translator of many modern Japanese literary works. Zhu Tianxin began her writing career in 1974 while she was in high school. From her early works, she has exhibited an unusual sensitivity to and passionate concern for history and her Chinese heritage. After graduating from college, she turned her attention toward social critique and became interested in politics during the formative years of Taiwan’s political democratization in the 1980s. It is also during these years when discussions of the issue of identity—national, cultural, and ethnic— began to appear in the mass media, the arts, and among academics. Being a second-generation mainlander in Taiwan, Zhu Tianxin is faced with multiple identity crises.11 Inevitably she must reconsider her place in Taiwan’s new cultural and social environment. Recognition of ethnic diversity replaced the notion that Taiwan’s society is homogeneously Chinese. In her 1992 collection In Remembrance of My Brothers in Military Compound12 (Xiang wo juancun de xiongdimen), Zhu Tianxin meditates on the dynamic relationship between history and the individual. Her early fiction already reveals a serious attempt to articulate the cultural identity crisis that has surfaced since the society as a whole began to experience disorienting reversals in and dissatisfaction with Taiwan’s culture and political order. The gradual shift in cultural and political paradigms has formally pushed Taiwan’s society into a postcolonial state, delayed by Chiang Kai-shek’s authoritarian regime for forty-two years after the Japanese colonization, from 1945 when Japan returned Taiwan to China to the annulment of martial law in 1987. There are new urgencies to rewrite history, to redefine authenticity, to reconstruct identity—the list is

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long, but all these new projects reflect a newly released collective desire to reclaim the island. Like many of her contemporary writers, Zhu Tianxin seeks to understand the impact of these paradigm shifts and to find ways to articulate a coherent and independent cultural identity. To understand the significance of Zhu Tianxin’s project of (re)constructing cultural identity in post-martial law Taiwan, it is necessary to review her shift from using “China, my native land” in previous works to using “the West” and its imports as a way of designating a cultural-historical other against which to articulate a coherent cultural identity. The fact that she takes China as the model is quite obvious in her earlier works. But her awareness of Western cultural influences is already clear in an early short story, “Passages of Things Past”13 (Shiyi shiwang, 1984). Her obsession with information (about fashion trends and media entertainment) and knowledge (particularly from the West in fields such as mythology, philosophy, literature, and so on) is also exhibited in In Remembrance of My Brothers in Military Compound, which begins an expansion of her narrative landscape that is even more apparent in her subsequent publication, Ancient Capital. The emergence of the West as the culturalhistorical other in her narrative indicates how Zhu Tianxin has repositioned herself in postcolonial Taiwan. Combining postcolonial sensitivity and postmodern practice in Ancient Capital, Zhu directs the discourse of Taiwan cultural identity to a more intricate discussion. This collection of stories gives a general impression of the author’s obsession with the prevalent presence of foreign cultural influences in Taiwan. Zhu uses foreign elements such as names of Western cities and countries, terms and images from world literature, mythology and religion, the latest and most fashionable theoretical jargon from a variety of academic disciplines, and popular artifacts such as pop music, fashion, and movies. These selected materials share two characteristics: they represent high cultural or social standing and they are held as cultural icons signifying nostalgic sentiment shared by her generation in Taiwan. Zhu Tianxin freely incorporates bits and pieces of foreign cultural influences as intrinsic components of her narrative strategy. Like puzzle pieces or building blocks, foreign names and details of imported knowledge are taken apart and put together in such a way as to orient her cultural critique and direct her search for a cultural identity throughout the narrative. She refers to canonical works, appropriates aesthetic ideas, and borrows titles from renowned films to pursue her agenda of reconsidering the cultural politics of Taiwan’s postmodern and postcolonial condition. Her tactics of imitation and appropriation, on the surface, do parody the cultural domination of the West; but more significantly they evoke the dysfunctionality in Taiwan’s culture in which the individual is perceived as facing problems with identity construction, particularly at the fundamental level of articulation.

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In Ancient Capital, Zhu Tianxin’s cultural gaze oscillates between “timeless, cultural China” and Japanese and American culture. There are interesting similarities between Patrick Fuery’s discussion of Australia’s search for cultural identity14 and Zhu Tianxin’s narrative endeavor. Contextualizing the Lacanian concept of the gaze in Australia’s postcolonial culture, Fuery defines a type of gaze that synthesizes postcolonial identification and postmodern practice. Shifting its gaze back and forth between itself and cultural others (“the world”), the cultural self thus becomes aware of its intercultural position. This process of shifting the cultural gaze, Fuery argues, is what “constitutes the cultural identity, rather than any extraordinary set of signs [taken as distinctly Australian]” (205). In addition to Fuerey’s definition, Zhu further complicates Furey’s theorization by constantly changing the cultural self ’s perspective between that of the gazed at and the gazer in order to better understand the inherent crisis in a colonial identity. One of the methods Zhu adopts to resolve the crisis is that of pastiche, a postmodern narrative tactic also used by Patrick Fuery in an attempt to make sense of the concept of cultural identity in a postcolonial context. For Fuery, pastiche is necessarily historical because it provides the missing element in the construction of postcolonial cultural identity (197–201); for Zhu, pastiche invokes not so much historical nostalgia but rather textual hybridity, yielding space for a kind of negotiation specific to Taiwan’s unique postcolonial condition. However, pastiche, like parody and appropriation, is not the ultimate solution to a crisis of cultural identity. Homi Bhabha suggests that the employment of colonial mimicry—defined as “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite”15—can create a space of ambivalence within which the colonized will be able to negotiate a new cultural identity. But the real struggle lies not in how to achieve this ambivalence but in what to do afterward, and this is precisely what Zhu Tianxin finds baffling. To legitimize one’s own cultural hybridity apparently requires more than just ambivalence. How to look back upon history and to go deep into the present hybridized culture to find a sense of historical continuity are the real challenges faced by the colonized. Through her narratives in Ancient Capital, Zhu Tianxin seeks to understand what is at the core of her cultural identity crisis and to see what lies beyond.

Ecstasies of Imitation: Appropriating “Death in Venice” The first short story “Death in Venice” (Weinisi zhi si) in the collection of Ancient Capital recalls Thomas Mann’s highly celebrated short story of the

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same title. Zhu Tianxin’s narrative begins by directly acknowledging its textual link with Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” with an accentuation on the word/name “Venice.” The first link to Mann’s story is the narrator’s trip to Venice, which is the only connection he has with the actual Venice. The second link is a café he finds in Taipei called Café Venice, which provides inspiration for a story he later writes, also entitled “Death in Venice.” The narrator constantly admits that he has problems with writing, particularly his lack of resistance to the immense impact the environment has on his imagination and the creative process. Because of this vulnerability to the influence of the environment, the narrator moves from café to café hoping to find the right one where he can feel completely free from distraction. Purely by accident, he walks into an obscure café in the corner of a department store where he immediately feels at home. However, this is not a place devoid of the influence—its name, Café Venice, prompts him to associate it with Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” and so he decides to write a story also called “Death in Venice.” Feeling it necessary to justify this random choice of subject matter, the narrator launches into a discussion of how writers select/collect their materials. In this discussion, he uses the image of Melquíades and his magical magnet portrayed in García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude to explain how he believes writers are possessors of such a magnet whose primary purpose in life is to collect. Basically the narrator’s writing of “Death in Venice” is a reliving of his two primary concerns: how a writer always writes under the (almost) complete influence of his environment, and that he is only an instrument for textual production at the service of his characters and the fictional world he helps to create. This is the first “Death in Venice” story in the text, enclosed within another “Death in Venice” story which is Zhu Tianxin’s. Zhu Tianxin’s “Death in Venice” utilizes parody to deconstruct Western authority in Taiwan’s culture. In the opening of the narrative, a series of disclaimers in connection to the original Mann work immediately calls attention to the concern for textual legitimacy: “Hey—relax, no one dies, nothing’s happened. There is no Thomas Mann, no Visconti, there’s not even any connection to the real Venice” (47).16 Zhu Tianxin’s outright defense of the authenticity of her text is also intended to dissociate it completely from the Western tradition where the famous literary work and the historic city are situated. In other words, Zhu Tianxin attempts to maintain the originality of her story by stepping outside of the Western tradition, claiming that her work is not to be associated with the other famed and therefore legitimate originals—the literary work of Mann, the film by Visconti, and the city itself. But, can she? The controversy over authenticity and originality here is not merely textual; it is also cultural. Appropriating Mann’s title sets up a contrast: on the one hand, there is Europe and its high Modernist culture and aesthetics

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represented by Mann’s work; on the other hand, there is Zhu Tianxin’s pseudo-Venice-but-Taipei-in-actuality story depicting a place where memory of its colonial past, struggle for reconciliation with its multiple foreign cultural influences and dominations, and an urgency to define a clear cultural identity for itself are constantly at work and at war with one another. Thus the intended opposition and cultural politics in Zhu Tianxin’s appropriation, as well as denial of any connection with Mann’s title (and perhaps the story too) are easy enough to understand: it is not only canon versus noncanon but also a first world canon versus a non-first world noncanon, an imbalance of power relations which can cause protest and resistance. What supports this act of “writing back” thus deserves our close attention.

Anxieties inside the Labyrinth of Signs A closer analysis of the text of “Death in Venice” reveals that what hides behind this confident “writing back” gesture is actually more anxiety and uncertainty than the author would like to disclose. The story opens with the narrator trying desperately to cover his tour around Venice—not for experiencing the world famous city, but simply for the record of having “been there, done that,” as if he were out on a mission to “collect” Venice merely because it is a “collectable” item. He rushes through the city and tries to visit as many tourist spots as possible: “just because I want to declare— to whom I really don’t know, but, I trample, therefore I exist” (48). Venice is thus reduced to a commercial product possessing collectable value of no use (for artistic inspiration) to the narrator, but collectable nonetheless. A city is now merely an empty symbol in the tourist book, a souvenir that can be bought, brought back, and put away. This symbol of Western artistic culture— a city known for its celebrated world film festivals, which for the narrator used to be the holy land of filmic art—becomes a piece of cultural souvenir because it is now too accessible (thanks to Taiwan’s prosperous tourist industry) and yet a must-have (thanks also to Taiwan’s consumer culture characterized by an obsession to possess). Both Mann’s “Death in Venice” and the city of Venice itself embody Western aesthetic supremacy and cultural superiority, which are recognized throughout the world. In many postcolonial cultures such as Taiwan’s, Mann’s fiction and the Italian city are recognized as icons, and because of their iconic status, they often run the risk of being reduced to mere signs. The pivotal point here is to investigate whether a sign can distinguish itself from its copy, and if so, does the copy share the same value as that of the original. In other words, can Zhu Tianxin validate her imitation of “Death in Venice” and her appropriation of such signs by repossessing the signs and reassigning new value to them?

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This attempt to validate is important to Zhu Tianxin because it may point to a way to legitimize the cultural hybridity manifested in her text. By taking the title of Mann’s story and the name “Venice,” she treats these two cultural icons as signs. Robbed of their substance as a work of art and an historical city in Italy, their original signification is displaced by the material form of the referent. Such displacement then allows a new signification to be attached to the same signifier, thus changing the meaning and identity of the sign. What we see in this text is Zhu Tianxin’s attempt to remove the sign “Venice” from its cultural paradigm and relocate it in a new set of cultural, social, and fictional conditions. In doing so, she succeeds in turning the appropriated into an original. The narrative structure contains three texts: Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” Zhu Tianxin’s “Death in Venice,” and the narrator’s “Death in Venice.” On a superficial level, both the primary narrative (Zhu Tianxin’s story) and the narrative frame (the narrator’s story) do resemble Mann’s story in their title, locale, death (physical death in the nested narrative and quasi-spiritual death in the primary narrative), and the theme of alienation. This partial duplication of Mann’s story allows Mann’s original “Death in Venice” only a shadowy existence in the total text. Mann’s story is the sign of the West which signifies for both authors of “Death in Venice,” Zhu Tianxin and the narrator, their hybridized culture that contains substantial foreign cultural influences. Caught in between Taiwan’s colonial past and neocolonial present, Zhu Tianxin’s preoccupation with imitation and appropriation indicates the pressure from the crisis of cultural legitimation. Mann’s story may be just a shadow, but it is daunting nonetheless. In a way, Zhu Tianxin’s partial duplication is a rewriting of Mann’s story. In this rewriting, tension is deliberately created between the presence of Zhu Tianxin’s double story lines and the absence of Mann’s story. Reflected, as it were, by the distorting mirrors of both the primary and the nested narratives, the Mann story becomes a deformed image. Within the differences between the original and its reflection created by the two narratives, we see Zhu Tianxin’s Venice locale and her “Death in Venice” narrative clearly break with the authentic discourse. Zhu Tianxin transfers the title “Death in Venice” from Mann’s story to her own “Death in Venice,” knowing that by changing the conditions or environment, the identity of the sign also changes. The “Venice” in Zhu’s title is no longer the same “Venice” as in Mann’s; the death theme and the theme about the decline of a certain conception of art also carry a different meaning. In this transfer, something new is created. The implication of this transfer is that it provides a way for Zhu Tianxin to downplay, or devalue, the significance of Western cultural presence in Taiwan’s culture. Whether their “cultural value” will change depends on how Zhu Tianxin handles them. But how she handles them is in turn affected by the cultural pressure upon her.

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A closer look at the primary narrative will illustrate how Zhu Tianxin utilizes foreign cultural artifacts. The primary narrative, Zhu Tianxin’s “Death in Venice,” parades a long list of quotes and references from Western literary, artistic, and philosophical canons.17 It may seem somewhat disjointed at first glance; nevertheless, it is the creative principle of the two “Death in Venice” stories by Zhu Tianxin and by the narrator. Demonstrated through the narrator’s peculiar creative principle is the very essence of imitation and appropriation, as seen in this comment by the narrator: “I feel I am like a garbage collector” (64). The kind of garbage he refers to is illustrated in an image borrowed from Garciá Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. What constitutes “garbage” is depicted by the specific evaluator. To Melquíades the gypsy magician, metal like pots and pans and screws have their own worth, “[t]hings have a life of their own, . . . [i]t’s simply a matter of waking up their souls;”18 José Arcadio Buendía’s faith lies in his imagining of what the magnet is likely to attract, the possibility of finding gold in piles and piles of junk, even though all he finds is a fifteenth-century suit of armor.19 The narrator identifies himself with José Arcadio Buendía, for he too looks for gold in what most might regard as junk: “This is how it is! Writers who write like us do exactly the same thing: we drag a big magnet across cities and countries . . . Others may regard what we find as garbage, but to us they are treasures” (64). With this unique dynamics between the writer-character, his surroundings (the physical reality), and the fiction he produces, Zhu Tianxin exposes the postcolonial predicament of a writer facing a hybridized literary heritage. Unable to find something in the past from which to draw authenticity, the postcolonial writer can only find the meaning of identity in the presently occupied space, manifested in those exotically decorated cafés.

In Search of an Epistemological Faith in Meaning It is clear that in the narrative there is an underlying obsession with information. Zhu Tianxin is interested in exploring how transient information, including cultural imports from around the world, has possessed the psyche of the people in Taiwan, or at least that of those who live in Taipei—the central receptor of intercultural exchanges on this small island. Recurring questions surrounding our information age are whether or not abundance of information is always a good thing and how we process information that is constantly being renewed. It is not just daily information, for example, incidental news (the transient kind) that tends to lose its value by the minute; the more endurable sort of information such as formal knowledge (i.e. philosophy, psychology, and sociology) also faces the danger of being “out

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of fashion” faster than before. Because both types of information now face a higher turnover rate, they are treated as everyday cultural products. In “Death in Venice,” Zhu Tianxin uses her “borrowed” foreign cultural materials exactly as such. By quoting and using knowledge imported from the West in a fragmented manner, she treats them as if they were signs or labels—disposable, transportable, and replaceable. Well-known names such as Picasso, Blake, and Jung; psychoanalytical jargon such as “archetype” and “collective unconscious;” one-line quotes from famous poets and artists such as Keats and Degas, are all appropriated by lifting them from the tradition in which they originate. The value of these names and jargon is then transferred from durable to transient.20 In Zhu Tianxin’s practice of imitation and appropriation, durable knowledge is turned into labels or signs that function as markers used by the narrator to generally represent Western intellectual superiority in Taiwan. A paradox is thus created: on the one hand, Zhu relies on the inherent qualities of these labels by virtue of their places in Western cultural and intellectual tradition, but on the other hand, she denies their given values and imposes on them her reappraisal of the imperialist implication of these labels. Placing these label-markers within different cultural boundaries can drastically change their value. In Zhu Tianxin’s narrative context, these Western masters’ names and important philosophical or theoretical jargon are being “utilized,” or “shown off ” like fashionable brand names. As a result, what is supposed to be evidence of foreign cultural domination becomes something that can be easily manipulated. Zhu Tianxin seems to be home free. But a bigger hurdle still awaits her, that is, Thomas Mann’s story. On the surface, it would seem that the only story that gets lost is Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice.” Zhu Tianxin’s “Death in Venice” certainly has some thematic parallels with Mann’s story, but they are not without interesting twists. Mann’s narrative is about a writer, Gustave Aschenbach, who becomes gravely doubtful of his own artistic principles once he encounters with a beautiful young boy Tadziu. He realizes that beauty cannot be captured despite the artist’s effort, and this realization (rather than the cholera) ultimately kills him. Instead of portraying an artist in pursuit of higher truth (such as beauty), Zhu Tianxin’s writer is completely submissive to reproducing in his works influences of his environment and foreign cultures. But this is how Zhu Tianxin plays the postmodern game of intertextuality. What she does may be a typical manipulation of narrative structure to reinforce the postmodernist claim that writing is at best a process of textual production. But Zhu Tianxin does not totally validate the postmodernist concern for the ontological crisis of the text; she is in an epistemological quest for meaning. But this intention only becomes apparent after we

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unravel the narrative’s intertextual play. Therefore it is necessary to closely examine how each text is interwoven with the main narrative. The narrator’s “Death in Venice” is about the correspondence between two friends (called, respectively, A and B); both characters are modeled after the narrator himself—one from the past during his time in Venice (character A) and one from the present living in Taipei (character B). In Café Venice the narrator enjoys the writing and gradually becomes deeply involved in the correspondence himself. Problems arise when, without his knowledge, the Venice character A mysteriously disappears from the story and is replaced by a real-life close friend, also called A, from the narrator’s adolescence. Because this new character is not produced by the narrator, his power to control the story is reduced only to his hold over the Taipei character B. As the author of his story, the narrator not only loses control of his own narrative, but he essentially becomes controlled by his characters. His loss of control does not end here. One day, to his surprise, Café Venice, the place he comes to write everyday, suddenly looks different to him—his usual waitress has been replaced; in fact the entire management has been changed. In total disappointment, the narrator makes an uncharacteristic move: “I take out my notebook and easily execute the thing A has wanted to do: he shoots himself in Venice, successfully” (69, 70). Thus the narrator ends the story he would not otherwise have been able to end. With the closing of one “Death in Venice,” we see the author-narrator, the sole character in Zhu Tianxin’s “Death in Venice,” walk out of the café, overwhelmed by a sense of loss and loneliness, thus ending another “Death in Venice.” At this closure—as if Zhu Tianxin is adding a footnote here to Visconti’s “Death in Venice” film—we suddenly feel the presence of a camera’s eye that was not there in the entire narrative. Now we can see through such a camera as it pulls away from the scene and gives us a bird’s-eye view of the closing scene: a middle-aged man walking out of a café into a flock of highschool girls, wondering whether one of them will be his wife someday— “because I am so lonely and desolate” (70). The blurring of textual reality and the reader’s reality that persists throughout most of the narrative is now suddenly made clear. The distorted ontological structure of the text is restored as we see a merger of two “Death in Venice”s—Zhu Tianxin’s and the narrator’s—into one coherent narrative whole. As soon as the narrator is transformed into a full-fledged character seen at the end of the story whose transformation can stabilize the ontological instability of the fictional world, Zhu Tianxin maintains the textual integrity by creating a complete structural closure at the end. In so doing, Zhu Tianxin abandons her previous strategy of keeping the narrator as a destabilizer of the narrative’s ontology and an agent who problematizes representation. Instead, she turns the narrator into a conventional textual function—that of a character—by giving

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“it” a limited and framed consciousness, confined in a lonely middle-aged man’s existence. This unexpected ending, inconsistent with the narrative strategy that we have seen thus far, brings the story closer to the original “Death in Venice” than it initially seems. The thematic parallel is easy to draw, at least the similarity of the most apparent themes on death, both spiritual and physical, lost youth and the feeling of solitude and isolation, and an actual death in both stories. Perhaps Thomas Mann’s story is not entirely lost after all. But, if appropriation and imitation of Mann’s story is what Zhu Tianxin intends as the framework of her own story, does she simply want to reproduce a “Taiwan” version of a canonical Western work? It seems the answer should be negative, because the desire to deconstruct foreign cultural dominance is clearly the purpose of the strategies of parody and self-reflexivity. But the ending also undoubtedly reveals a sense of hesitation toward such strategies. Why? There are two levels of anxiety in the text. They are anxieties over Taiwan culture’s lack of authenticity and its need to establish a definite cultural identity. To resolve these anxieties, Zhu’s tactic is to parody Western cultural influences because their presence in Taiwan’s culture is a symptom of such a lack and a crisis in identity. In order to downplay such presence, she needs to constantly utilize self-reflexive narrative strategies to distance her own text from her original literary source, Mann’s story. She may have successfully done so, although the ending of the story conversely shortens the distance she has painstakingly created between herself as the author, the text, and the Western cultural elements. One reason that explains her change of course is Zhu’s deeper anxiety about the crisis of her own cultural identity, which is built upon Taiwan’s hybridized culture. To think in terms of hybridity, she must resist the opposed notions of purity and authenticity. But such resistance is not easy, particularly in a society that is culturally related to a dominant East Asian culture (Chinese); in addition, Taiwan’s postcoloniality is a delayed event—it did not happen immediately after the traumatic process of decolonization. Instead, it came into being only after the annulment of martial law by Chiang Ching-kuo and the peaceful transfer of power when he appointed Lee Teng-hui, a native Taiwanese, as his successor who, in 1991, called an end to the period of emergency rule. In Taiwan post-coloniality is thus more a mentality, an awakening, than a political triumph or a direct result of bloody political struggles. In such a context, to consider cultural hybridity as the only option to resolve Taiwan’s cultural identity crisis entails a difficult psychological struggle. Zhu Tianxin needs to reach some reconciliation with this inherent cultural hybridity, and to do so, she needs to resort to the epistemological faith that meaning is still possible because the postmodern nihilism, which rejects meaning, will only further deepen her identity crisis.

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It may be easy to resist and even dismiss Western cultural dominance through parody and pastiche, but the more serious question for which she has yet to find an answer is what to do after foreign cultural influences are devalued. Can she offer a constructive model for rebuilding a new cultural identity, one that is confident in facing foreign cultural influence? It is obvious that parody and self-reflexivity can help her dismantle the influence, but they cannot supply an ultimate solution for further reconstruction. An independent and confident cultural identity would be expected to come out of her deconstruction, but all we see at the end is hesitation and bewilderment. As we have discussed so far, references from Western culture have been her philosophical language to explain doubts and fears. Eliminating Western cultural elements,—if at all possible—she loses the essential vocabulary with which to articulate her predicaments. Without this language, she cannot enunciate. This may be the most serious ontological crisis and aporia Zhu Tianxin has to deal with, and in her next story, “Ancient Capital,” Zhu continues her efforts to find solutions for these predicaments.

Confronting Cultural Hybridity in “Ancient Capital” In the novella “Ancient Capital,” Zhu Tianxin turns to history to find ways of resolving the problem of constructing cultural identity in an essentially hybrid milieu. She uses textual simulation to negotiate the interplay of history (time) and nostalgia (memory of images). In this story, Zhu goes back and forth between past and present, the historical real and the imaginary, idealism and disillusionment, to find a balance between cultural hybridity and personal identity. She digs deep into the very core of what cultural identity means and what reconciliations are necessary before construction can even begin. Outflows of emotion demonstrate her painfully sharp interrogation of “history” and her earnest search for ways to define “identity.” In her pastiche of a Japanese canonical work and a colonial map, Zhu Tianxin devises ways of narrating different pasts with the hope of finding the proper position to begin building a coherent and independent cultural identity. The struggle in this story is essentially between two contradicting conditions: hybridity and authenticity. Zhu Tianxin borrowed the title “Ancient Capital” for this novella from Kawabata Yasunari’s canonical novel The Old Capital (Koto).21 Zhu Tianxin appropriates the Kyoto that Kawabata captures as an ideal city where the history of a place and the memory of an individual are tied together. She then projects this ideal onto modern-day Taipei, hoping to reconnect the latter,

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alienating city with (its) history and (her) memory. Kawabata’s novel is the silhouette of history, a shadowy outline of the meaning and representation of a coherent cultural identity. Paralleling the Kawabata super text are three subtexts: Preface to the General History of Taiwan (Taiwan tongshixu), a tourist map of colonial Taipei, and the story of Peach Blossom Stream (Taohuayuan). These various applications of appropriation, pastiche, and multilevel structures entail control and calculation; the narrative is also overwhelmed with nostalgia and the desire to connect and relate to a foreign city, Kyoto. History thus is her foremost preoccupation in “Ancient Capital,” combined with a concern for legitimizing cultural hybridity.

Memory and Map The plot of “Ancient Capital” is linear and thematically parallels that of Kawabata’s novel. Zhu’s novella begins with the narrator remembering her high-school years spent with her best friend “A.” The two friends have grown apart as they enter adulthood. One day the narrator suddenly receives a fax from A, who invites her to meet in Kyoto. The narrator thus begins her journey to Kawabata’s old capital. While she awaits A’s arrival, she takes a walk through the streets and alleys of the city, remembering her residence there with her daughter some years before. After waiting for a day, she realizes A will not show up, and thus decides to return to Taipei earlier than scheduled. At the Taipei airport she is approached by a cab driver who mistakes her for a Japanese tourist; without attempting to correct him, she gets into the cab and is driven into the city. As soon as she decides to return to her home city as a foreigner, everything begins to look different. A Japanese tourist map of colonial Taipei, which she finds in her bag, inspires her to revisit the city as it existed half a century earlier. The map lays out Taipei the way it was designed by the Japanese, with the streets, government buildings, and other landmarks appearing under their original names. By moving the scene back to Taipei, Zhu Tianxin shifts her cultural gaze from Kyoto; yet it is not just the present-day city she is looking at but also the colonial city manifested on the map. This switch of perspective is made more intriguing by her pretense as a foreigner—a Japanese tourist—under which she is able to psychologically remove herself from the immediacy of the surroundings and allow the map to become a lens through which she sees the city anew. In this section the narrator begins a journey back to the past but realizes at the end that she no longer knows where she is. “Ancient Capital” is also a story of remembering the history of Taipei/ Taiwan through the process of its cultural hybridization. References to foreign

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cultures characterize the narrative’s cultural background. For instance, before the narrator’s trip to Kyoto, the cultural scene is sketched via references to American popular music and to American culture in general. In this section, the narrator recalls the Taipei of her adolescent years. As she proceeds to Kyoto, anticipating a reunion with A, the cultural scene shifts and Kawabata’s Old Capital provides guidance to her revisiting of the city. In the next section where she pretends to be a foreign tourist in her home city, there are more historical and cultural references alluding to the colonial period than in previous sections. With each change of cultural references, space and time are structured by different principles. Revisiting her own past as well as Taipei’s is the primary theme of the first section, prior to the trip to Kyoto, where conflicts between the native and the foreign are apparent. In the second section, which describes the trip, Kawabata’s novel becomes the principle for constructing space and time, and the narrative is double-coded with Kawabata’s. In the third section, Zhu Tianxin imposes on present-day Taipei the city drawn on the colonial map so that the city is seen as a replica of old Kyoto, thus calling attention to the contrast between the historical and the contemporary. Unlike in “Death in Venice” in which playing with narrative form is the means of exploring the issue of identity crisis; in “Ancient Capital” Zhu Tianxin’s intriguing play with time and space makes Taiwan’s inherent cultural hybridity apparent. In the first section, as the narrator reminisces about her adolescent years in Taipei, American popular music characterizes her memory of the sixties and the seventies (152). Although the mood Zhu Tianxin portrays relies entirely on foreign artifacts, the tone is not parodic but nostalgic, as if the hybridization of Taiwan’s culture is accepted without question. The first time the narrator is seen walking around the city (walking is the only type of activity in the entire story),22 some streets already appear under their former Japanese names, evoking Taiwan’s most recent colonial experience. Interestingly, the narrator seems to feel alienated from the local culture and customs and intimidated when walking through a traditional market. When she climbs up the hills to look out on the ocean, she tries not to notice the nearby small huts “built in Fujian/Taiwanese style” (154). Often, she likes to imaginatively romanticize a sight by endowing it with characteristics of Spain or other Mediterranean countries (155). In this hybrid existence, the representation of personal/private history is dominated by foreign cultural influences, while the representation of the official/public history of the city is determined by its colonial records as illustrated in the subtext of Preface to the General History of Taiwan. Similar to the way American popular music is used to constitute a part of the narrator’s cultural consciousness, bits of actual historical detail are inserted into the narrative to shed light on the island’s colonial past. Thus Zhu Tianxin

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protests the total erasure of Taiwan’s history in order to underscore the absurdity of the pan-Chinese identity that the KMT government has strategically imposed on the people at the expense of the local history prior to 1987. Occasionally a passage from historical reportage is woven into the narrative to establish the identity of the city (164). The stark contrast between the factual history of the land (Sword Pond—Jian Tan) and the personal memory of the narrator (of the Jian Tan Zoo and Children’s Playground) indicates the disjunction of official history and personal existence, particularly when this history is not written by the native, even though it inevitably makes up a part of the native’s collective identity. Ban Wang in his articulation of history has a poignant observation: “Historical narrative is allegorical, not symbolic, in the sense that there is always a jagged line between our attempts at making meaning and what is sunk forever into oblivion and death.”23 This “jagged line” is precisely what Zhu Tianxin intends to straighten by looking into the distant and not-sodistant past. She utilizes spatiality as a nonlinear form of writing history to delineate traces of the people who came to this island where their descendants still live. The personal/private account of the past thus differs from the official/public history in that, as the latter often concentrates on privileging and totalizing the past in order to assure the dominant power’s legitimacy in the present, the former finds it more essential to make sense of the present: the individual who collects personal memory and writes a private history is the one who also bears the colonial imprint, who lives out the colonial heritage daily. The individual inheritor of the colonial experience must be able to successfully define a legitimate postcolonial identity for the future. This personalization of the process of decolonizing Taiwan is significant because, despite the (official) historical fact that Taiwan was more than once “liberated” from its colonizer’s domination, it remains in question whether such liberation succeeded in mending the individual’s fractured sense of cultural identity. There have been two occasions when Taiwan played an important political role in relation to mainland China, even though the island has always occupied a marginal position within Chinese territory as well as within Chinese official history. Taiwan was twice decolonized; however, on neither occasion did the local people play a significant role in determining their own destiny. The first time, in the second half of the seventeenth century, the invading Manchus overthrew the Ming Dynasty and established the Qing dynasty in China. The Ming loyalist resistance, led by Zheng Chenggong (Coxinga) used Taiwan as its base after retreating from Xiamen in Fujian Province in 1662. At that time, Taiwan had been occupied by the Dutch since 1624, and it was Zheng’s army that finally expelled them. When the Ming loyalist resistance failed in 1683, Taiwan was placed under the control of the Qing dynasty.24 The second time Taiwan

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gained political importance (because of its geographical marginality) in opposing mainland Chinese power was when Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war to Mao Zedong in 1949 and retreated to the island to continue his Nationalist regime. However between 1662 when Taiwan was placed under the Qing control and 1949 when it came under Chiang’s rule, there was a period (1895–1945) during which it was controlled by the Japanese. Taiwan was decolonized in 1945 when Japan unconditionally surrendered to the Allies led by the United States. Not only was decolonization from the non-Chinese not accomplished by the local people, but also they were never allowed to reclaim their heritage. To them, it was simply a matter of changing hands between the nonChinese and the Chinese. The local Taiwanese began to establish political influence and power only from the 1980s. For the individual Taiwanese to realize an independent sense of identity, it is necessary to understand the decolonization process in personal terms. By the same token, to understand the essence of the general Taiwanese identity is to accept that it is composed in part of its colonial experience. Thus Zhu Tianxin’s narrator immerses herself in different segments of the island’s history when different groups of people—the early Chinese settlers, and the previous foreign invaders such as the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, the French, and the Japanese— arrived.

Reproducing Cultural Authenticity In the second section of the story, the narrator embarks on the journey to Kyoto to meet with her long-lost high-school pal. Here, Zhu Tianxin creates a labyrinth of intertextuality and interculturation by weaving Kawabata’s Kyoto into her depiction of Taipei and mixing the city’s colonial past with its postcolonial present. The element of intertextuality provides an additional level of textual depth to correspond with the intercultural condition that is the textual horizon of “Ancient Capital.” As seen in “Death in Venice,” plagiarizing the original text is not Zhu Tianxin’s primary intention. Rather, she uses Kawabata’s work to simulate history, or as Baurdrillard puts it, “to resurrect the period when at least there was history, at least there was violence, . . . all previous history is resurrected in bulk—a controlling idea no longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates.”25 Indeed, Zhu Tianxin’s simulation of history shows how nostalgia prevails; but it is probably closer to David Wang’s “imaginary nostalgia,” which “questions the ontological assumption often associated with the concept of nostalgia, and refers us to the intra- and intertextual dynamics that configures the yearning

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for home.”26 To understand the important role imaginary nostalgia plays in the narrative, we need to ask what it entails and how it is realized in textual practice. Nostalgia is the desire to connect with and relate to the past, and where there is desire, there is a lack, a need. What is lacking? And what does the narrator need? How does Zhu Tianxin’s appropriation of Kawabata’s novel express the narrator’s yearning for home? In this section and the following, as Zhu gradually gives in to nostalgia, the protagonist also slowly betrays the anxiety and ambivalence hidden underneath the seemingly calculated and controlled narrative strategy of pastiche. Zhu Tianxin buries her deep nostalgia for an ideal past in the imitation of Kawabata’s novel, maintaining thematic parallels—the desire for a utopian history, the deteriorating relationship between man and nature, and the intriguing (dis)connection between the twin sisters/friends/cities. But she also laments the rapid destruction of Taipei’s natural environment by both the KMT government and the native Taiwanese politicians who often obliterate history in the name of progress. Kawabata’s Kyoto, a fictionalized Japanese city, ironically becomes the source of the narrator’s nostalgia as well as the symbol of history. It represents the eternal city, the Peach Blossom Stream and Shangri-La that Taipei can never be. It is also in this ancient city that the narrator’s anticipated reunion with A does not happen. Although this runs contrary to the plot of Kawabata’s novel, in which the estranged twin sisters, Chieko and Naeko, do reunite (but choose to remain separated at the end), the narrator feels little regret. During her visit to Kyoto, it is actually her daughter’s childhood that she wishes to recapture; because everything in the city itself has been well preserved, she is able to revisit every site and corner she and her daughter visited previously. Taipei, on the other hand, cannot provide this sense of history, not even a personal one. The city changes too fast—nearly every trace of its past has been modified or erased. So, ironically, the foreign denotes familiarity and historicity while the native symbolizes alienation and temporality. In Kawabata’s novel, there is a sense of tranquility and stillness that pervades the narrative. The art of Kawabata lies mainly in his ability to weave in the narrative a poetic atmosphere. To achieve this effect, Kawabata relies on the flow of the language and the haiku-like juxtaposition of objects. In his discussion of Kawabata’s Snow Country, J. Thomas Rimer explains the influence of the earlier Japanese literature, such as nô drama and haiku, on Kawabata’s aesthetics and how this influence manifests itself in his “poetry of place becom[ing] poetry of self-realization: Here Kawabata binds together the characters . . . the plot . . . the images recurrent throughout the text . . . and the thematic concern of wasted beauty, a concept that in

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turn evokes those characters, images, and plot. Such linking, such reinforcement, becomes impossible to unravel.”27 In his last novel, The Old Capital, which is one of the three novels cited by the Nobel Prize Committee, Kawabata maintains the same aesthetic principle to create a sense of Kyoto’s beauty and old traditions by juxtaposing the city’s natural landscape with the narrative’s reminiscence of its cultural heritage and through the characters and the plot. Zhu Tianxin imitates and applies such aesthetics. Borrowing Kawabata’s principle, Zhu attempts to recreate the same poetry—not for an actual geographical place but for a textual place in her narrative. Zhu Tianxin’s appropriation tactic of Kawabata’s Kyoto relies on the suggestive power of absence to evoke presence rather than attempting to simply re-present the old capital. Zhu quotes nine passages from the Kawabata text; all of which are short and fragmented, and all but two carry little thematic significance (the two exceptions are the passages where Chieko first realizes Naeko is her twin sister, and the farewell of the two sisters at the end of the novel). At first glance, it may seem that these quoted passages only open a small window into the world of Kawabata’s Kyoto, but in their original context, these obscure passages are parts of what brings out the essence and ambience of the tranquil and antiquated city that Kawabata painstakingly depicts. Thus it is the near absence of Kawabata’s Kyoto that provides the similar mood and atmosphere in Zhu Tianxin’s narrative. She then uses this absence to simulate the city’s presence in a different narrative space for different interpretations. Zhu Tianxin’s minimalistic pastiche of the Japanese master shows her resistance of unconditional imitation. Her plan is not to relive Kawabata’s narrative but to use it as a convenient backdrop for her own drama. Her strategy is not a gesture of cultural-political protest, but a way of reconstructing a lost history. The fragments Zhu Tianxin quotes from Kawabata’s novel are juxtaposed with the main narrative to bring the same mood to her portrayal of Kyoto as a utopian space where the presence of history is felt everywhere, as well as to contrast Kyoto with Taipei, an entirely different space where nothing lasts. In Taipei, not only concrete public records of history such as monuments and historical buildings are constantly in danger of demolition, the private memory of the individual is also threatened by the possibility of total erasure. Zhu Tianxin describes the resulting horror: All of a sudden you can’t even recall what the street looks like; you feel as if you were a witness to a crime who went to report it to the police, but when you led the police back to the crime scene, not only was the dead body gone, there was not even a trace of blood. Choked with tears, you tell your future husband that this is not how the street used to be. It should look like this and that and . . . aimlessly you point your finger here and there, trying

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desperately to describe how the street used to be, but deep down, you know you have completely lost your sense of direction. (201)

In the narrator’s perception of Kyoto, on the contrary, where many institutions have been well preserved over thirteen hundred years—including temples and shrines, trees and gardens, religious ceremonies and festivals—this means a guarantee of continuity and preservation of personal memory. For Kawabata, traditional Japan may have slowly disappeared at the end of World War II, but for Zhu Tianxin, on the eve of the twenty-first century, Kawabata’s Kyoto nevertheless remains a symbol of history and antiquity. Zhu Tianxin’s celebration of its historical status seems to transcend any ambivalence about Japan’s previous colonialism over Taiwan. Ironically, a Japanese city’s wellpreserved history allows this second-generation Chinese mainlander in Taiwan to find meaning in an individual’s bond to a place, which, in turn, helps to provide her with an unambiguous cultural identity. While Zhu’s cultural association with Kyoto may be apparent, there arises the problem of how to reconcile this “unambiguous” cultural identity with her highly problematic ethnic identity. The bad blood between China and Japan has not dissipated with time since the end of World War II, and for her to claim a Chinese identity while identifying culturally and spiritually with Japan seems rather callous, if not altogether naive. Even if she chooses to lean toward her Taiwan identity while embracing the island’s previous colonizer and Japan’s historical capital as her solace, she still runs the risk of being politically insensitive. Given her personal background, Japanese culture would be for her a familiar source of inspiration. Her mother is a translator of modern Japanese literature; her (and her sister Zhu Tianwen’s) mentor Hu Lancheng,28 who resided in Japan after the war, came to Taiwan in 1985 to teach, but because he had been accused of being a traitor to China (hanjian),29 he had to return to Japan. Undeniably Zhu’s choice of Japan, and Kyoto in particular, has a personal element in it, an impulse to allow herself to find comfort and safety in the metaphor of Kawabata’s fiction and Kyoto’s stature. But in the end (or at least at the end of this section of the story), she realizes that the historical and political burden forced upon her by the choice of “Japan” is far too great to offset by a mere “personal inclination.” The primary language in the second section is a spatial one. As the narrator walks through the space of modern Kyoto, through its parks and streets, her memories of the Taipei of her youth and of Kyoto during the time of her residence with her daughter are constantly evoked to contrast with her immediate location. Embedded in her memory of Taipei is the imagined space of the colonial Taipei, which parallels the fictional space of Kawabata’s Kyoto projected through the quoted passages. These spaces are simulacra at best because they are based on images, not rooted in any concrete

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reality. The projection of Kawabata’s Kyoto and the two Taipeis conjured up by the narrator are not the “real” but rather the “fictional real,” created by nostalgia for an ideal space, lost in time. In this way, nostalgia underlies Zhu’s writing of history, but her narrator’s sense of history is replaced by either another history (Kyoto’s) or the media version (as in what she perceives through American movies). It is interesting, as well as baffling, to see how Zhu Tianxin writes about Kyoto and how she uses it to bring out her contempt for contemporary Taipei; yet, in this contempt there is a distinct feeling of nostalgia for the past (and better) Taipei. Is this self denial? Does it represent a deep anxiety about how to situate herself culturally, socially, and historically? Before the narrator leaves for Kyoto, Zhu Tianxin strives to rediscover and embrace Taiwan’s colonial past, and she convinces us (and possibly herself as well) that she has found reconciliation with it. But as the narrative turns to another locale—and not just another place, but Japan—her efforts to reconcile with her native land’s hybrid past becomes a total identification with the colonizer’s culture and history. Perhaps Zhu Tianxin’s real predicament is not where and how to find her own history, but what historical facts she is willing to accept as her history. Her ambiguous and wavering attitude toward Taiwan’s past here reveals a dilemma concerning how to “write” history: Does the model of Kawabata’s historical Kyoto represent the ideal? Can Taiwan’s colonial/ hybrid past measure up to it? Jean Baudrillard uses the theme of neofiguration in painting to describe what history is to us today.30 In Zhu Tianxin’s attempt to rediscover Taiwan’s past, she has only the possibility of drawing a neofiguration that may resemble her imagination of that past. She turns to historical and cultural Japan because, ironically, its colonization of Taiwan has created an undeniable affinity between the two cultures. Her narrator’s experience in Kyoto becomes a testimony to Taipei’s rapidly disappearing history. The narrator’s feeling of being “at home” in Kyoto is immediately contrasted with her fear of walking in her own city. In Kyoto she knows where to go for her favorite cup of coffee; she enjoys being part of the crowd of professional women during rush hour on the busy streets; to this city and its people, she finds herself saying, “Tadaima, I am back” (183). But in Taipei, she feels alienated by the constant construction and reconstruction of streets and buildings— once familiar sights are now entirely lost to her (184). It is no wonder that, in the narrator’s imaginary rediscovery of the old city accomplished by her reference to the colonial map, she is happy to recognize that Taipei occupied a similar geographical significance as Kyoto once did in Japan, and thus can easily be a replica, or twin city/sister, of Kyoto (223). This desire to see similarity between the two cities is itself a symptom reflecting the very issue Zhu Tianxin wants to explore in her narrative,

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namely, the discontinuity in Taiwan’s historical record and the disruption of its inhabitants’ collective memory. To the generations of Taiwanese, native and mainland origins alike, who were born after 1949 (including Zhu Tianxin), colonial history has not been taught, and colonial memory has not been allowed to be passed down from their parents and grandparents. There is a gap, a disruption, in the local history and the people’s collective memory because the KMT government had forcefully imposed another history and memory on the post-1949 generations, namely, those of China. It is therefore questionable how concrete the notion of Japan as “the colonizer” would actually be for these “baby boomers.” The era of Japanese colonization can be both alluring and mystifying to people who have not lived through it or heard first-hand recollections of it. Japanese cultural imprints are still vivid in Taiwan’s culture, yet they belong to the untaught and inexperienced past. On the one hand, these colonial imprints can be used as clues to retrace history; on the other hand, they can be a source of nostalgia and inspiration for imagining the past. Zhu Tianxin’s recuperation of Kawabata’s old capital is not a sign of naiveté about history or mere romanticism for an ancient city; rather, it reveals her sense of a lack of a coherent and continuous historical and cultural heritage shared by her generation and those that follow. The historicity that Kyoto represents is authentic; the previous colonial connection between Japan and Taiwan provides a reference with which to retrace the city of Taipei as it was built during that period. A fragment of Taiwan’s history can only be found in the map of the colonizer. Ironically, in Zhu Tianxin’s neofiguration of Taipei, there seems to be a superimposed image of Kyoto—as if linking the two cities together would ensure that so long as Kyoto’s history is well preserved, Taipei’s history will somehow be protected too.31

Authenticity versus Hybridity: Who Am I? Where Am I? In the third section of the novella, the narrator returns to Taipei pretending to be a Japanese tourist and revisits the city by following a colonial map. Zhu Tianxin juxtaposes the colonial version of Taipei, which only exists on the map, and the contemporary version, which, in the eyes of the narrator, is stranger than the one on the map. In this portion of the narrative, Zhu Tianxin attempts to match the Japanese names of streets and districts in Taipei with their current Chinese names. In between rounds of this game, she uses images of Western (mainly American) landscapes or landmarks to highlight the actual collage and pastiche of Taipei’s architecture and landscape—sites

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that for her clearly bear no indication of Taiwan’s specific cultural and historical identities. As the narrator walks on, the Taipei recorded on the colonial map slowly emerges. She checks off every name on the map as she visits the corresponding contemporary site. The “mismatch of language and landscape”32 emphasizes the differences among the narrator’s imagination of the city drawn on the colonial map, her personal memory of the city, and her impressions of the city at present. Here the map acts as an agent to disconnect the narrator’s visual image of history that exists in her imagination and memory from the place where this image of history should be rooted, and, as a result, it ruptures the cohesion of history, memory, and place. The colonial map stands as an allegory of the author’s project to rewrite the present with an imagined past; it connotes order (arrangement) and meaning (representation). The layout of different zones and city landmarks with their old names structures the visual space, and the legend for each name/symbol specifies the location and nature of the structure. In his analysis of the world atlas, José Rabasa specifically points out the correlation between the legends on the map and the historicity the map embodies in its simulated space: “The written solidifies locations while supplying meaning to the visual. . . . The inscription of the map gives place to its silhouette, but its silhouette is historical and meaningful only when it evokes a . . . history.”33 In Zhu Tianxin’s use of the map, the legends are expanded by the narrator’s personal memory. With her added “writing,” the original colonial map creates a paradoxical alliance between colonialism (denoted by the map itself ) and the desire to reterritorialize the increasingly alienating city. Thus the Taiwan Bank built in 1903, which the map records as having been designed by Nomura Ichirô in the Mansard style, is regarded by the narrator as a perfect model for a Tiffany store (214). Seimonjô, the Japanese pleasure street as indicated on the map (218), is portrayed as a decayed district filled with filth and desperation. The Red Chamber Theater, designed by Kondô Sûrô and built in 1908, has a supernatural flair that is combined with the Peach Blossom Stream story as the narrator dreams up the city as an embodiment of such a paradise (220). It is to the period of Japanese colonization that Zhu Tianxin appeals. Her underlying impulse is to remake the map and thereby evoke the coherent sense of history of which she has been deprived. Maintaining cohesion among history, memory and place is, for Zhu Tianxin, the only way to establish an independent cultural identity. To drive home this conviction, she uses negation as her main strategy to articulate the meaning of that identity and to write about the process of bringing home the self to the native land. The colonial map becomes the narrator’s guide through this process. But to use it is contradictory to her purpose; as the map can only further widen the gap between the narrator’s image of Taipei

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(in both history and in her memory) and the city in the present, the process of identification becomes the process of disidentification. “Ancient Capital” is not about cultural identity but cultural un-identity. Zhu Tianxin establishes not what the Taiwanese individual’s cultural identity should be, but what it no longer can be—through the colonial map and the pastiche of Kawabata’s novel, she points out a dissemination of Taiwan’s history, her memory, and the place from which the two originated. This idealization of the past contrasts with the present as dystopia, manifested in the subtext of the Peach Blossom Stream story. The inserted text34 maintains its original symbolism of the Peach Blossom Stream as a utopian place that exists outside the mundane world until at the end of the narrator’s journey, when she loses the map and the symbolism takes on a twisted meaning. Merging this subtext with the figure of modern-day Taipei, Zhu Tianxin turns the story of utopia into a reality of dystopia. The moment of merging appears soon after the narrator loses her map. As she wanders into an obscure section of the city, she finds men and women sitting under trees or on broken chairs in complete idleness, the music of Beijing Opera playing in the background. The Peach Blossom Stream she searches for is darkly reflected by this obscure juancun-like neighborhood: Helicopters are circling in the sky, perhaps they are searching for floating dead bodies in the river; an obasan35 passes by you on a motorcycle which is emitting black smoke. She probably has received a notice to identify a dead body. Under a tree is a gang of dogs who are looking at you with blank faces . . . Across the river on the other bank a high-pitched funeral music is playing faintly; there is grass burning somewhere . . . near the highway are tall grey walls blocking the way like prison walls, so clean there is not a single graffiti on them, not even one stroke. Where is this place? . . . You burst out crying. (233)

From fiction to cartography, the dialectics of reconstructing the past via Kawabata’s novel and deconstructing the present by superimposition of the colonial map suggests the ontological anxiety arising from Zhu Tianxin’s frustrated attempts to define a coherent cultural identity. The strategy of doubling Kawabata’s Old Capital (with a map included) allows her to indulge in nostalgia; by hiding behind the superstructure of the Japanese canon, Zhu Tianxin can claim immunity from history and thus escape the burden of colonialism in her selective historical memory. The perceptions of Kyoto and the old Taipei are ideal, as though the cities were set in an eternal past, beyond real historical time. Her approach to the present and the past, by way of simulacra and pastiche, produces a depressing sense of loss of a personal cultural identity. In fact, nostalgia, the desire to connect with

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history and to privilege the past over the present, has restructured her appropriation of the Kawabata text so that the attempt to reclaim a missing past is now refracted through simulacra. From dealing with culture in “Death in Venice” to investigating history in “Ancient Capital,” Zhu Tianxin seems to be trapped between two poles: cultural hybridity and historical authenticity. In her project of constructing a coherent cultural identity, she needs to find a rationale to accommodate these two essentially conflicting values. It is interesting that she should use appropriation and imitation as the main strategies to achieve this goal. Zhu Tianxin recognizes that the essence of Taiwan’s culture is heterogeneous, and though it is based on Chinese culture, it also has absorbed tremendous Japanese and Western (mainly American) cultural influences—a mixed result of colonialism and capitalism. But this recognition alone is not sufficient for defining cultural identity, because identity must also be situated within history. It is therefore necessary to map Taiwan’s cultural hybridity in history; then the question becomes: Does history necessarily guarantee authenticity? In the Wang Anyi chapter, historical authenticity for the Chinese who have “too much history” ironically presents itself as a problem or a burden to the construction of an individuated cultural identity; but for the Taiwan people who, in comparison, do not have “enough history,” historical authenticity becomes an important ingredient for identity. How to relate history to the individual and to identity thus depends on where the individual is located, as well as on the kind of history, or the particular discourse of history, the individual is bequeathed. History, as both Wang Anyi and Zhu Tianxin have concluded, seems to pose more a challenge than an automatic solution to the problem of cultural identity.

Chapter 4 Hong Kong Androgynous: Embodying Cultural Hybridity

The story of Hong Kong reached its climax—or some might say, anticlimax— at midnight on June 30, 1997 when the trajectory of this crown colony of the former British Empire was forever altered. At precisely 11:59 pm of June 30, the whole world watched the British Union Jack being lowered down the pole. At 12:01 am on July 1, the Chinese five-star banner went up. As these two national flags changed place, we also saw the old Hong Kong flag being replaced by a new Hong Kong flag. The page of history was literally turned over, in a seemingly elaborate slow motion, in front of the eyes of the world. I remember how emotional I felt when the British flag disappeared in the air: more than a century long of Western colonialism in China was finally over. But as soon as the red Chinese national flag went up, my patriotic feeling was quickly taken over by a shiver: authoritarian rule over Hong Kong! My thought then turned to Taiwan, my native country, and I shivered at the idea that the fate of Hong Kong will become Taiwan’s some day. I did not want to think any more of it, so I turned off the TV. As an outsider (and a viewer), I could brush off the chilling feeling and walk away; but I could not imagine how the Hong Kong people must be feeling at the moment of the handover. I wondered if there was a collective sigh of relief, knowing their Western master and colonizer was finally no more. I wondered if their collective nerves were tightened when they watched their city officially become part of People’s Republic of China (PRC), the largest communist region in the world today. I also wondered if there ever was a moment, fleeting as it might have been, when they collectively felt their Hong Kong identity was not attached to any master but had stood on its own. Perhaps the answer to this last quandary is “no” because

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there was hardly any time lapse between the change of sovereignty for such a thought to even surface. This lack of time amply describes how the Hong Kong Chinese have always lived in the fissures between other powers and cultures. It would have been a miracle that in the fissures there could emerge an independent Hong Kong cultural identity. But it has. Under British laissez-faire governance, Hong Kong prospered and the pride of the people who created a formidable economy in such a tiny port city constituted the very core of an unmistakable sense of “Hong Kong” identity. Particularly in the 1980s Hong Kong’s cultural identity grew even stronger as Hong Kong popular culture such as TV dramatic series, Canto-pop music, martial art movies, and comedies gradually formed an indigenous culture, and this local culture was exported to mainland China, Taiwan, and other neighboring regions. Several scholars and critics have noted that the spectacular impact of Hong Kong popular culture and the “Hong Kong style” of entertainments, fashion, and cuisine on Chinese society carry quite significant implications for the Hong Kong people, especially in light of Hong Kong’s reunification with China. This boom of local culture and as a result, the formation of a distinct cultural identity, can be viewed as a timely necessity for Hong Kong’s unpredictable post-Britain/colonial destiny. But in order for us to have a better understanding of how this colonial identity may evolve into a post-British/colonial identity and adjust itself within the newly imposed national framework, the accumulative establishment of Hong Kong cultural identity needs to be historicized.

Evolution of Hong Kong Cultural Identity Trade of opium was the reason Hong Kong was born. This barely habitable small island off the southern coast of China was desired by the British Empire because its deep water was ideal for building a free port; and also because the island was a land of its own that would make an excellent base for Britain to advance into the Chinese mainland. Hong Kong finally became a formal British colony on June 26, 1843 under the Treaty of Nanjing as a result of China’s defeat in the first Opium War. Since the island possessed no natural resources that could be exploited for the British needs, Hong Kong’s primary function as a colony was soon determined to be a buffer zone mediating between Britain and China for diplomatic, military, and commercial negotiations. In fact, Hong Kong served as the conduit between the East (China, India and Southeast Asia) and the West (Europe and America) for the trafficking of people and goods.1

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Two significant events took place that laid the foundation of a civil Chinese community. The gold rush in California in 1848 and the widespread Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) in China saw a massive migration from China to Hong Kong and via Hong Kong to America and later on to other places as well. This migration created the first rapid growth of Chinese population in the colony and the first wave of Chinese emigrants to the Americas. More and more Chinese immigrants began to set roots in Hong Kong as the political and economic situation in the mainland continued to deteriorate. Hong Kong also became the jumping board for Chinese people who sought better opportunities in places such as America, Australia, Southeast Asia, Peru, Cuba, and other places in the world.2 This helped to establish Hong Kong as an entrepôt for China and Britain to trade with multiple countries and regions such as Southeast Asia, Japan, America, and Europe. From the beginning, Hong Kong was an immigrant community governed under colonial rule. Like their colonial masters, the Hong Kong Chinese also came from a different land. Since there had never been a sizable indigenous population to begin with, there was never a “local” Chinese collective identity that the British colonial government had to wrestle with. However, segregation and discrimination did exist between the Westerners and the Chinese since the first day of colonization. The only thing binding them together was the pursuit of economic success. In a sense, it is fair to say that both the Chinese and British flocked to this small island motivated by the same ambition: wealth. One could not achieve the goal without the cooperation of the other; and despite problems typical of any colony between the colonizer and the colonized, both sides did work together. About this phenomenon, Nigel Cameron commented: “[T]he odd thing was that the mix of Western, capitalist, mercantile activity and the Chinese capacity for dedicated, intelligent work, allowed both sides to thrive” (103). In the 1860s the Chinese community became more organized in terms of providing services (such as hospitalization and funeral arrangements) in accordance with Chinese customs and in mediating between the Chinese and the colonial government in handling civic matters. This trend was aided by the colonial government’s limited bureaucratic resources and insufficient Chinese language skills to administer the Chinese community on the one hand, and the Chinese community’s preference of minimal interference of the colonial government on the other. The communal identity that emerged amidst Chinese efforts to accommodate both its own community and the colonial government therefore was a typical colonial identity: it was inherently a cultural hybrid. The early form of Hong Kong Chinese identity thus has three fundamental traits: it was not strictly “Chinese” but a hybrid combining traditional Chinese culture and Western modernity; it was operated on a capitalist

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impulse; and it was based on the community. Such traits continued to thrive despite the destructions of war and worldwide shifts and changes of power during the first half of the twentieth century. This historical period witnessed China struggle through its modernization process and nation building. Any political ripples in China inevitably must reach Hong Kong. Not only did Hong Kong serve as a safe haven for the revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen, who eventually succeeded in overthrowing the decayed Qing Dynasty and established China as a modern nation-state in 1911, but also Hong Kong once again became the harbor for political refugees and dissidents from the mainland when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army lost its entire control of China to Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party in 1949.3 This war time experience brought the Hong Kong Chinese emotionally closer to China, especially immediately following China’s victory over Japan as World War II came to an end. Chinese nationalism was running high in Hong Kong (Tsang, 142). Such patriotism identified China as the homeland, and thereby brought in a new element to the emerging Hong Kong Chinese identity. This newly arising Chinese patriotism made the Hong Kong Chinese more acutely aware of their status as “colonial subjects.” Ironically, though, as this colonial awareness grew, the fall of the mainland into the Communists’ hands also forced the Hong Kong Chinese to take a step back from their patriotic feelings for China. During the cold war era when the world was divided along the ideological line of democracy and socialist communism, British Hong Kong found itself on the opposite side against China. In addition, the Chinese population at the time was injected with a huge dosage of Chinese émigrés, most of whom were intellectuals, professionals, wealthy businessmen, and technicians who fled China to escape communism. Sentiment among the majority of Chinese residents was thus suspicious of the new Chinese Communist regime. This brought ambivalence to the Hong Kong Chinese’s identification with China; however, culturally they would identify themselves as “Chinese” precisely because they were well aware of their position as British colonial subjects. The significance of Hong Kong Chinese’s cultural identity at this stage is twofold: as their perception of China was split into two separate signifying entities: the “political China” and the “cultural China,” their awareness of themselves being colonial subjects now carried nationalistic implications. During the 1960s and 1970s, the community-based form of Hong Kong Chinese identity of the previous decades developed into a local “Hong Kong” identity. This local “Hong Kong” identity is the Chinese residents’ identification with the place as a whole and not just with the Chinese community itself. Culturally, the hybrid nature of this collective identity continued to grow more complex when more foreign cultural imports came

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in as Hong Kong integrated itself deeper into the global economic network. However, to claim a distinct Hong Kong cultural identity would have to depend on the maturation of a local popular culture. This period hence is a preparation for that cultural identity to be fashioned. With the colony’s economic prosperity and social stability, those who fled China at the onset of the Chinese civil war now joined the older generation to take root in Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s continual social, cultural and economic growth further strengthened a sense of cultural independence that was distinctively “Hong Kong.” But more importantly, this collective identity was further affirmed by the Hong Kong Chinese’s direct comparison with the Chinese from the mainland, especially with the incoming illegal Chinese immigrants whom the local mockingly called “An Chan” or “Dai Huen Chai.”4 These are derogatory terms that discriminate against those illegal Chinese immigrants who could not assimilate into Hong Kong society because of their peculiar Maoist upbringing, social and cultural “backwardness,” and economic poverty. Comparing themselves with their “poor cousins,” the Hong Kong Chinese could not help but develop a sense of superiority over the mainland Chinese, hence separating even further the “Hong Kong” version of Chinese identity from the “authentic” version of the (mainland) Chinese identity. Aside from the growing sense of “them vs. us” in the mind of the Hong Kong Chinese, there are two important elements that together led the Hong Kong cultural identity onto the stage of maturity. One is economic prosperity and the other is the colonial government’s determination to strengthen a civil society and the continuation of its noninterference policy. Hong Kong’s economy during the era of the 1960s and 1970s took off in full force and fundamentally transformed the former entrepôt to an industrial modern city. The colonial government maintained its focus on building a strong economy and a system of social welfare to provide for its subjects a stable society with minimal governmental interference in the local residents’ daily life. The establishment of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974 under Governor Sir Murray MacLehose, in particular, was one instance of such an effort. The success of ICAC in calming a series of social unrests that erupted during 1970s earned the colonial government much-needed trust from the people. It was primarily due to the colonial government’s noninterference principle of governance and efforts in maintaining a stable society that the Hong Kong people were not required to cultivate any form of political awareness. The period of the 1980s saw an even faster growth of economy which led to the indigenization of its popular culture. Television and radio programs catered more and more to the local taste; movie and music industries marketed products that were created by the local talents to appeal to the

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local consumer market. What the proliferation of media culture created was a distinct sense of an imagined community that served as the cradle of an indigenous cultural identity. The booming of Hong Kong’s popular culture not only enhanced the character of Hong Kong cultural identity within the confines of the citystate, its influence also reached neighboring countries such as China, Taiwan, Singapore, and other Southeast Asian countries. Its influence on China’s popular culture is particularly worth noting. The spread of Hong Kong popular culture in mainland China allows Hong Kong cultural identity to proliferate in relation to its Chinese Other. Some scholars even suggest viewing such a phenomenon as Hong Kong’s reversal of its position as the perceived passive colonized to that of an arising dominant colonizer toward Chinese popular culture.5 Indeed, the popularity of Hong Kong media culture such as films and TV programs has created a media empire that reaches as far as the United States, Canada, and beyond. By the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, Hong Kong had firmly established itself as the capital of Chinese popular culture whose influence outweighed that of Hollywood.6 The export of Hong Kong popular culture also indicates a much globalized Hong Kong. At this juncture, Hong Kong had once again transformed itself from a modern industrial city to a world class financial center. The way of life in Hong Kong became cosmopolitan. Hoiman Chan points out a vigorous mechanism at work in Hong Kong cultural development at this stage. This mechanism is comprised of three parts: inwardly it indigenizes foreign cultures and makes them an integral part of the local culture; in this hybridizing process, it is able to generate its own brand of cosmopolitanism; and outwardly it expands to neighboring regions and asserts influences on these host cultures.7 What this mechanism accomplishes is to deep-root a distinctive local or Hong Kong cultural identity: “in the development of the 1980s, cultural cosmopolitanism was eventually assimilated, crystallized into the formation of the maturing local culture. . . . in the eighties it can no longer be denied that Hong Kong society embodied to a significant extent a cultural milieu that was at once global in frame of reference, indigenized in style and themes, and multifarious in technical resources and inspiration, all these on top of the surface glamour of cosmopolitan consumerism and the associated assortment of cultural commodities” (Chan, 185). Chan even boldly predicts that Hong Kong culture as “the spearhead in the shaping of a new South China culture . . . may well be the spearhead of the cultural China per se” (172). One significant political development that brought tremendous impact on the continual evolvement of Hong Kong cultural identity in the 1980s is the signing of Joint Sino-British Declaration in 1984, which signaled a

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formal launch of the preparation for the 1997 handover. With this document in place, the people in Hong Kong began to realize the inevitability of Hong Kong’s return to PRC. The Hong Kong Chinese now had to think seriously about their relationship to China. Until this point, “China” to the Hong Kong Chinese was primarily a cultural signifier and an ethnic origin; it was never a national identification. The anticipation of reunification with China changed all that. Sheldon H. Lu commented that films made during this short period exhibited a “China syndrome” which linked together the issues of Hong Kong identity with (Chinese) nationality and ethnicity.8 If there was any nostalgic sentiment toward “China, the homeland” during this period, it was soon destroyed by the Tiananmen incident in 1989. This cold reality check quickly brought the Hong Kong Chinese face to face with an unsettling prospect of their future under the Chinese communist regime. The collective uneasiness and anxiety toward reunification stemmed from the distrust and fear of the authoritarian Chinese government. The 1997 handover thus cast its first shadow over Hong Kong.

Postcolonial Identity under Siege The idea of Hong Kong being subsumed by the authoritarian national apparatus of China threatens the very existence of Hong Kong cultural identity because this is a completely separate identity all of its own—separate from its British colonizer and its Chinese ancestor. There are two formal factors that shape the thinking of Hong Kong’s identity as “colonial”: its historical disconnection from China and its political condition as a British colony. However, when we look back to Hong Kong’s history in the development of its cultural identity, it becomes less true that such an identity is “colonial.” And this is precisely the paradox of Hong Kong: as a colony, its culture has grown and matured so much more than this colonial status can contain; and as a city-state, it has established such an autonomous cultural identity that it now competes on equal footing with its “mother(land)” China. Therefore in thinking about the coloniality of Hong Kong’s identity, hybridity is probably more in tune with the cultural reality of this unique colony. Hong Kong cultural hybridity, manifested in a colonial identity, is less of a result of British cultural colonization and more of the making of the laissez-faire capitalism. In a colonial environment where there has been a lack of assimilation policy and free trade has been encouraged, it is necessary to separate the process of cultural hybridization from the process of colonization. The case of Hong Kong is an anomaly of the classic colonial identity

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formation because it retains much of its autonomy under the larger containment of colonial governance. It is thus important to understand the separation of hybridity and coloniality in Hong Kong cultural identity since they are not inherently one and the same. Hong Kong as of the late 1980s has spread its network of cultural influence far and wide to reach and capture the imagination of the mainland Chinese, the Taiwanese, the worldwide Chinese communities and beyond in Southeast Asia, America, and Europe. Ackbar Abbas states, but not without irony, that Hong Kong’s “postcoloniality” had already begun before 1997. It can be seen in the process of history, if we pay attention, when the people of Hong Kong became gradually aware of their socio-political-cultural and historical condition. Therefore, “postcoloniality is a tactic and a practice, not a legal-political contract, or a historical accident. . . . Dealing with such conditions may involve, for example, thinking about emigration in a certain way . . . in the sense of remaking a given space that for whatever reason one cannot leave, of dis-locating—emigration, that is to say, before the exit visas have been issued” (10).9 It is a “diasporic state of mind” that characterizes the postcolonial condition of Hong Kong. It will, likely, stay permanently with the people of Hong Kong since the return to China’s tighter grip will make the symbolic exit—the “dis-locating” or psychological emigration—even more difficult. The 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident is a significant event for the collective psyche of Hong Kong.

The Tiananmen Incident: A Collective Trauma Because of its hybrid and colonial nature, Hong Kong cultural identity is flexible and adaptive; also because capitalism has been the basic impulse of the society, this identity is at the same time cosmopolitan and outward looking, with a strong ability to assimilate foreign cultural influences. These characteristics came out particularly strongly after the Tiananmen Incident when panic and fear set in. The deep emotional involvement of the Hong Kong Chinese in supporting the demonstration in Beijing is indicative of the Hong Kong Chinese’s collective feelings toward their unknown future under PRC sovereignty. Many linked their fate with the outcome of the students’ and people’s demonstration for democracy in Beijing. Over a million people in Hong Kong joined the demonstrations by holding vigils, marching on the streets shouting slogans such as “Chinese do not fight and kill Chinese” and “We are the same family,”10 and donating food, money, and supplies to aid the protesters in Beijing. A sense of national solidarity ran high among the Hong Kong Chinese who identified themselves with those protesters in Beijing, and who felt rightly that their voice should also be heard by the Beijing officialdom.

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Then tanks and armed soldiers entered Tiananmen Square. Shootings began and people were killed, all of which was captured on camera and immediately broadcast around the world. The whole world was shocked and horrified; in particular, the people of Hong Kong were completely devastated. Again they went on the streets to protest, mourn, and express their anger toward the PRC government. It was made abundantly clear to them that whatever happened in Tiananmen Square could very well happen in Hong Kong. The previous feeling of national solidarity was turned into a chilling realization that they, the Hong Kong Chinese, could not identify with China, their supposed “homeland.” This disheartening experience created a sense of crisis as confidence in Hong Kong’s continuous prosperity after its reunification with China was shattered. The following years saw a big wave of emigration for those who could afford to move out of Hong Kong. It became commonplace among the middle-class and the wealthy that a person acquires resident status in a foreign country while maintaining a base in Hong Kong. Flexible citizenship, as Aihwa Ong terms it,11 describes exactly the post-Tiananmen Hong Kong Chinese’s diasporic condition. The 1989 Tiananmen incident marks a turning point in Hong Kong culture’s expansion beyond its territory. The era of the 1990s thus began a diasporic phase as many sought ways to escape the gloomy future awaiting them in 1997. “Flexibility” has been the buzz word among scholars to describe the state of Hong Kong cultural identity. While the word connotes adaptability, it in fact can also denote uncertainty and ambiguity underlying such a state. On the superficial level is the phenomenon of an increasing number of people who have acquired multiple permanent resident statuses and passports, who regularly fly in and out of two or three homes from overseas. They have become “flexible citizens” with flexible identities and identifications who are also regular international travelers.12 As Natalia Sui-Hung Chan correctly points out, Hong Kong’s cultural identities “are always orbiting the categories of ‘Chinese,’ ‘Hongkongese,’ and ‘overseas/diasporic Chinese’ . . . or even ‘overseas Hongkongese’ ” (141–42). On the deeper psychological level, Hong Kong culture exhibited tendencies toward fragmentation, ambivalence, self-reflexivity, and transnationalism. Against the backdrop of 1997, Hong Kong culture entered a period of soul searching, as Agnes S. Ku observes, “since the early 1980s, in the context of the ‘1997’ issue, there has been a growing self-consciousness of Hong Kong identity in the society, as manifested in the continuing vogue for narrating, exhibiting, and preserving the changing faces of the city in museums, memoirs, movies, archives, architecture, political speeches, and also academic conferences.”13 While the aforementioned psychological phenomena can be described as a common “postcolonial” identity crisis syndrome, Hong Kong’s return to China might be called, not “decolonization,” but more accurately

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“recolonization.” To the issue of “decolonization,” Reimund Seidelmann argues for such an interpretation by relying on official rhetoric used by HKSAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) in which the word “reunification” is often used to emphasize the historical (hence original) tie of Hong Kong to China, the promise of Hong Kong’s high degree of selfdetermination (including the promise of free elections)—all of which, in Seidelmann’s view, points to Hong Kong entering the “decolonization” stage.14 What he has missed in his argument, however, is that the term “decolonization” is true only in its procedural aspect pointing to the Sino-British reordering of political power. Inherent in “decolonization” is the change of political situation from being a “colony” to a “non-colony”; substantively what it means is to be rid of colonial domination and gain self-governance and autonomy after the withdrawal of the colonizer and to begin the rebuilding of an indigenous governing body. In reality it is a hard-pressed case that the people of Hong Kong indeed will enjoy more “self-determination” after it is returned to the authoritarian Chinese regime. How much autonomy HKSAR will be allowed to enjoy under the auspices of the PRC government remains a wide open question. The post-1997 Hong Kong cultural situation vis-à-vis its “reunification” with China is ambiguous and vulnerable. Agnes S. Ku views the HKSAR government as the ultimate propaganda machine for the creation by Beijing of a new cultural myth with which to suppress Hong Kong cultural consciousness from becoming critical of its colonial legacy and thereby more susceptible to the recolonization of the PRC.15 She argues that this new hegemonic structure combines two grand narratives, one inheriting the colonial legacy of Hong Kong’s “economic and governing success” and the other promoting “certain elements about Chineseness” (343), to normalize the fluctuating collective cultural consciousness. The underlying question thus is to examine precisely Hong Kong’s problematic “postcolonial” stage: “If it is an indisputable fact that Hong Kong has entered a postcolonial era in the temporal sense since July 1, 1997, on a deeper level, the question nonetheless remains as to whether it has already superseded colonialism culturally or ideologically” (344).

The Androgynous Imaginary of the Origin of Hybridity What challenges Hong Kong cultural identity’s legitimacy is the issue of origin. Hong Kong’s cultural identity has been developing in the fissures of

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cultures and powers. Its origin is therefore difficult to discern. But how does one pinpoint origin and how does one imagine the genesis of a cultural identity? In all forms of differentiating the self from others, gender difference is the most fundamental. Taking this view along, it is only appropriate to seek the symbolic origin of (Hong Kong’s) hybridized cultural identity in the archetype of gender/sexual hybridity, the androgyny. The myth of androgyny as known in the West can be traced back to both Greek and Roman antiquity. A common place to find the beginning of the myth is Plato’s Symposium in which Aristophanes recounted the genesis of human sexuality. He reported that originally the primordial humans had two faces to one head, one body endowed with two sets of hands, legs, and sexual organs positioned at the top of their thighs.16 There were three human species: male-male, female-female, and male-female. This is the first stage of human development, one that is presexual and undifferentiated. As time went on, humans grew arrogant and began to think that they could surpass the gods. As a punishment, the gods split the humans in half. Humans thus entered the second stage of development in which each human being was destined to seek out his or her lost half. Without the original other half, humans came to be sexual beings. Duality thus was perceived to be the original condition of human sexuality, be it male homosexuality, female homosexuality, or heterosexuality. In art and literature, androgyny has been held as the symbol of harmonious coexistence of both sexes in one body, though in reality such sexual abnormality has always been marginalized and discriminated against. The figure of androgyny symbolizes union of difference and self-generation. Kari Weil elaborates on how such a figure has been regarded in the romantic tradition of literature and philosophy of the West and particularly in Germany: “The androgyny is at once a real, empirical subject and an idealized abstraction, a figure of universal Man. . . . [t]he androgyny figures . . . the dialectical synthesis of what is objectively known (identified as the masculine) and the unknown Other (identified as feminine) who will make that knowledge complete.”17 The male body was the universal symbol of beauty in Western antiquity; in Eastern antiquity, specifically in Chinese tradition, masculine beauty tends to transpire in the form of brotherhood as seen in the tight bonds of friendship shared among the male protagonists in two Chinese classical novels, The Water Margins (Shuihu zhuan) and The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi). It is an emotional expression rather than an emphasis on the physical aspect of masculinity. Femininity naturally is pushed to the opposite side of masculinity: it signifies difference, as opposed to universality that masculinity embodies. The symbol of the androgyny functions as the receptacle that contains the masculine and the feminine.

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In psychological terms, Weil continues to explain that the androgyny “has often been considered to be an archetype or a universal fantasy. More specifically, psychoanalysis equates androgyny with a repressed desire to return to the imaginary wholeness and self-sufficiency associated with the pre-Oedipal phase before sexual difference” (3). The divine split, or the “cut,” (which has been interpreted by Freud as castration), that divides up the primordial beings is the turning point in which men and women became incomplete without their other halves. This sense of incompleteness thus can only be recovered in the archetype of the androgyny. But it is also because of the split that the concepts of “sex” and sexual difference were created. It is according to the different sexual roles that human social relations were organized. Once differentiation is established, “identity” immediately occurs. As a human figure embodying dual sexuality, androgyny serves as a metaphor for hybridity and the androgynous voice is a voice that articulates alternatives, not erases differences. The androgyny’s dual sexuality is an original state before the divine split. Another mythical figure that closely resembles androgyny is hermaphrodite. The myth of hermaphrodite, as told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, represents dual sexuality in succession, that is, the single-sexed body transforms to becoming dual-sexed, possessing both masculinity and femininity. Ovid told the story of how the beautiful young man Hermaphroditus, a son of Hermes and Aphrodite, wandered into the forest one day and came to the Salmacis spring. His beauty immediately attracted the admiration of the nymph Salmacis who, in order to be with Hermaphroditus, threw herself onto Hermaphroditus so that the two of them merged as one. In despair, Hermaphroditus called to his divine parents to endow the waters of the Salmacis spring with the power to unman all males who came into contact with them. They would become half-males like Hermaphroditus.18 In a different legend, hermaphrodite also means a male body possessing the experience and memory of being both male and female. The blind poet Tiresias is one such figure. Here is a brief account of his story: one day Tiresias witnessed the copulation of two snakes and struck the female snake. When he wounded the female snake, he was immediately changed into a woman who later had intercourse with a man. Apollo then informed him that if he observed the copulation of other animals and struck the male sex of the animal, he would be changed back to a man. Tieresias did exactly what the god had told him and was transformed back to his male self. This is how he came to possess the experience of being both sexes. Whether it is according to the myth of Hermaphroditus or Tiresias, one commonality emerges: that hermaphrodite is the fusion of two sexes or sexual bodies whose former state is male. It differs from androgyny as it does not represent an original condition but a transformation or a metamorphosis.

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Whereas the androgyny symbolizes the harmonious union of both sexes in the original state, the hermaphrodite represents a “fallen state” which “presents the union of male and female as forever incomplete, two bodies competing with, rather than complementing each other,” as seen in the myth of Hermaphroditus (Weil, 18, 10). If the androgyny symbolizes a utopian vision of transcending difference from without, the hermaphrodite denotes the conflict and struggle with difference from within. The androgyny and the hermaphrodite represent two slightly different archetypes of hybridized sexual origin: hybridity/ hybridization in the first archetype does not embody difference and has no differentiation, but in the latter it does. Thinking about issues of origin, hybridity, and coloniality in Hong Kong’s cultural identity via androgyny/hermaphrodite is intriguing. In fact, scholars have consistently noted that the symbolic meaning of androgyny is often evoked when in time of crisis or unrest.19 Coming from archival research of how androgyny was treated in reality, Luc Brisson makes a similar observation that from 209 to 92 BC there was a series of eliminations of sixteen androgynies when wars and all kinds of crises occurred (31). It may not be accidental that Dung Kai-cheung (Dong Qizhang), a prominent young Hong Kong writer, employs dual sexuality in his works to reflect the writer’s preoccupation with Hong Kong’s cultural identity crisis surrounding the 1997 handover.

Dis/locating the Point of Origin Dung Kai-cheung (1967– ) was born and bred in Hong Kong. He first achieved his literary fame in 1994 by winning first prize in a Taiwan literary competition, Unitas’s Eighth New Writer’s Award, with his novella, Androgyny: Evolution of a Non-Existent Species (Anzhuozhenni: yige bu cunzai de wuzhong de jinhuashi)20 Since then, almost all of Dung’s works including the well-received The Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City (Dituji), were published in Taiwan until in 1998, Accounts of the Rise of V City (V cheng fansheng lu) appeared through a Hong Kong publisher. During the same year, he also published Dual Body (Shuang shen) in Taiwan and won the first prize for the novel category of The United News’ (Lianhe bao)21 Seventeenth Literary Award. Dung’s path to literary establishment is not uncommon for local Taiwan writers as well as those from Hong Kong and other Southeast Asian Chinese communities who gain public recognition through participation in various writing competitions sponsored by newspapers or literary magazines. Their prize-winning pieces would then be featured in the sponsoring magazine or the newspaper’s literary supplementary section (fukan). It is usually a quick way to gain publishers’ interest and

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more often than not, these new writers are able to publish their works within a year or two.22 Dung Kai-cheung is a theory-minded writer. The Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City is a perfect example of how Dung utilizes his academic training in creative writing. The novel is an imitation combining various Western sources: Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Umberto Eco’s On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1, and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. The word “archaeology” in the subtitle naturally brings to mind Michele Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. In terms of defying conventional genres and confusing the boundary between the factual and the fictional, Dung also has Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths in mind. The Atlas is a hybridized text not only because of its diverse sources but also because it ruptures generic boundaries. With such a style of hybridization, Dung delineates the colonial history of Hong Kong and the fictitiousness of the colonial space where the misreading of meanings, mistranslation of names, misinterpretation of customs make up of the “localness” of a place called “Hong Kong.” Dung deconstructs the cityscape of the colony by reading various old and current maps of Hong Kong, ranging from those drawn in the early nineteenth century to the present. He even imagines how the future map of Hong Kong would look. Dung mixes together academic, historical, and documentary styles of writing to create the map of an imaginary city. The novel is divided into four sections: “Theory,” “City,” “Street,” and “Sign,” with altogether fifty-one short essays. “Theory” pits locality against the conceptual aspect of cartography to challenge the map’s authorial definition of a place. The author claims that the Hong Kong that is known to its people in fact cannot be pinpointed on a map because a map is only an “epistemological translation” of the world.23 The author then presents evidence to show how on various maps, Hong Kong carries different names and is marked on different locations, hence calling into question the origin of this colony. “City” weaves together historical developments of the various sections of the city to show the “fiction” of the place. Dung compares his imaginary “Victoria City,” which of course is Hong Kong, to a hybrid creature, “the centaur of the East,” because it is a combination of many compatible and incompatible elements. “Street” traces the original names of several Hong Kong streets to reveal the folly of miscommunication and misunderstanding between the colonizer and its subjects. Finally “Sign” imagines the future of this imaginary city. In this section, Hong Kong becomes a tourist production, a simulacrum, a virtual place. Dung closes his “archaeological research” with a “discovery” that an old Hong Kong-Kowloon subway/railroad map with a train schedule in fact is a map of time travel that can take us back to the past on “the orbit of

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time.” Traveling on the opposite direction of normal time—that is toward the past—allows the arrival of the present (i.e. 1997?) to be forever postponed (181). The point of origin becomes an empty point of reference. In this time loop, the beginning simultaneously becomes the end, and the end becomes the beginning. Seeking the origin of an imaginary city is therefore itself a folly. In Atlas, Dung’s concern is not Hong Kong’s approaching postcoloniality but rather about what “coloniality” entails. His approach of deconstructing the core of Hong Kong—of what makes up “Hong Kong”—is both temporal (the colonial history) and spatial (the colonial map). Dung’s appropriation of Western texts, with a mindfulness of its critical and theoretical discourses (i.e. post-structuralism, deconstructionism, postcolonialism, postmodern metafiction, and new historiography), is to investigate Hong Kong’s cultural-historical origins or lack thereof. But such efforts only further destabilize the signifying capacity of “Hong Kong” the signifier. At the end of Dung’s investigation and analysis, “Hong Kong” comes through as no more than a mere sign, “signifying nothing.” On the other hand, since the cultural space of Hong Kong is always already a highly hybridized space, perhaps Dung’s method of appropriation is only fitting. In “Writing Hong Kong,” Abbas makes the argument that: “The more we speculate, the more obvious it seems that those engaged in the task of writing Hong Kong cannot put their faith completely in any predecessor but instead, must recognize their position between two colonialities and invent their own models.”24 This new model certainly must be a hybrid model, one that encompasses all the available discursive languages and subversive methodologies because without such complexity and heterogeneity, the meaning of Hong Kong cannot be fully understood. Celebrating hybridity is also necessary because it is a powerful weapon with which to challenge the tyranny of authenticity. It is with this vision in mind that the rich metaphors of androgyny and hermaphrodite can lend themselves to better characterize, and thereby position, Hong Kong not only in relation to its two colonizers but also beyond the (old) context of colonialism toward the (new) global cultural context.

Androgyny/Hermaphrodite as Metaphors of Cultural Hybridity The story of Androgyny: Evolution of a Non-Existent Species centers on an unhappy married woman who moves into the mountainous areas of Hong Kong to find a legendary all-female species of reptile which she nicknames “androgyny,” and also as a way to escape her husband and her wifely duty to

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procreate. The woman’s solitary dwelling in the family-owned cottage in the mountains is soon disrupted by a hunter, who also lives in the mountains and has been hired by the family to maintain the cottage for years. Unfamiliar with the terrain, the woman has to seek help from the man and the two begin to spend much time together in the hunt of the androgyny. As time goes by, the woman becomes increasingly curious about this man who seemed to have no past. One day, their hunt for the androgyny takes them deeper into the mountains where the man suddenly unleashes his desire for the woman. As they are struggling in the water, the woman suddenly finds the androgyny who is sitting on a rock by the water coldly staring at this struggle. After a week, the man shows up in the cottage with the androgyny kept in a net. That night he also successfully captures the woman’s body. The man then regularly demands sex from the woman. From that night on the woman endures his sexual assaults but as a measure of resistance, she talks excessively during the intercourse to attack, insult, or anger him. Meanwhile the woman’s unhappy husband finally asks for a divorce after failing to get his wife back into the city. At the end of the story, the woman realizes she might have become pregnant. At that moment of realization, she also comes to an identification with the androgyny as she visualizes having a female baby growing inside her. It is at that moment that the androgyny escapes and disappears into the woods. Forecasting the self-procreation metaphor of androgyny, Dung Kai-cheung proposes in the prelude (entitled “Imitating Oneself ”) that the narrating voice created by a writer is always an imitation of no voice and all voices because the narrating voice actually does not have a counterpart outside the context of the narrative. It is an imitation of something that is not there. This kind of imitation without a real counterpart—an original/origin—is thus fiction/al (Androgyny, 6). Self-imitation is like copying without an original. This may seem logically impossible, but in a paradoxical way, it is possible. It points to the possibility of turning the copy into the original because the original is also the copy and vice versa. But at the core of this process is a void that refers to nothing but the emptiness itself. It is like taking the illusion reflected by the mirror as the real. Perhaps this is how Dung Kai-cheung interprets the transitory existence—the culture of disappearance, as Abbas describes it—of Hong Kong. Its identity and subjectivity thus must depend on an array of endless self-reflecting/referential of signs. This kind of self-reflecting/referential means of affirming identity and subjectivity is telling. The signification of androgyny rests precisely on the self-referential nature of its being. It is self-sufficient, original, and it defies the categories of male and female. Dung’s novella depicts a woman’s struggle toward a radical feminine and a female-centered world, symbolized by

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the legendary reptile, Capillisaurus Varicaudata, which the woman has nicknamed androgyny because of its unique biological and sexual attributes. This species of reptile is all female. Every spring two female androgynes imitate the mating ritual of a male and a female reptile to procreate. These androgynous reptiles have only been spotted four times in known history; both the first and the last time were reported in Hong Kong’s Da Mou Mountain. Combining an all-nature setting with a woman seeking an all-female reptile species, the author’s intention is not difficult to see: he wants to set back the time to a pre-civilization stage in order to allow the woman not only to break free of the patriarchal domination but also to reestablish her subjectivity and identity. The language with which she wishes to articulate her emerging subjectivity is the same language with which she struggles to describe the androgyny: “what kind of language should I speak to bring me close to the essence of the androgyny? What language would help me establish a basis of communication with her so I can avoid talking endlessly and vainly to myself instead?” (13). The mystery of the androgyny is further compounded by its unknown origin. At the beginning there were males and females among these reptiles. Then they began to breed with other species, and eventually they became a hybridized species crossing over several reptiles and mammals. The hybridization process is so complex that this species of androgynous reptiles is beyond categorization (24). The androgyny thus represents to the woman an obscure object (one without origin) of desire and identification. Her search for the androgyny parallels her quest not of difference from the patriarchal world she comes from but of similarity to an all-female species that is self-reliant and sufficient without the male. The question here is: Is such a legendary androgynous species a legitimate model for locating/constructing a new identity and subjectivity for such a woman who only wishes to escape (and not so much to rebel against) the patriarchal hegemony? Corresponding to the genetically hybridized androgyny, the narrative itself is also a hybrid in genre. The first-person narrative is regularly injected with scientific accounts of the reptile in a third-person voice. Here the author not only is imitating the voice of a woman, he is also mimicking the voice of a scientist. Putting together two fictional voices and a legendary androgyny, apparently Dung does not believe there are available models for a radical feminine—not feminist—subjectivity; what he has to offer is a utopian vision of a harmonious union of two female sexes. A passive resistance to the patriarchal order, perhaps; but this gesture implies how little maneuvering room there is for Hong Kong in insisting on its illegitimate/ colonial/hybrid/inauthentic cultural identity when incorporated into the masculine/heterosexual/patriarchal/authoritarian system of China.

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Before the woman arrives at a full identification with the androgyny, she has to struggle with another primitive being, the male keeper of the cottage. The erotic entangling of this “wild man” and the civilized woman against a semideserted garden house setting reminds us of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She is afraid of and at the same time fascinated by his primitive masculinity and physical strength. Her only weapon of selfprotection is words. Whenever she is with him, she talks excessively, as if to resist the wild (man) with civilization.25 The man never talks back. However in her only meaningful correspondence with the outside world, that is, with her best friend, she becomes increasingly silent until there is no word from her. Language has lost its communicative function. When the woman utilizes language, it is either to futilely resist the man’s sexual invasion of her body or to record her equally futile search for the androgyny. Ironically, though, the woman can only find the androgyny with the help of the man. Internally, the woman has to struggle with her old instinct that tells her she is single-sexed in need of a man to complete her. The slowly growing new instinct, inspired by the androgyny, would eventually convince her that she is dual-sexed and is whole by herself. The woman thus has to fight two opposing sets of values and establishments parallel to the battle between the primitive and the civilized, the mountain and the city, written records and imagination, in order for her to emerge as a new being. The woman’s pregnancy by the man at the end of the story is the final step that leads to the merging of the woman with the androgyny. At the moment of conception, the woman imagines that perhaps her egg can produce certain substances to kill off the man’s sperm; or perhaps her body can generate the other (male) gamete to join with her egg to produce an offspring (71). This thought signals the woman’s breaking away from the control of the two men in her life: the cottage keeper and her husband. With this new awareness, she comes to a full identification with the legendary reptile: “Androgyny didn’t run away. I am the androgyny” (72). Her pregnancy and her newly gained subjectivity indicate the woman’s arrival at the originating point of the androgyny in which the female body contains both male and female sexes. But does the woman’s awareness necessarily bring her to a primordial, pre-Oedipus wholeness? Perhaps this passage in the story can best describe Dung’s ambivalent optimism: “Day and night all I can do is wait in the house for the man to come and continue this hopeless struggle. The androgyny sees every inhumane situation that goes on in this house. She has gone through a much crueler competition of nature and she survived. Somewhere in our body there must be something miraculous that helps us stay alive” (69). Not only is survival important, but also the ability to defeat the domination of the male and the female instinct of wanting the male to impregnate her and thus complete her. The ideal vision is for the female body to also

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have the function of the male; and the first step toward of which is changing her frame of mind: she must think and feel like an androgyny in order to become one. To survive and maintain her identity and subjectivity, the woman must allow herself to think the otherwise impossible and unacceptable: that she must desire hybridity and seek strength in it. She must transform herself from an incomplete half-woman to a hybridized creature that is complete with both male and female capabilities. Androgyny thus becomes the metaphor of an idealized vision of hybridity. Dung’s 1994 utopian visions of hybridity became complicated in his 1997 novel, Dual Body or Hermaphrodite (Shuang shen). Dung admits that he has borrowed the main concept of the story from Kafka’s Metamorphosis.26 The story evolves around the emotional and physical struggle of a man, Yuan, who wakes up one morning in an Osaka hotel room and discovers that he not only has become a woman but also has lost his memory about the trip to Japan. The only clue he (now “she”) was left with is a business card with the name of a bar and its address in Tokyo and on the back a Japanese woman’s name. Before he leaves Japan, Yuan meets a man and a Chinese woman and develops a relationship with both of them. Frustrated with not being able to find the mysterious Japanese woman who, Yuan believes, is the key to his sexual metamorphosis, he returns to Hong Kong to find his sister. There Yuan begins to develop an intimate bond with his sister. Gradually Yuan recovers his memory of childhood, but he still cannot remember the incident in Japan. Constantly Yuan struggles with a male consciousness trapped in a woman’s body and adjusts to a new identity, new life, and new gender role. The Chinese woman whom Yuan met in Japan returns to Hong Kong to rekindle their friendship/ relationship. Their homosexual relationship grows, while Yuan and the man in Japan continue their long distance heterosexual relationship. Unexpectedly this man shows up in Hong Kong one day and asks that they consummate their love. The consummation is only partially completed because Yuan refuses to be “penetrated.” Near the end of the novel, the mysterious Japanese woman shows up in Hong Kong in an exhibition where Yuan worked. Unable to catch her, Yuan loses this Japanese woman and she disappears again into thin air. But this near encounter provokes some flashbacks in Yuan and he remembers their affair and the Japanese woman’s promise never to leave him. After this incident, Yuan finally accepts the man from Japan and moves there to live with him. Despite the complex web of relationships, the crux of the novel is the protagonist Yuan’s intense emotional struggle with his ambiguous sexual and gender identity. The body of Yuan becomes the battleground of the constant competing forces of the male and the female. He is undoubtedly the incarnation of hermaphrodite. In this near reversal of Dung’s earlier

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novella The Androgyny, there is no longer the yearning for and the utopian vision of the harmonious union of the two sexes. As in the myth of Hermaphroditus, Yuan’s body is usurped by the Japanese woman/nymph Salmacis who threw herself onto the man so that the two of them merged as one. Also as in the myth of Tieresias, Yuan is burdened with the memory of both the male and the female. Dung’s previous semi-utopian vision of hybridity as embodied by the androgyny is challenged by the symbolic figure of the hermaphrodite. If the androgyny expresses the desire to transcend difference of the exterior, what the hermaphrodite reveals is an inherent disharmonious condition of difference. Through Yuan we see the pain and anguish of being a hybrid. What is more poignant is Dung’s anxiety over the weakening masculinity, which, in his previous novella, is suppressed by the desire to return to the primordial state in which hybridity (manifested in sex/gender) is seen as original and authentic. In the preface of Dual Body, Dung provides a Chinese source for his vision of a dual-sexed mystic being. This source comes from The Classics of South Mountain (Nanshan jing) of The Classics of Seas and Mountains (Shanhaijing zhuan). Dung cites an ancient dual-sexual animal named Lei who is said to be born with both the male and the female genitals. The legend has it that whoever eats the flesh of this animal will be free from jealousy or du (i). Dung ponders on this legend and asks if the origin of jealousy comes precisely from the separation of the male and the female sex. This interpretation coincides, surprisingly or not, with the Western scholars’ interpretations of the myth of androgyny told by Aristophanes. Dung’s elaboration of the Chinese androgyny myth focuses on the dialectics between sameness and difference, as the Chinese word lei can mean both “category/categorization” and “similar/similarity.” The opposition between sameness (similarity) and difference (categorization) is how jealousy comes about: “The two simultaneous meanings of lei is the origin of du (jealousy). Whereas ‘sameness’ strengthens self-consciousness, ‘difference’ creates for self-consciousness a sense of loss or lack that can never be fulfilled. . . . For the self-consciousness to feel sufficient is always a fantasy. . . .” (ii). The condition of hybridity is simultaneously idealized by the metaphor of androgyny and problematized by the metaphor of hermaphrodite. The struggle of Yuan with his/her gender not only is between the mind and the body but also between masculinity and femininity. Because Yuan still remembers his life before the metamorphosis—the only memory that has lapsed is of his encounter with the mysterious Japanese woman in Osaka before his metamorphosis—his mind remains “male.” But his body has become female and he is therefore forced to adjust the way he thinks, feels, and behaves. What this new situation creates in him is a muddled emotional state. Yuan is often seen as hysterical, helpless, and confused. The

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only anchor that he has is the once estranged sister. The sister’s unconditional acceptance of and total identification with the female part of Yuan remind us of the idealism associated with the androgyny in Dung’s novella. Undeniably, however, it is Yuan’s fear of and confusion over being a woman that makes him reliant on his sister. Furthermore, Yuan is never comfortable with his heterosexual relationships. It is as if it is the author’s male homophobia that drives Yuan away from his male suitors—Yuan has never truly developed a full relationship with any man in the novel, be it the man from Japan, his old friend, or the photographer with whom Yuan considers having a close if not also intimate friendship. At the end of novel, although Yuan decides to reunite with the man in Japan, it is still dubious that he has come to a full acceptance of his new female identity (this is not to suggest that he is necessarily straight or a lesbian). Yuan’s acceptance of his newly imposed femininity is contingent upon his bond with his sister. The merger of their souls is presented as analogous to the mythical figure of androgyny, with both a male (Yuan’s) and a female consciousness (the sister’s). The emotional union of Yuan and his sister thus registers at the highest level of the androgyny metaphor, that is, an inherent male-female combination. On a lower signifying level is Yuan’s somewhat hesitant lesbian relationship with the Chinese woman—here we see Yuan’s half-hearted resistance—resistance because it is a lesbian relationship (thus is not a traditional social norm), but at the same time it can be considered a heterosexual combination since he was a man before. Parallel to this signification of the androgyny metaphor is Yuan’s inherent combination of both sexes. Then on the fundamental level Yuan’s male consciousness is locked inside his female body. This therefore begs the question: Is Yuan ultimately male or female? Which gender bears a larger imprint in him? Yuan’s unsettling bisexual predicament represents precisely the difficult challenge of hybridity. His turbulent sense of self is nowhere near the inspiration that Dung draws from the Chinese mythical androgynous animal lie. Difference is difficult to embrace, the truth of which cannot be expressed better than through the metaphor of hermaphrodite. The author’s ambivalence to male homosexuality is seen in Yuan’s total rejection of his old friend and persistent resistance to the man in Japan. Both relationships are regarded by Yuan as homosexual (male-male) and therefore unacceptable. On the surface it appears androgyny is an optimistic metaphor for Hong Kong’s cultural hybridity. However, a serious fault lies in Dung’s utilization of the metaphor: in dealing with the task of finding the origin, androgyny is a “happy solution” only when the sexual/ gender transformation takes place within a woman. Dung does not seem to have much difficulty in depicting the woman’s mental and emotional merging with the androgynous reptile via her imagination of possessing both sexes.

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But when the metamorphosis happens to a man, not only do anxiety and conflict abound, but the protagonist also resists the mental and emotional transition of becoming a woman. At the end, he is only a half-male. What is really at issue here is an anxiety about masculinity and the disappearance of it. What the author exhibits through the character Yuan is a sense of threat of his heterosexual masculinity which is also his (male) subjectivity. Dual Body betrays Dung’s toil over the challenge of legitimacy, of what is an acceptable norm (i.e. a heterosexual identity that Yuan finally adopts) and what possible alternative space or fissure is available for the hybridized being to continue its existence. Unfortunately the semi-utopian vision of androgyny of 1994 is now nowhere to be found. The utopian principle Dung fashioned in the image of the androgyny has completely collapsed in Dual Body.

Chapter 5 Chinese American? American Chinese? Community Building as Subject Making

This chapter brings us to the identity politics of Asian Americans, specifically that of Chinese Americans.1 The cultural hybridity that the postcolonial subject inherits, as I discuss in the preceding chapter, is first and foremost imposed by foreign powers. The post first-generation immigrant’s sense of cultural origin may be more ambiguous than that of the postcolonial subject’s; nevertheless, both must confront how cultural hybridization brings about the impetus to wrestle with authenticity. But the geopolitical and social conditions under which the two hybridized subjects negotiate their cultural origin and cultural hybridity are drastically different. The post first-generation Chinese Americans are overseas Chinese who have no direct connection with China, whose experience and understanding of Chinese culture are handed down from their immigrant parents. Already a refracted image, “China” in the Chinese American imaginary is radically different from the imaginary of “China” by other groups of Chinese in different regions such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Southeast Asia. Oftentimes depictions or representations of “China” in the works of Chinese American writers are judged and scrutinized not in terms of their artistic or aesthetic achievement, but by the measure of “authenticity.”2 Such critical examination reflects an ideology of cultural authority and historical origins that privileges the native Chinese as the only group of Chinese who are capable of “correctly” articulating “China,” while discounting all other

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overseas Chinese their right to claim cultural authenticity in the representation of their imaginings of and experiences with “China.” The contention is essentially over who possesses the right to claim cultural authenticity and on what grounds such a claim is based. The identity quest of Chinese Americans thus can be summed up in the question of authenticating cultural hybridity, whether in relation to their Chinese cultural origin or to their American cultural background. But the process of authenticating Chinese Americans’ hybridized cultural identity is a particularly daunting task. Chinese Americans are faced with a lack of the most fundamental elements in forming a cultural identity, namely language, and a clear social and cultural representation recognized by the mainstream American public. Thus, the need to construct a Chinese American historical discourse and situate it within the official American history becomes an essential first step toward such a cultural identity. The anti-Chinese movement in the United States beginning in the early 1800s and later known as the Asian Exclusion (marked by the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act in Congress in 1882, and the congressional repeal of the Exclusion Act in 1943), is evidence of the deep-rooted white nativism (thus anti-nonwhite prejudice) in the United States since the declaration of independence from its British sovereign. Beginning as a regional labor organizations’ prejudice against Chinese workers in California in the midnineteenth century, this anti-Chinese sentiment soon spread to other regions and eventually resulted in the U S. government’s immigration policy of preventing Asian immigrants from staying and becoming naturalized, as well as limiting the number of other Asians who might come to the United States. The agenda behind this was to protect the Euro-American labor market from being infiltrated or even dominated by Asian (mainly Chinese) labor, hence maintaining the “whiteness” of the country.3 According to Roger Daniels’ analysis, the nationwide anti-Chinese movements were reactions to local economic depression and the prejudiced belief in the racial inferiority and unassimilability of the Chinese (60). During World War II China’s alliance with the United States initiated a changed perception of the Chinese as fighting their common enemy Japan. The result of this alliance and the impact of the two World Wars made it possible for the American government to consider abolishing the Chinese Exclusion Act with the intention of publicly demonstrating how deeply the United States valued democracy. Once Chinese immigrants were allowed to be united with their families (that is, wife and children) and make their alien family members American citizens, the declining population of Chinese Americans started to grow again. But what is interesting in this growing population, as Roger Daniels points out, is the cultural impact brought by the Chinese adults entering

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America who would strengthen their cultural ties to China as opposed to the United States. Significant acculturation would take place only with their children as they moved into their adulthood. It was during the 1960s when these children were in or beyond their college years that the beginnings of the Asian American movement toward acculturation were felt. With American society’s increasing prosperity after the 1960s, the economic condition of the Chinese American also improved which, in turn, made education possible. By the 1980s, the Chinese American community had diversified with the growing number of native born and new immigrants from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asian countries, and other regions. These Chinese Americans occupied different economic and social strata, ranging from those poorly educated, with low English language skills, living in Chinatown and working in low-wage trades and sweatshops, to the highly educated, well-spoken, financially and socially affluent middle class. The general improvement of the Asian American during the 1960s inevitably raised their sense of self-awareness. Forging an Asian American identity thus became an important crusade. William Wei in his groundbreaking study, The Asian American Movement 4 provides a tremendous amount of data and a comprehensive account of the origin and the development of this movement. Inspired by the civil rights movement of the late 1960s, Asian Americans recognized that traces of the U.S. government’s systematic denial of constitutional and human rights to African Americans was also experienced by Asian Americans. It is therefore not surprising that the Asian American’s striving for social, cultural, and political representation finds alliance in the black movement. But as Collen Lye points out in her careful study of the “model minority” of the Asian American, issues embedded in racism against early Asian immigrants and its continuous stereotyping contain certain complications.5 To the American public, the Asian American embodies the mysterious and ancient, hence “inscrutable” and “inassimilable,” Asian civilizations. This form of Orientalism within American society limits the Asian American to always being Asian in America and not Asian of America. Lye argues that maintaining an “Asian frontier” represented by the Asian American, which is an imaginary space between “Asia” and “America,” is essential in consolidating America while at the same time providing a contact zone for America’s expansion to Asia (3–4, 15–18). When the United States entered the Vietnam War in 1964 with the intention of preventing communism from spreading in Asia, Asian American activists expanded their political platform from fighting domestic racism to opposing American imperialism on all Asian people overseas. The Asian Americans’ antiwar stance hence allowed them to project their self-identity beyond the American borders to Asia.6 The basic assumption is

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of course to redefine what being “Asian” means in the American sociocultural context and its racial make-up. In the early years of the Asian American movement, the goal was clear: to refuse to be assimilated by mainstream American society and to create a “unique identity and a counterculture” (45) of the Asian America.

“Asian American” as a Cultural Signifier Like all other ethnic minorities in the United States, Chinese Americans constantly have to struggle between two worlds. In order to achieve the ultimate goal of establishing an authentic cultural identity in American society, they have to resist the cultural hegemony of both “America” and “China.” But this is not to suggest that Chinese Americans should therefore take the essentialist or nativist stance as propagated by Frank Chin in Big Aiiieeeee!; on the contrary, what it requires of Chinese Americans is to negotiate a fine balance between ethnic essentialism and assimilationism, to make compromises with both Chinese and American cultures, and to commit themselves to this in-between cultural zone in order to construct a cultural identity that is “Chinese American.” But to strike a fine balance between ethnic essentialism and assimilationism is not an easy task. The ideal scenario is to believe that Chinese Americans can fashion the “content” of their unique Chineseness that will allow them to participate in the national articulation of what constitutes America and who Americans are. On the one hand, Chinese Americans need to play on the “Chinese” component because doing the opposite—that by emphasizing their “Americanness”—will only make them faceless members in this multiracial society. The irony and paradox here is that the “Chinese” element has been what historically makes Chinese Americans “un-American”—as Asians, they are considered “inassimilable”7—and yet this “Chineseness” is precisely what they need to make themselves American. How Chinese Americans should formulate or remodify their bicultural identity construction in finding ways to mix a certain amount of “Chineseness” with a certain amount of “Americaness” becomes the main challenge. Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1987), deals precisely with this challenge. The novel is a series of narrative maneuvers attempting to find a balance between two cultures, to achieve reconciliation with a hybrid cultural identity, and to solidify this identity by establishing a new cultural discourse. The novel is about a Chinese American named Wittman Ah Sing who struggles to understand his American cultural heritage (represented by his American literature background) from

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the locality of Chinatown; conversely, he also tries to reestablish his connection with his Chinese heritage (represented by Chinese literary classics and traditional theater) from the locality of the streets of San Francisco. Wittman Ah Sing is both American and Chinese. The task facing him is to find a way to fuse the two to make himself a Chinese American. Thus his mission is to search for the answer to the question: What really defines him as such? Rather than constructing a narrative to identify the characteristics of Chinese American culture, Kingston emphasizes an aesthetics of appropriation and imitation to dramatize the obvious lack of social and cultural space for Chinese Americans’ self-representation. Infusing the main narrative of the novel are two distinct literary languages, that of the Chinese and the American literatures, signifying Wittman Ah Sing’s bifurcated tongue. Such a strategy underscores the structural dependence of Chinese American cultural identity on cultural/literary discourses as a necessary mode for constructing the ethnic subject’s individual identity and ultimately his community. Defying Asian American literature’s traditional narrative practice of realism, Kingston injects into the novel an aesthetic playfulness characteristic of postmodernist performativity. This is significant because such narrative strategy represents a new identity discourse in formation. Arguing against the general assessment that the realist Asian American literature before the 1980s reflects how the Asian American social and cultural condition was limited to miming the already established, Jinqi Ling defends Asian American realism as not an inferior (to non-realist) form of literature by considering realism “both as a conventional literary form historically available to Asian American writers in much of the pre-1980s period and as a necessary ideological tool, however chosen, for their social and political struggles.”8 Following this argument, Kingston’s non-realist or postmodernist mode of representation therefore bears the implication that since the1980s, Asian American culture has been more deeply and more actively integrated with the mainstream society. However, such integrator remains a setback if we maintain that the Asian American’s “minority identity” is an essentially ethnicity-based identity, since treating Asian Americaness as an ethnic identity leaves one in an always unchangeable power relation with the ethnic majority. Here I propose to treat ethnicity and culture as two separate qualifiers in identity making and to define the “Asian American” signifier as culture-based and argue that it is more a cultural identity than an ethnic identity. As such, the cultural identity of the Asian American must be an expression of cultural affinity generated from the combination of the Asian American subject’s dual cultural heritage rather than a product of social and material forces. Thus, the agency the Asian/Chinese American writer chooses to

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negotiate with her two dominant cultures will affect the fundamental signification of “Asian American.”

Pastiche versus Parody: the Intertextual Game for Intercultural Identity I have briefly mentioned earlier that Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book marks an important shift in Asian Americans’ striving for representation in mainstream American society. In order to understand the inner workings of this shift, it is necessary to examine the narrative strategy of this novel. The “fake book” of Wittman Ah Sing is a compilation of three Chinese classic novels: Journey to the West, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and The Water Margin, and legendary folktale, all of which are contextualized within Asian American history and American popular media culture, embellished here and there with allusions to numerous American and British literary figures and works. Wittman Ah Sing (“I Sing”) is apparently a figure of Walt Whitman, and at the same time the magical Monkey from Journey to the West. As Wittman Ah Sing battles his American English and Chinatown English, he is also combating two identities—his American identity and his Chinese American identity. Through combining pastiche’s assimilation of similarity and parody’s stress on difference, Kingston offers a proposal to create a new cultural identity for the Asian American subject represented in Wittman Ah Sing, a cultural hybrid: a twenty-three-year-old, fifth-generation “chinaman,” a Berkeley graduate in the sixties, a self-proclaimed Beatnik poet of the tradition of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, William Burroughs and many others, and a playwright with a mission to revive traditional Chinese theater in Chinatown, who is also well-versed in British and American literature, American popular culture, and Chinese classics and folklore.9 It is crucial that we recognize Kingston’s intertextual strategy here is in fact pastiche with a parodic twist and not parody, because this illustrates how much affinity Kingston feels with Chinese culture and how it determines the agenda this strategy is designed to achieve. Linda Hutcheon maintains that pastiche is often not an imitation of one single text but of multiple ones. The imitation itself also tends to be superficial, with limited if almost no interpretation or adaptation involved.10 But other than borrowing someone else’s discourse, there is another important aspect in Kingston’s strategy of pastiche, that is, it serves to conventionalize her tasks. In imitating canonical works, Kingston is also suggesting that what she (and her

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protagonist) attempt to accomplish are really nothing revolutionary and that they are only old ambitions rendered anew. In addition, conventionalization of her project adds a layer of critical self-reflection to the project itself. It is undeniable that parody does have the function of subverting conceptions of originality and authenticity. But the parodist also inherently inscribes a certain stance in her practice of textual doubling. The methodology of parody should not be in question in our analysis of Kingston’s novel. What is really at issue is rather whether there is a clear ideological stance behind the practice, as that is a key element in distinguishing parody from pastiche. Although through textual imitation/appropriation and irony Kingston seems to be proposing a solution to the identity dilemma facing Asian Americans, inherently the authorial voice in this intertextual discourse is not in direct opposition to the ones in the original (the imitated) texts. In Bakhtin’s argument about parody and stylization (which, in my view, is very close to pastiche),11 he emphasizes that the intention of the parodist must be in direct contrast to that of the author of the parodied work: “Here, as in stylization, the author again speaks in someone else’s discourse, but in contrast to stylization parody introduces into that discourse a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the original one. . . . In parody, therefore, there cannot be that fusion of voices possible in stylization or in the narration of a narrator . . . ; the voices are not only isolated from one another, separated by a distance, but are also hostilely opposed.”12 The title of Kingston’s novel immediately establishes its mimetic connection with the sixteenth-century Chinese canon The Monkey or Journey to the West by Wu Chengen. Kingston’s appropriation of Journey to the West emphasizes (pastiche’s) similarity rather than (parody’s) difference. The similarity includes the Chinese classical fiction’s storytelling style and the form of seriality with the storyteller/narrator’s invitation at the end of every chapter to the reader to move on to the next chapter.13 Through imitating this form, Kingston is paying tribute to the oral tradition that is closely associated with theater and literary writing in pre-modern Chinese culture.14 Other major similarities between the two novels include the protagonists Wittman Ah Sing and the Monkey who share common personality traits, the theme of pilgrimage/journey/quest, and the Kingston narrator and the Goddess of Mercy Guan Yin who accompany and supervise their respective hero on the trip. But essentially Kingston’s appropriation of the Chinese classic is superficial at best. Jennie Wang has effectively characterized the intention of Kingston’s using the Monkey King for her protagonist: “To say that Kingston’s novel draws this legendary figure from Chinese Romance and Chinese classics is as good as to say that Joyce’s Ulysses draws from the Greek myth, or Melville’s Moby Dick contains a biblical reference. It adds but little to our understanding of the book and the creative genius of the

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author.”15 Kingston’s imitation of other literary sources also has the same superficiality, which is indicative of pastiche. So the distinctions all boil down to the markedly different manners in which Kingston imitates and appropriates her Chinese and Western literary canons (Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Joyce’s Ulysses).16 It appears that Kingston is more entangled with and critical of her Western sources than she is with her Chinese sources. Kingston’s objective and intent in borrowing the three Chinese classics is not to mock or attack the three Chinese classics, nor to establish a direct or hostile opposition between her authorial voice and the voices in the original/imitated texts. Moreover, Kingston’s object of criticism or opposition is not encoded in self-satire either.17 On the contrary, what Kingston intends to satirize and ultimately criticize is something quite outside of her imitation/appropriation project. What she sets out to do is actually to utilize or speak through others’ discourses for her own purposes. Because the textual doubling itself is without any ironic meaning, her narrative strategy is one of pastiche. To be able to correctly distinguish between parody and pastiche sometimes can significantly affect the subsequent reading of the novel. Take, for example, the thematic correspondence between Wittman Ah Sing’s “fake book” and the blank Buddhist scriptures sought by Tripitaka and his three disciples (the Monkey King being one of them). A. Noelle Williams mischaracterizes the nature of the thematic correspondence between the original source and the imitating text as derivative.18 She argues that because the pilgrims believe the blank scriptures to be false (which are to the Buddha the true scriptures), whatever is regarded “true” or “false” thus cannot assert its permanence (89). However, we should note that in the original Chinese novel, the opposite to what Buddha means by “true” scriptures is not “fake” scriptures but scriptures containing “lesser” truth, suggesting different teachings of Mahayana (the Great Vehicle) and Hinayana (the Lesser Vehicle). Furthermore, the pilgrims’ initial reaction to the blank scriptures is not that they are “false,” as Williams interprets it, but rather “useless.” In Kingston’s rendition, the interpretation is much more ambiguous—she merely points out the Monkey King’s suspicion of fraudulence and his demand for an exchange because he thought what they have received from Buddha’s two disciples is “nothing” (42). This shows how a misreading of the Chinese text must inevitably affect our interpretation of Kingston’s ideological stance embedded in her novel’s subtitle, His Fake Book. The term fake book here does not bear any symbolic correspondence to the Buddhist scriptures but rather is a self-reflexive symbolism that points back to the novel itself. Kingston’s own explanation of the fake book is that it is a book filled with raw materials for further improvisation.19 This is a book filled with borrowed references which the author fakes into some

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thing completely different. Agreeing with Kingston and the critics, Diane Simmons explains that the novel’s complexity “prevents readers from gliding through the book, mindlessly projecting onto it their own stereotypes of the Chinese.”20 Making such chain linkage from “fake” to “improvisation” to “structural complexity” and finally arriving at “resistance of racial stereotyping” is to suggest that the author has successfully manipulated all her literary sources to achieve a single purpose.21 However, are we all too eager to agree with the interpretations and explanations Kingston has provided in her numerous interviews about this novel?22 Tripmaster Monkey Wittman Ah Sing’s fake book essentially is a compilation of all the canonical works Kingston puts in her novel. The Chinese canons Kingston incorporates in her novel have asserted, through a long period of time, a great degree of literary authenticity (hence “truth”), but together they are made into an open-ended “unoriginal” (hence “fake”) hybrid book for a Chinese American social and cultural misfit.23 Thus, what is really at issue here is the suspicious consensus among Kingston’s critics— with the affirmation from the writer herself—that with this novel Kingston has successfully resolved the predicament of being alienated by the cultural stereotyping of two worlds. Instead of agreeing that Tripmaster Monkey is an ethnic writer’s spiritual triumph, I believe there is a persistent sense of defeat and unresolved conflict throughout the novel. Indeed the Monkey King is a dauntless character whose capability and loyalty help Tripitaka successfully arrive at the Western Paradise where Buddha resides. The virtuous warrior Gwan Goong from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms does provide an excellent role model for Wittman Ah Sing who needs to become a congruent facilitator/leader and unite his families and friends. And the friendship-brotherhood of the three war heroes also is an inspiration for Wittman Ah Sing’s multiethnic cast to come together in the theater house as a community. The iconoclastic spirit of the one hundred and eight outlaws from The Water Margin is a legitimate spiritual guide for Wittman Ah Sing in his crusade to fight against racism and for peace. Last but not least, Yue Fei whose legendary patriotism exemplifies for Wittman Ah Sing the supreme model of loyalty to one’s nation. Kingston seems to have, thus far, found from her Chinese cultural/literary heritage all the necessary ingredients for building a Whitmanian utopia of democracy: friendship, brotherhood, iconoclasm, patriotism, and loyalty. Ethnic differences seem to have faded into the distance in this program of communal harmony. But from the beginning of the novel till the end of the narrative, ethnic difference is constantly in Kingston’s mind—it is a ghost that she cannot shake off. Notice within the mere seven lines telling of the most significant episode in the Journey to the West where the pilgrims discover the blank scriptures, Kingston’s sensitivity toward the race of the two immortals is rather

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peculiar: she identifies the two Buddhist disciples who give out the scrolls as “Indian” (42), and when equating that to the Monkey’s remark of them as “pig-catchers” (42), we cannot but wonder what kind of racial orientation is embedded here. Kingston may have simply assumed that since the “Western Paradise” is inferred to be located in India, the Buddhist monks who appear in this location therefore must be Indians. But in the original Chinese text, these monks are actually immortals, including the two disciples of the Buddha, whose racial/ethnic identity is neither identified nor relevant in the context of the story. Jeanne Rosier Smith suggests that, by inserting this episode into the narrative in the moment when Wittman Ah Sing is faced with an identity crisis as a writer, Kingston not only provides her protagonist with an inspiration for “new writing to explore contemporary American issues,” but also creates “new visions of identity and community” for contemporary America.24 It is this kind of “agreeable/agreeing” reading— which is all too common in many recent studies of this novel—that tends to gloss over Kingston’s deep-seated anxiety and struggle over ethnic difference that is well disguised in her performative reconciliatory optimism in the narrative. By walking Wittman Ah Sing through several theatrical pieces, Kingston chooses to use Chinese theatrical tradition in America as a means by which “peace and love” can be attained among people of all colors. Before Wittman Ah Sing arrives at a “higher plane of benevolence” at the end of his theatrical endeavor, he stages a one-man show which alludes to Whitman’s “Starting from Paumanok.”25 Here Kingston’s appropriation of Whitman carries a tinge of parody: Wittman Ah Sing is clearly protesting against Whitman’s essential erasure of difference and discrimination by coating them with liberal humanism. From her parodic appropriation, Kingston apparently has a more intimate relationship with her American source. Unlike pastiche, with which the imitator merely transplants the style or content from the original text to her own, parody involves the imitator more deeply in her textual transference in that the imitator critiques, converts, or subverts the imitated: hence a comparatively more prevalent sense of continuity between the two texts. By this token, Kingston makes it rather obvious that it is the American society and its racial culture with which she quarrels. Thereby, at the end of her discourse when she finally is able to embrace her “America” with Whitmanian liberal humanism and the sixties’ spirit of “love and peace,” such a reconciliatory gesture is not only logically conceivable but also admirable. It is no wonder most of her critics believe that with this novel Kingston has made a spiritual triumph over America’s racial divisions by transforming an angry Chinaman to an all-American pacifist monkey hero. Since Kingston draws her inspiration from both American and Chinese literary/cultural

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sources, she seems to have found a way to situate her “Chinese American” self in American society. But Kingston still has unsettled issues in her much more ambiguous and complex relationship with her Chinese heritage. To understand her attempt in resolving these issues, it is necessary to compare the two personae Kingston assigns her protagonist, “Whitman” Ah Sing and Ah Sing “the Monkey.”

“Whitman” Ah Sing and Ah Sing “the Monkey” Building a Community Together When Wittman Ah Sing first appears, he is presented as the Whitmanian hero with an existential crisis in “Song of Myself,” asking the perpetual question from Hamlet via Laurence Olivier, “To be or not to be” (3). This question of identity establishes not only the theme but also the doubletrope language of the novel. Speaking in an impetuous and hyperverbal manner, Wittman Ah Sing sees himself and his generation as the legitimate heirs of the Euro-American literary heritage. Not only does this literary heritage link him with Western culture, his pride in being a Berkeley graduate of literature, a member of the American poet fellowship and a participant in historical moments of the sixties also connect him with American culture and history. It is this cultural allegiance which Wittman Ah Sing believes he has with the mainstream American society that makes him uneasy about any reminders of his Chineseness and associations with Chinatown. Wittman Ah Sing consciously refuses to be identified as a stereotypical Chinese American. Appropriating Whitman’s spirit of democracy and universality, Wittman Ah Sing stubbornly insists that he is not to be defined by any racial category—“Once and for all, I am not oriental. An oriental is antipodal. I am a human being standing right here on land which I belong to and which belongs to me. I am not an oriental antipode” (326–27). Wittman Ah Sing’s sentiment toward his Chinatown origin, tainted by the stereotypical images of China in American culture, is one of self-parody. It is his way of distancing himself from the Chinese culture and at the same time reserving the right to criticize the prejudices imposed upon his ethnic and cultural background. In his mimicking of Chinatown English, it is quite apparent that Wittman Ah Sing attempts to use Whitman agrarianism to contest the social injustice suffered by Chinese Americans: “Show the bok gwai26 that Chinese-Ah-mei-li-cans are human jess likee anybody elsoo, dancing, dressed civilized, telling jokes, getting boffo laffs” (15). While

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Wittman Ah Sing means what he says here, he is also performing an act for Nanci Lee, an aspiring actress whom he tries to impress. It is always with this double target of ridiculing the racist discourse and his community that Wittman Ah Sing that attempts to undermine his awkward cultural and ethnic position. Wittman Ah Sing’s interest in theater has everything to do with his dancer-comedian parents, mother Ruby Long Legs and father Zeppelin (a combination of “Zhuo Bielin” in Chinese and “Chaplin” in English) and his growing up in the backstage of theaters. To Wittman Ah Sing, theater/ performance is closely connected with what he is—a boy from the Chinatown show-biz circle. His memory of the striped pants with a hole in the back which he wore to begin his career as a circus monkey and a street-dancing monkey (16) eventually evolves to the imagination of himself becoming many different monkeys: the Monkey King, the almighty King Kong, and the American kung fu Monkey. In sum, Wittman Ah Sing is “really the present-day U.S.A. incarnation of the King of the Monkeys,” as he admits to Nanci Lee. Wittman Ah Sing’s monkey nature has always been hidden behind his Whitman countenance, if not also underneath the mock Superman disguise. Emulating Whitman and the Superman, Wittman Ah Sing believes his life mission is to bring peace to his fellow humans and to envision the world as one big community that embraces racial, social, cultural, and class differences. The power of Ah Sing the Monkey comes from his being a brilliant performer of language and words. He can move freely from high literary vocabulary to street talk, from American English to Chinatown “Chinklish.” But his linguistic agility also affects his sense of identity, shifting from being comfortably American to feeling somehow ambivalent about being Chinese to anxiously wanting to affirm his Chinese Americaness. So in order to solidify this Chinese American identity, Kingston needs not only to develop a cultural language for her subject to express itself and to distinguish itself from other cultural-ethnic subjects in America, but also to build a community for her subject with a tradition or a set of beliefs to bind its members together. Yet, who will qualify as members—Chinese Americans, all Asian Americans, or all Americans? A community with its organizing principles would mean exclusiveness. But it is precisely communal exclusivity which Kingston and Wittman Ah Sing fight against. How then should Kingston imagine her own community, and what kind of community should it be? The close parallel between Kingston’s novel and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass leads us to believe that the kind of community Kingston envisions is the Whitmanian democratic community where everyone is respected for what he or she is and represents. After carefully tracing the novel’s references correlating to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, James T. F. Tanner concludes

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that Kingston, “like Walt Whitman, is concerned with the construction of two entities, the self and the community, the requirement in a democratic society that the individual have proper scope for development and that the community have means for furthering social goals.”27 Tanner further points out Kingston’s several ironic adaptations and projections of several of Whitmanian themes (66–67) through which Wittman Ah Sing expresses indignation toward American society and its racism. While Kingston may agree with Whitman’s vision of an agrarian society, we cannot then assume that Kingston is a believer of Whitmanian utopianism, that she subscribes to the same American Dream that Whitman and his fellow Americanists have constructed for the “other” (namely, nonethnic minority) Americans over some hundred years ago.28 Undoubtedly, Kingston must understand that once a community is formed, certain people will be excluded. If her goal is to (re)build a Chinese/ Asian American community, how does she reconcile herself to the fact that mainstream white Americans also have their own community which ostracizes ethnic minorities? Will she not be committing the same crime? Indeed the play Wittman Ah Sing stages in the end of the novel consists of a multiethnic cast, indicating Kingston’s utopian vision of the American society as “one big happy family” where everyone gets along. However, as we look closely at the final scene where Wittman Ah Sing soliloquizes his “marital problem” with Taña, we get the idea that Wittman Ah Sing is after “fair treatment”: he volunteers to share half of the household work and he will not treat Taña as a wife: “You don’t have to be a wife either. See how much I love you? Unromantically but” (339). The audience, who are Wittman Ah Sing’s “community and family” (339), missed Wittman’s conditional declaration of love and applauded him for what they thought as a totally romantic gesture. So they blessed him, “whether he liked it or not” (340). Here we must pay close attention to the modifier and the subordinate clause Kingston attaches to the main sentence in these significant statements—“unromantically but” and “whether he liked it or not.” It cannot be clearer that the ironic tone embedded in each optimistic message is an indication of Kingston’s ambivalence toward what many critics believe to be her re-creation of a Whitmanian multicultural, multiethnic “democratic community.” One’s own community does not provide a haven of understanding and acceptance. Wittman Ah Sing’s behavior/performance is received not by what the subject/actor communicates but by a set of (stereo)typical reception codes. There seems to be another story in Wittman Ah Sing’s one-man show which is less audible but no less significant than the one spoken aloud. In the course of Wittman Ah Sing’s indignant protest, a subterranean opposition is slowly building up between Wittman Ah Sing and his audience. The

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make-up of this audience includes people from Chinatown and Wittman Ah Sing’s multiethnic cast. In Wittman Ah Sing’s long soliloquy, his “enemy” clearly is the racist American public; what is worth noting is that this is a silent enemy, an amorphous object characterized by and existing in Wittman’s speech. This adversary is made easy to identify and quarrel with because of Kingston’s parody of her Western literary sources. But it is more difficult to recognize the real opponent Wittman Ah Sing is up against. The subterranean opposition actually comes from the audience who constantly interrupts, misunderstands, and imposes on him with its untimely applause. The meaning of applause is already indicated in the epigraph of this chapter: “You felt how your heart intensified unceasingly toward an immense reality and, frightened, you tried once more to take people’s gaze off you like long gossamer threads—but now, in their fear of the worst, they were already breaking into applause: as though at the last moment to ward off something that would compel them to change their life” (Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) (305). The audience applauds because they agree with what they see and hear, but their applause can also abruptly end the artist’s act, thus cutting short what needs to be expressed. The audience may also applaud for the wrong reason, and the artist may feel misunderstood or forced to accept the misinterpretation. This examination of Wittman Ah Sing’s relation to his audience also helps us to see if the community formed by this audience meets the expectation of Wittman Ah Sing and Kingston. The persona of the audience reminds us of stereotypical Chinese parents of an older generation in America who care a great deal about their children’s (academic) achievements; who are not well integrated in the American society; and are often quite passive in accepting how the American society views them. Such characteristics are evident in the beginning of Wittman Ah Sing’s show. Wittman Ah Sing has just uttered his first round of protest on the discrimination over immigrants: “They escape westward, that is, to Southeast Asia. They shunt their skiffs through the tule fog and shoot out in Viet Nam . . . become the One Hundred Children who are the ancestors of the Vietnamese. . . . Everybody would rather be the indigenous people of a place than be its immigrants” (306). Upon hearing this, the audience “clapped loud, bone-proud of our boys and girls, just like graduation, where we take the hardest awards, math and science” (306). Notice the discrepancy between what Wittman Ah Sing is really protesting and what the audience takes to heart—“bone-proud of our boys and girls.” What they are proud of is not Wittman’s daring words, but the fact that Chinese were the ancestors of the Vietnamese, making Vietnam a land of the Chinese instead of Chinese being immigrants of the place.

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Also notice that when Wittman brings out newspapers with reviews of their theatrical event, the audience applauds again, accepting uncritically any kind of acknowledgment or attention from outside of Chinatown— “Don’t be so easily made happy,” chided Wittman, “Quit clapping. Stop it. What’s to cheer about? You like being compared to Rice Krispies?” (307). Clearly between the actor/protester and his audience/crowd, no solidarity is established. Kingston portrays Wittman Ah Sing’s supposed followers as a group of people ignorant of the kind of racial discrimination they have been subjected to, including his fellow actors like Charley and Nanci (310). Indeed, what Wittman Ah Sing criticizes is not just American society’s racism against his people but also his own people’s willingness to conform to stereotypes and mainstream value systems. Despite this apparent lack of real communication, Wittman Ah Sing continues on with his ranting and confession to his community. The only way he is able to have this community join with him is by gathering them into a carnival-like atmosphere of game and fun, in a round of kissing and hugging one another to show that everyone is equal and the same and they can be united by stepping beyond racial divides (329–30). In this scene, Kingston offers an idealistic picture—clichéd as it is—of the audience holding hands and walking happily on wide-open streets. Indeed, it is curious that the final formation of the community that Wittman Ah Sing and Kingston strive for is one that is not a new community by any measure of imagination. We cannot but wonder what kind of self-imagining is at work here—if this final scene is supposed to be the epiphany after a long spiritual journey, why does it offer nothing but another stereotype of a Chinatownlike community? From this final scene, what kind of correlation can we find between an imagined community and stereotypes? Kingston’s imagined community here is supposed to be a symbolic point of confluence of her “Whitman” Ah Sing and Ah Sing the “Monkey.” But what kind of a community is this? How confining or liberating is it to the individual’s pursuit of identity? A brief summary by Laura E. Skandera-Trombley of Bobby Fong’s 1989 study of Kingston’s narrative strategy of her first novel is still relevant to this latest novel: “he (Fong) notes that Kingston’s narrative structure is circular instead of linear—the personal growth on the part of the narrator is toward not autonomy and independence but rather ‘reattachment to familiar and cultural patterns.’ ” Indeed, after a long trip away from Chinatown and distanced as well from American culture, Wittman Ah Sing arrives at his final destination in the familiar/familial Chinatown with a sense of affirmation of his bicultural heritage. The individualistic Wittman Ah Sing may very well become a devoted member of his newly founded community. The

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answer he sets out to find—about who he is—turns out to be an answer to where he should belong and how he can make himself feel at home. Here Kingston is suggesting that for Asian Americans to have identities, they must build an imagined community for themselves. What is more significant is that forming this kind of community is not necessarily reactive to outside pressure. Community formation goes through different sequences at different historical moments. The context in which Wittman Ah Sing gathers his fellow actors, families, and friends to create a community allows him to conceive an open community, which indicates that his effort is proactive rather than reactive. He has the three fundamental elements to form an imagined community: a particular script-language, a high (cultural) center, and a shared temporality/history/cosmology (Anderson 36). Wittman Ah Sing’s intensely hybridized language of both American and Chinese literary sources as well as American idioms drawn from a wide range of linguistic styles and ethnic origins can be viewed as a particular script-language that conveys the ontological truth of the cultural experience of the Chinese American. The theater certainly is the center of this imagined community. The experience of temporality within the theatrical space disconnects the audience from their normal sense of time on the one hand, while on the other, it links them together with another sense of meaningfulness. In addition to these basic components, there is yet another element present in Wittman Ah Sing’s conception of his community: stereotypes. Among the many cultural similarities the members of this community share, historical stereotyping of Chinese Americans is one. Stereotypical images of Chinese Americans have become so ingrained in the Chinese American’s self-imaging that they actually occupy a place in their cultural unconscious. We only need to look to the series of “incongruent” responses the audience has to Wittman Ah Sing’s criticism of racism to find such evidence. On the part of Wittman Ah Sing, an observation made by Debra Shostak can shed some light on our investigation: “the means of the inquiry (of the notion of cultural identity) is for Kingston to recover the Chinese past from which she feels excluded. . . . she needs to distinguish ‘What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies’ (Warrior 5–6)—that is, Western representations of Chinese culture” (241). In fact, the Chinese tradition that Kingston wishes to recover is not the Chinese tradition proper, but the one which has been handed down from her parents and those before them. The Chinese culture represented in American mass media also is a different construction of the Chinese culture proper. They are not the original, but in the context of America and Chinese America, they are authentic nonetheless. Therefore it is impossible for Wittman Ah Sing’s imagined community to be devoid of cultural stereotypes of Chinese Americans, by both themselves and the American public. What we can conclude from the above

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argument is that the cultural identity of the Chinese American is partially constructed by and within themselves, grounded in their imagined community, and partially conditioned by stereotypes created by the American imagination.

A Love Triangle: Kingston, Her Fiction, and Her Imagined Community In one of her earliest interviews upon the publication of Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston agreed with the interviewer Marilyn Chin that for her finally to be able to narrate in the voice of a third person, she needed to be able to write the Other, no longer the Self.29 It is also in this interview that Kingston compares the narrator of Tripmaster Monkey to Guan Yin the Goddess of Mercy who, in the original Chinese folktale of Journey to the West, throws a boulder on top of the Monkey and imprisons him for five hundred years. Kingston also describes the personality of the narrator and her relationship with Wittman Ah Sing. When talking about the first person “I” in Woman Warrior to discussing her creation of the third-person narrator of Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston makes an apparent equation between the writer “Maxine Hong Kingston” and her narrators. Clearly female/gender identity is a pronounced issue that is worked through in all her writings. But more poignantly, it is her anxiety about her identity as both a woman and an ethnic writer that she attempts to resolve in her manipulation of her narrators and their relationship to the protagonist: “in that first book, the reader is reading the first person . . . that the ‘I’ is so strong that the reader is caught in it; . . . [in] this new book, I think that it’s a real triumph to do an omniscient narrator . . . my narrator is Kuan Yin . . . As craft, though, I felt so good, so revolutionary, in that I have a woman, goddess narrator, as opposed to those nineteenth century omniscient narrators, who were really men” (88–89). Already apparent in a fairly straightforward discourse such as an interview (in comparison with a much more elaborate discourse such as a fictional narrative), Kingston reveals an unyielding desire to “enunciate”: that she must speak, and quite often excessively, about Kingston “the Chinese American,” the “woman,” and the “writer”; about her fictional protagonists, her narrators, and her stories. What becomes important is not what her works cannot tell—recalling Spivak’s question of what the subaltern can (or cannot) speak—but how much Kingston feels she must speak in order not to be misunderstood or “underintrepreted.” Laura E. Skandera-Trombley

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has noted in her summary of a big body of Kingston studies that, since the publication of The Woman Warrior in 1975, Kingston has made frequent comments and consistently responded to her critics regarding their readings of her fiction: “Over the past two decades Kingston has given a multitude of interviews in which she discusses and sometimes defends her writing. It is clear that Kingston is not just involved in what she writes but also cares very deeply about how it is perceived, and that if in her view there are misperceptions, then it is her duty to try to clarify matters. For Kingston, to use her words, ‘there’s a life that’s not the text,’ yet it is clear that this life is greatly intertwined with her writing. In short, the critics can expect that if they comment on her writing, it is certain that she will comment on theirs.”30 Probably one of the most interviewed writers in the United States, Kingston certainly has a great deal to say and a strong inclination to talk back. So, what operates behind this excessive self-annotation and talking back? The answer to this question can be found in Kingston’s peculiar relationship with her narrators who are always the protagonist in her novel. Since the publication of The Woman Warrior, Kingston constantly has had to confront the Asian American community, the Chinese community, the American public, and the feminists for their misreading, distortion, accusation, praise, or support. As an advocate of Asian American identity, she also has her own political agenda at play in her writings, interviews, public talks, and community projects. Undeniably, Kingston is a highly politically charged writer. Facing such a writer, it can be difficult for the literary critic to sort out this particular intricate tangle and at the same time remain uninfluenced by either the politic itself or by Kingston’s self interpretations of her writing and “talk back” comments. A situation like this does make one wonder how the literary critic and the writer should keep themselves apart from one another, so to speak, and how much distance should the writer place between herself and her published work. Nevertheless, that Kingston still quite actively and energetically engages her literary critics and involves herself in her already published works tells us that she does not believe her work is done even after the manuscript is sent to the printer. We can also interpret this as her odd way of forming the very community Wittman Ah Sing and the narrator propose to build in Tripmaster Monkey. To further understand this particularly complex relationship between Kingston the writer, her work, and her critics, we need to return to the earlier question of Kingston’s connection to her narrator and/as protagonist, as it tells of Kingston’s unceasing struggle to define her identity both as a woman and an ethnic writer. The manifestation of this connection and her grappling with identities is her confirmation of communitarian values. Therefore, to understand these multifarious issues, we also need to examine

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how Kingston contrives her communitarian values so as to construe the negotiation between communitarian values and individualism. At the end of the analysis, a few questions need to be asked: Does the community reign higher than the individual? Can an individual, not an individualist, be placed on the same level as the community, and by what governing principle(s) is the latter to be warranted? Kingston concludes at the end of Tripmaster Monkey that, in order to affirm the Asian/Chinese American’s minority identity as culturally and historically authentic, Asian/Chinese Americans must form a community first. The self alone is not enough. As a transformed pacifist, Wittman Ah Sing no longer centers his sense of identity on his self but rather on the newly found(ed) community. In Kingston’s “narrative of community,” to borrow Sandra A. Zagarell’s term, Wittman Ah Sing’s sense of self is now a part of “the interdependent network of the community rather than … an individualistic unit.”31 In her study, Zagarell first recognizes that this particular genre was initiated mainly by white women of the middle class in the nineteenth century (251), and specifically in the American tradition of narratives of community: “everyone in the community is seen having an equal opportunity to be a member, and exclusion because of race or ethnic background is rarely acknowledged” (254). This is essentially a discourse of women’s literary expressions of their experience and “concern with patriarchal constructions of femininity” as well as their “multifaceted efforts to maneuver within or move beyond them” (258). This narrative of community no doubt is a women’s discourse, a minority’s discourse, and a discourse that counters the majority and its domination. The equation of women as minority and as a counter voice to that of the majority and the dominant male is not necessarily an affirmation of women’s position. However, Zagarell argues that “[these] writers apparently felt a certain expansiveness about writing the narrative of community that may have been sustained partly by its ties with women’s culture and a relative freedom from too oppressive constraints of extant literary models” (261–62). What Zagarell believes to be the empowering aspects of the narrative of community actually reveals more of the predicament facing them. The message here can be read plainly: Writers of this genre, namely women, need to stick together to form a community of their own in order to resist men’s domination and to fashion an alternate way of living. If this is essentially what Kingston is striving for through her design of a woman narrator as a goddess, a protagonist as a man, whose joint effort creates an ideal community where gender and racial differences are overcome, she certainly has gone to a great extent only to return to the initial point of the women’s movement—resistance to the male center. Her lofty goal for building a Whitmanian democratic community that crosses all gender lines,

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or for arriving at the land of enlightenment of Buddhism, is only camouflage at best. With an accent on the prospect of community throughout the course of the narrative, Kingston only further encourages her writing to be read as ethnographical fiction. The aporia here is, while Kingston needs to stress the cultural element in order to define her identity as an authentic Asian/Chinese American (by mythifying her Chinese cultural heritage and by “community building”), she inevitably limits her writing to be “ethnographical” which, in turn, undermines her subsequent intention to transcend racial/ethnic difference. The example of Kingston’s novel does point out that, although this pan-Asian alliance is the essential defining feature by which Asian Americans can be recognized in their host country, it is an American cultural identity for which they strive. Thus it will be more productive to conceptualize such an identity on the basis of the Asian American’s cultural experience—how their sense of American identity is established with their Asian family and community upbringing, but essentially is instituted in the American culture and society.

Marking the Point of Origin Manifested in the narrative of community, the discourse of minority identity construction also goes hand in hand with the discourse of gender. Asian/Chinese Americans have always been stereotyped in American popular culture as feminine. But this “femininity” is particularly characterized as socially, culturally, intellectually, and class-wise inferior. The conventional argument is that because Chinese Americans carry the burden of China’s ancient history, which symbolizes antiquity, tradition, backwardness, and weakness, Chinese Americans must also possess all these qualities, and hence must be “feminine.” While this stereotyping is attributed to the American public’s lack of understanding of China’s historical reality, in many ways it also has to do with how Chinese Americans articulate their immigration history, specifically from which point in time they began their history in America. Writing the history of the Chinese American has been undertaken actively by Chinese American scholars and writers. But what is generally missing is a comparative perspective and contextualization of the early period of Chinese immigration with changes China had been experiencing in its political system, sociocultural structure, and economy. Chinese Americans’ sense of being rejected or excluded by their motherland is partly because they fail to link their own history with that of modern China. If this historical link had not been overlooked, there would not have been such a sense of disconnectedness which can only be mended through

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mythifying or mythologizing “China” and Chinese culture, as Kingston has done in Tripmaster Monkey and her other two novels, The Woman Warrior and China Men. “China” in the Chinese American’s imaginary should not be just a myth, a story, or a distant, misty past. Making an unclouded association of their history in America with the history of modern China, would allow the ethnic and cultural self of the Chinese American to be seen in a clearer light. The Chinese American cultural identity can thus be fine-tuned by history such as in the form of family genealogy, for example. Kingston’s lavish exhibition of cultural memories, of both “China” and “America,” is her way of creating a historical link with both her Chinese and American heritage. However, as is evidenced in her different attitudes toward imitating and appropriating Chinese and Western literary sources, this two-headed linkage seems not to be in a good balance. Indeed, her “fake book” is a book of translation and improvisation of cultures, one that allows Wittman Ah Sing to “invent selves” not only for himself but also for his audience/community. Much of this improvisation and invention is inspired by memories and stories which are themselves improvisation and invention. This explains why the “transpersonal or communal self ” from the “fake book,” which Debra Shostak argues is what Wittman Ah Sing and the narrator together represent, is without distinct individuality.32 In Kingston’s final vision, the individual is completely dissolved into the community collective; the meaning of his or her self and cultural identity is determined by the collective to which he or she belongs. Is this really what Asian/Chinese Americans envision themselves to be? Identity cannot be without history, but this is not to suggest that history is the defining principle of identity. In the episode where Wittman Ah Sing confronts his Japanese American friend Lance Kamiyama to avenge a childhood fight, Lance claims he does not remember it and that his memory only begins with the machete massacre in 1953, following the “camp” period— the incarceration and relocation of Japanese Americans by the Executive Order 9066 during World War II. During the time when he was presumably killed in the massacre, Lance escaped to an island where he thought he would find his fellow “ex-Japanese.” In this odd journey, he hopped from island to island, meeting people who lived away from the world and the war. Finally Lance escaped once again, this time back to the American civilization. Although America incarcerated Lance and many of his fellow Japanese Americans, the United States is still their home—“I’ve had it with islands. We shouldn’t go to Asia even for vacations. We get turned around. I got made into a Kibei. A Returnee to America. Never leave, Wittman. The next time I am curious about foreign lands, I’m traveling to Vegas or Reno” (126). In his wholesale rejection of Japan (represented by the islands), Lance

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embraces only Japanese American history, whose beginning is marked with the same kind of injustice suffered by Chinese America at the hands of White America. In his contemplation of “[h]ow to kill Lance and eat his heart, and plagiarize his stories” (126), Wittman Ah Sing is also making Lance’s choice. One element we cannot overlook at this point is the issue of generation disruption. While it is no trouble for the first generation of immigrants to still feel bound to their homeland, for the later generations, such a link has become weaker and the sense of historical connectedness fades with time. The problem in characterizing one’s “origin,” as it were, with historical discrimination and subordination, is precisely this self-imposed image as the inferior and the oppressed/victimized. This is not to suggest that Asian Americans should not demand rectification—they should and must. But at the same time, Asian Americans also need to rethink how far back to mark the origin of their history as immigrants. Kingston and many other ethnic minority writers in the United States like to stress the importance of memory in their project of identity construction, but their memory often stretches only as far as their mother’s or grandmother’s who have lived on American land. If memory/history can be captured in a photograph, can these writers afford not to look at it?33 That one picture may well be the missing link in many current writings and imaginings of Asian American histories. The essence of one’s cultural identity ought to be centered on the self. Ghetto-like community has often been the way Asian Americans and other ethnic minorities gather and live, which constitutes a congruent part of their tradition and history in America. Although Kingston proposes a remedy to regroup the community by overlooking racial differences, the importance of the individual’s identity is still neglected in her proposal. “Yeah, it’s better not to have best friends anymore—the time has come for community” (120), exclaims the goddess-narrator after Wittman Ah Sing realizes his friendship with Lance is, after all, a ludicrous affair. Sensing his aloneness among peers (at Lance’s party) and on the San Francisco streets, Wittman Ah Sing falls back on the idea of community as refuge for the individual. But Kingston does create Wittman Ah Sing as a hybridized cultural being who has an interracial marriage. Wittman Ah Sing’s cultural orientation differs radically from that of his mother’s and grandmother’s; even with his peers such as Nanci Lee and Lance, the distinction is apparent. Here, the differences come from generation, gender, national origin, and class. Lisa Lowe contends that it is necessary to “stress heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity in the characterization of Asian American culture . . . [in order] to disrupt the current hegemonic relationship between ‘dominant’ and ‘minority’ positions. . . .”34 However, her strategy of destabilizing the “discursive construction and determination of Asian Americans as a homogeneous

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group” (28—recalling the myth of “model minority”) does not go beyond the thinking of Asian American identity as an ethnic identity, although she does propose to “rethink the notion of ethnic identity in terms of cultural, class, and gender differences” (41). Why consider ethnic identity when cultural identity is already inscribed with all the desirable qualities that distinguish heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity? Lowe is perceptive in championing the constructedness of ethnicity and thereby making ethnic identity a flexible concept, but I would push her thinking further by shifting her direction of thought toward culture. Individual cultural identity has more autonomy than does one’s ethnic identity; culture celebrates even more so than ethnicity the “fluctuating composition of differences, intersections, and incommensurabilities” which also accounts for, if not more, “inheritance” and “active construction” (Lowe, 27). So rather than trying to bring the element of culture into Asian American’s pan-ethnic identity, I believe it is more productive to place “ethnicity” under “culture”—by defining it as a cultural identity; the enveloping “Asian American” identity will not be a problematic concept. Needless to say, reflection of “Asian American” as a hybrid cultural identity in the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries must also be foregrounded in what Terry Cochran calls “global contemporaneity.”35 Cochran argues that because of the technological, economic, and cultural change worldwide in the second half of the twentieth century, referred to as “globalization,” ideas such as nation, collectivity, and cultural production, and fields such as knowledge and the organization of knowledge not only must be reconsidered, but how to reposition the human being in this context also requires new attention. A new conceptualization of cultural identity is an effort to place the human being in our global contemporaneity. A part of this project is the thinking of “Asian American” not as a pan-ethnic identity but a hybrid cultural identity. In this form of collective identity, culture is not a model of hegemony because the global mode of cultural production and consumerism constantly displace culture and deprive it of its traditional transcendent value (Cochran, 135). As culture in the age of consumerism has become a popular ideology and tool used to define the individual’s identity materially,36 transcendentally the Asian American’s project of identity construction should also place culture in the foreground. Consider, for example, how would they situate themselves among local Asians when they cross the national boundaries to Asia? Jinqi Ling proposes that, “Asian American coalition workers need to develop strategies that are not only able to register the politics of a given praxis but also willing to engage with the discursive consequences of global corporate power’s active interventions in contemporary Asian American life.”37 Asian Americans’ endeavor should not be confined within the borders of the United States, nor should its vision be limited to the racial/ethnic politics of America.

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Part III The Vision

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Chapter 6 Chinese Diaspora and Transnationality: Envisioning Global Citizen/ship

The precariousness of diasporas’ political and cultural condition1 poses, probably, the greatest challenge in the reshaping of cultural identity. The national model of identity may not work for geopolitically displaced persons trapped as they are between native and foreign, home and the host country, and memory of the past and prospect of the future; they will have to consider transnational or multiple cultural identities and political affiliations. Riva Kastoryano proposes that “[t]ransnational networks linking the country of origin to the country of residence and promoting participation in both spaces bring to light multiple membership and multiple loyalties. Furthermore, transnational participation appears as the institutional expression of multiple belonging, where the country of origin becomes a source of identity and the country of residence a source of rights, and the emerging transnational space a space of political action combining two or more countries.”2 What Kastoryano proposes here is of course appealing; however, when applied to émigrés or political dissidents who reject or are rejected by their native country, the disjunction between the country of origin and the country of residence directly challenges Kastoryano’s theorization of a transnational identity. A case in point is Gao Xingjian, a political dissident who has been blacklisted by the Chinese government since he fled to Europe and became a French citizen. Establishing a transnational network as the basis of multiple cultural identity and belonging for people like Gao Xingjian presents a conceptual challenge to Kastoryano’s theorization. When the country of origin is not

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on the equation, thereby eliminating the source of identity for the diasporic subject, what substitution can he or she find to compensate for such a loss and rejection? The conflicting and oftentimes paradoxical situation in which émigrés or political dissidents struggle for their cultural identity and sense of belonging can be best illustrated by the controversy surrounding Gao Xingjian in 2000 when he emerged from being a relatively unknown writer to the international fame of being the first Chinese Nobel laureate in literature.

Diasporas Versus Nation: Politics of Representation The news came as a big surprise to many. On October 12, 2000 the Swedish Academy made its announcement that the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Gao Xingjian, a Chinese writer in exile. The academy recognized the honoree’s literary achievement in his soulful and honest depiction of “the struggle of the individual to survive the history of the masses” (The Swedish Academy Press Release), referring primarily to the essence of Soul Mountain (Lingshan 1999). Citing One Man’s Bible (Yigeren de shengjing 2000), the writer was praised for successfully capturing “the meaning of human existence” through his crafty use of pronouns to create different degrees of alienation (Presentation Speech: The 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Swedish Academy). This technique, as the speech continues, allows the author to assume the position of an “outside observer,” which in turn reveals not only the detached state of mind of the author/protagonist during the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, but also Gao Xingjian the person/author on self-exile looking in from his outsider’s position to his memory of this traumatic experience. Finally, the academy recognized Gao Xingjian for his ability to transcend the ideology of nation and who has come to embrace his native language as his only “true and real country.” Being the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize suddenly transforms Gao Xingjian into the embodiment of the culmination of modern Chinese history: a writer-intellectual who aspired to be the conscience of the people and the voice against injustice by the government but finally chooses to leave China for the West in pursuit of greater creative freedom. From the perspective of first world ideology, Gao fits the profile of a third world intellectual who confirms the political correctness of the free world: a “politically incorrect” writer in his own socialist country who is concerned with the fate not only of the individual but more deeply of the masses; whose work constantly came under the authoritarian government’s criticism and sanction; and finally had to made the difficult decision to leave his country and never

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to return.3 The Western world’s stereotypical image of China and fascination with the Cultural Revolution are confirmed by the Swedish Academy’s overt attention paid to its 2000 literary laureate’s two autobiographical novels in which the author reveals his personal experiences as a victim of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the laureate’s openly political play, Fugitives (Taowang), which is the playwright’s public denouncement of communist China after the Tiananmen massacre incident in 1989.4 Despite the Swedish Academy’s proclamation that political considerations never play a part in its selection of Nobel laureates, the opposite stance is made abundantly clear in the academy’s citation of Gao’s three most political works and lack of comment on his many other nonpolitical plays and short stories. Michael Specter in his article, “The Nobel Syndrome,” discusses numerous cases in which politics is exactly what dominates the academy’s decision on its annual literary prize winner, especially when the candidate is from a third world country or a member of a minority group. The writer’s political experience plays a central role for the members of the Nobel committee in their consideration of the candidacy. Although the committee claims that the prize is awarded for the writer’s literary achievement, it is in fact the nation (or the minority status) represented by this writer that is a much bigger factor than the writer himself or herself.5 Therefore it is arguable that Gao’s newly acquired status represents China and its long awaited recognition by an international authority of its literary achievement. Responses from China have been sarcastic and skeptical. Here are two typical examples: an article published in January 2001 blatantly states that, although the Nobel Prize for Literature has always had the aura of representing the highest literary honor in the world, no one in China has ever regarded Gao Xingjian to be a top literary figure, not to mention a world-class writer (Zheng, 2001: 25). To the author of this article, the cultural significance of Soul Mountain exists only in the unknowing eyes of the Westerners (27). The author in a following article makes it even clearer that the decision of the Swedish Academy is a poignant statement of Western separatism and an anti-China stance. This author argues that Chinese cultural authority should rest with the Chinese; Western scholars of Chinese literature are but handmaids of Western anticommunist ideology (Fang, 2001: 34–37). The two articles’ underlying superiority/inferiority complex is not uncommon among Chinese intellectuals. This complex has been at work in the collective mind of Chinese intellectuals since the call for modernization in late nineteenth century; it is now most often referred to under the well-known catch phrase: obsession with China.6 Julia Lovell in her insightful article, “Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Prize, and Chinese Intellectuals: Notes on the Aftermath of the Nobel Prize 2000,”7 gives a thorough examination of Chinese intellectuals’ “Nobel

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complex” developed in the 1980s. She situates the Chinese intellectuals’ century-long obsession with China in the specific historical moment of contemporary China and identifies such an obsession as a manifestation of anxiety over Chinese nationalism and China’s national-cultural-literary identity: “The Nobel represented the last imagined center of universal authority from which they could seek recognition and a sense of identity, in contrast to their sense of marginality within Chinese society itself ” (15). In the words of Xudong Zhang, (a U.S.-trained mainland Chinese scholar who holds a position in an American university), the controversy over Gao Xingjian’s Nobel prize reflects precisely “the politics of recognition and the anticipation of being recognized”8—the former refers to the authority of the Western world and the later points to the Nobel complex of the Chinese intellectuals. In sum, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Gao Xingjian, a writer-playwright who is little known in his native country and is now a dissident and citizen of France, not only shatters the Chinese intellectuals’ illusion that China’s cultural and literary achievements, hence China itself, can be acknowledged by an universal authority represented by the Nobel Prize, but also it opens up and pokes at the unhealed scar of a nation deep in identity crisis. In Taiwan and Hong Kong, on the contrary, reactions were warm and embracing of the honor befalling a Chinese writer. Taiwan’s most popular and prestigious literary magazine, Unitas (Lianhe wenxue) not only laid out a special issue on Gao Xingjian, it also carried in other issues numerous articles, interviews, and reports of the Nobel laureate’s visit to Taiwan. Gao Xingjian received VIP treatment during his visit to this island, including a meeting with President Chen. In 2001, the Republic of China Council for Cultural Affairs spent millions of dollars,9 invited top Chinese opera actors and renowned musical and visual artists, and cooperated with Masse Opera House of France to stage Gao’s latest play, Snow in August, under the direction of none other than Gao himself.10 This unprecedented undertaking by all means can be read as a tactical attempt by the Taiwan governments to turn China’s rejection of Gao’s Nobel Prize into a valuable venue for promoting Taiwan’s national identity and international visibility.11 Reception of Gao Xingjian in Hong Kong was also enthusiastic—there were performances of his plays, invitations for lectures, and an honorary doctorate from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. However, Gao’s visit was arranged around the Hong Kong government in order to avoid irritations to the central government in Beijing.12 In several of Ming Pao’s special reports, Gao is portrayed as a writer who is disinterested in politics and whose works are deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. But compared with reports in the mainland, Ming Pao’s reports did manage to portray a more objective and comprehensive picture of Gao’s literary path to

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the Nobel Prize.13 Its intention seemed to be to balance out the Chinese government’s hostile response to the Prize. By providing readers insights of Gao Xingjian and his works through commentaries, articles, and interviews of scholars and critics from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States, Ming Pao served as an alternative voice to the Chinese government’s censored responses as seen in the mainland Chinese print media.14 It is clear that Hong Kong’s “unofficial” organizations such as the universities, newspapers, and magazines are the venues through which the Hong Kong media is still able to retain its objectivity, thereby making Hong Kong the frontier of free speech in the communist China. This may well become a new identity for post-1997 Hong Kong, although the promise of this new identity remains to be seen, as it is dependent upon a variety of political and economic factors that cannot yet be predicted. At any rate, the historical event of the first Nobel Prize for Literature to be received by a Chinese writer was, at the end, celebrated by two marginal Chinese communities. People in Taiwan and Hong Kong, whose cultural identities in the greater Chinese community are by far ambiguous for being considered hybridized, are those who actually embraced and enjoyed the event that supposedly endows modern Chinese literature with international recognition. This entire affair is truly full of irony and intrigue.

Self, Nation, and the Global System of Literary Economy Amidst these various national and regional identity politics, how does the Nobel Prize affect Gao Xingjian, the person who is at the center of the storm, his own identity as a Chinese (or French?) writer, a writer in exile, a Chinese diaspora, a Nobel laureate, a participant in the global literary economy, and an uncompromising individualist? The challenge of identity and identification is never simply about how one decides what it would be but also about how one is aware of, reacts to, and negotiates with what others think that identity should be. The dynamic interaction between the self and its multiple others carries more impact on identity formation than does the individual’s self determinacy. How the Nobel Prize affects Gao Xingjian’s identity and identification is not a simple question. It concerns more than just his individuality in relation to the world at large. More significantly, it involves his relation with “China,” the signifier representing an eternal past, a cultural origin, a historical trauma, and an un-returnable home.

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As has been sufficiently demonstrated by his numerous short stories, novels, and plays, “China,” in a simple phrase, is his creative capital. This creative capital became particularly indispensable when Gao Xingjian put himself in self-exile and turned into a diasporic subject. Most of his writings in Europe cannot escape his Chinese origin. Particularly intriguing is that after four consecutive plays in which he completely turned away from anything Chinese—Between Life and Death, Dialogue and Rebuttal, Nocturnal Wanderer, and Weekend Quartet15—Gao looked again toward China and produced a novel of over four hundred pages, One Man’s Bible. As if the formidable Soul Mountain of more than five hundred pages is not enough to convey his nostalgia for China, Gao had to continue his narrative about this massive land in a sequel in which nostalgia becomes an urge for confession and cultural China turns into a dark land of tragedies.16 After winning the Nobel Prize, the signifier “China” has come to denote Gao Xingjian a world-class writer. As one news report states, “Gao is a living reminder of China’s turbulent, and recent, past” (The Associate Press and Reuters, 2000). Ironically, Gao’s newly acquired global status as a Nobel laureate marks him even more profoundly as a “Chinese” writer. His journey thus has come full circle: Gao Xingjian has gone from being a native Chinese diasporic subject to a global personage who now comes to represent the quintessential modern Chinese figure. Winning the Nobel Prize has profoundly changed the dialectics between Gao’s exilic condition and his (unwilling) representation of the Chinese collective.

The Outsider: The Ragpicker of History A Chinese writer-intellectual who lives in France as a political refugee and now holds French citizenship, Gao Xingjian’s identity is controversial. But a particular identification has clearly been established in the public discourse. Numerous news articles and headlines have converged Gao’s personal story into a standard narrative to describe the Chinese writer in exile. Gao Xingjian was betrayed by his wife to the authorities, leading to his burning of kilos of manuscripts for fear of persecution. Inevitably he was sent to reeducation labor camp. Even after the Cultural Revolution all his plays were still banned. Finally in order to escape from the surveillance of the government, he went into the mountainous regions of Sichuan for ten months to search for the soul of Chinese culture and his own. But that experience itself did not stop him from fleeing China in 1987. The climax comes at his very public final farewell to his native country in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square massacre, when he openly denounced the Chinese Communist Party with the play Fugitives and terminated his party membership.

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While such experiences are typical (though by no means less painful) for the survivors of the Cultural Revolution, they nonetheless capture the world’s imagination of the suffering individual in this massive tragedy. The news media’s narrative not only shapes the public’s perception of the figure of the writer, it also becomes the connection between the writer and the global literary community. One cannot help but wonder: Will Gao Xingjian’s relationship with the global community be forever mediated by the narrative of his “China/Cultural Revolution” experience? Can his readers see the figure of the writer beyond the “Oriental freedom fighter” he has now come to embody? For a writer who always considered himself an outsider while living in his native country and is more so now that he is cast out it how can language help him negotiate the contradictions of this ideological situation? When Walter Benjamin talks about the figure of the outsider, he holds the malcontent as its archetype. In literary history, Thersites, Homer’s cynic, and conspirators in Shakespeare’s historical plays are examples of such a figure. This personage often appears unnoticed, but at the right moment he will “refuse to play the game. He [will] decline to don a mask for the carnival mounted by his fellow human beings” (1999: 305). The outsider does not participate in the community, nor does he intend to be a recorder of events. His outsider status allows him to challenge any utilitarian scheme, but “he has no commitments that might allow authorities to trump his assertions and force him to hold his tongue. No commitment to the idea of community, for example” (306). The outsider always stands alone. In his final analysis, Benjamin gives a powerful and somewhat disconcerting image of this figure: “A malcontent, not a leader. No pioneer, but a spoilsport. And if we wish to gain a clear picture of him in isolation of his trade, what we will see is a ragpicker, at day break, picking up rags of speech and verbal scraps with his stick and tossing them, grumbling and growling, a little drunk, into his cart, not without letting one or another of those faded cotton remnants—‘humanity’, ‘inwardness’, or ‘absorption’—flutter derisively in the wind. A ragpicker, early on, at the dawn of the day of the revolution” (310). Is Gao Xingjian modern China’s ragpicker? He himself is one of the millions of victims of China’s largest, most brutal and senseless revolution, but the literary path he has carved out for himself is likely to put Chinese literature, long an instrument of the political, on a new trajectory. Gao advocates literature “without isms”; of this, David Der-wei Wang offers the following observation: “One of the reasons he won the Nobel Prize is precisely because of his ‘without isms’—not even modernism. Seeing from this perspective, it is suddenly made clear what he means to mainland Chinese literature of the second half of the twentieth century: he is both the instigator and the terminator of modernism” (74).

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In order to appropriately understand Gao Xingjian’s unique role in modern Chinese literature, we need to take a closer look at Benjamin’s outsider as a ragpicker of history. He is not a hero or a prophet. Instead he is a pitiful, insignificant, and ragged human being. He may be the first person to arrive at the dawn, but he does not see the hope and promise in the daybreak. The outsider is not there to launch a new phase of history; rather, he is to clean up the last scene of the old history and announce its closure—he picks up and tosses away scraps from a dying era, waiting indifferently for another to begin. The ragpicker lives in a temporal crack that connects the past and the future. The progress of history does not concern him; he is a lonely figure standing in the juncture of linear temporality. He willingly exiles himself to the margin of history so that he can escape from the familiar into the realm of the strange to observe the follies of human events. Through and through, Gao Xingjian has proclaimed that having the freedom to write is the prerequisite of maintaining his writerly self. He willingly turns himself into an outsider and wanderer so that he can protect his subjectivity from being subsumed by the apparatus of the nation. But being an outsider, especially by going on exile, has its price. Despite his repetitive claims that exile is his only salvation and “a writer in exile” is his preferred label, undeniably such is a choice of unfortunate circumstances. In One Man’s Bible, for example, the taxing burden of exile is apparent. The effect is a splitting of the self, one holding the other in contempt, undermining the other. The injury of the self is a persistent symptom exhibited in Gao’s two autobiographical novels. However, the image of the exiled should not be over-romanticized. In our postmodern age of globalization, how easy is it to distinguish “exile” from its similar terms such as diaspora and immigration, and from related issues such as travel and tourism? Is the aura surrounding the Euro-American expatriates of the two World Wars still present in today’s cosmopolitan diaspora? In Gao Xingjian’s case, his voluntary exile to the West—Europe and finally France— can be interpreted in different ways. Given China’s political condition, especially the tense atmosphere in the late 1980s, exile means gaining freedom. Gao Xingjian was considered lucky to be able to leave the country unscathed. Even with China’s currently more relaxed political control and relatively open economic situation, there are still thousands of young Chinese who seek admission to universities in the United States and other Western countries just so that they can get out of China “to see the world.” Of course these Chinese students can choose to return home or to stay in the West, whereas those who openly reject the Chinese regime do not, like Gao Xingjian. But, with his prestigious title as a Nobel laureate, Gao is welcome and even sought after to visit any country in the world (hence making him a global traveler-tourist). The cultural capital Gao has gained

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through the Nobel Prize is enormous. As I have discussed earlier, “China” is a signifier to Gao’s works. The location of “China” has lost its actual significance—that of a home—to become the qualifier of Gao’s “exile” status with some romantic residue left from the Euro-American modernist discourse of exile. With the Nobel Prize, his relation to his host country France also changes drastically. As a French citizen, his honor belongs to France17 (and more conveniently so since China has rejected the honor). In this view, can we still consider Gao a writer in exile? If not, then what is he—a diasporic writer, an immigrant writer, or a global writer?

Modernist Exile and Cosmopolitan Diasporas With her thorough analysis of the mutated meaning of displacement in the postmodern age, Caren Kaplan offers an interesting delineation of the modernist exilic subject and the cosmopolitan diaspora.18 The practice of exile has its historical origin in the Hellenic era in the West (Kaplan, 1996: 27) and at least as early as in the Warring States Period (475–221 BC) in China, recalling Qiu Yuan as its prototype poet in exile. Kaplan points out that in the early twentieth century, the trope of exile, as it is manifested in Western modernism, denotes a kind of existential significance of the individual who stands at the margin of history, nation, society, and commerce. This exilic subject is much like the Bejaminian figure of the ragpicker, both of whom are perpetual outsiders. But in Kaplan’s analysis, the subject in question has an ulterior motive: “Euro-American modernisms . . . aestheticized excisions of location in favor of locale—that is, the ‘artist in exile’ is never ‘at home’, always existentially alone, and shocked by the strain of displacement into significant experimentations and insights. . . . [T]he formation of modernist exile seems to have best served those who would voluntarily experience estrangement and separation in order to produce the experimental cultures of modernism” (original emphasis, 28). Clearly presented here is an extremely performative exilic subject who wears a political mask but dances quite a different number. Although the exilic subject commits only to finding an artistic and existential sanctuary, one can argue that such a motivation is as political in nature as the mask he wears. At this juncture, it becomes clear why Benjamin portrays his ragpicker to such disconcerting effect: because he is not to be trusted. As one who chooses to stand outside of history and nation, he has no idealism and therefore feels no ethical responsibility toward any community; as an exilic subject, he relies upon an inflation of his displaced condition in order to create his art, hence shows commitment to truthfulness neither to his locale (of exile) nor his location (of imaginary nostalgia and melancholia).

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The modernist discourse of displacement mystifies and celebrates the condition of exile because transnational travel in the early twentieth century was not as easy as it has become today. The metaphor of distance has more cachet in the modernist discourse of exile as spatial barriers remained a more formidable challenge than they do in our global age. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, the hallmark of the kind of globalization we witness today is mobility.19 Although metaphorically we are “on the move” in an everchanging, information-ridden, Internet and interconnected environment, Bauman argues that “the effects of that new condition are radically unequal” (2). The crucial element that produces varying effects is the possession of the symbolic and material means to mobilize (or globalize) oneself. Gao Xingjian’s Nobel Prize is precisely such a means—it serves as an international passport, as it were, and also provides Gao the financial capability (the award is about US$900,000). With this means, he is free from the spiritual and emotional confinement of exile—“a condition of the soul,” as Aijaz Ahmad describes it (1992: 86)—and is able to enter the openness of the global. He is now, as one airline advertisement says, with a (not so) slight modification, “free to move around the globe.”20 Given today’s heightened mobility, as David Harvey points out in his diagnosis on the time-space compression, sentiments attached to exile or expatriation have diminished significantly. Exile and expatriation have become distant romantic notions under the sweeping force of globalization. The melancholic reaction attached to exile and expatriation clearly has become less applicable. When Adorno articulated feelings about his émigré condition in North America, he spoke of homelessness (Kaplan, 1996: 118–19) and the anxiety about fame and oblivion (Nicholsen, 1999: 115–20). But the reality and convenience of contemporary globalization has made it easier to remedy, superficially or not, the sense of loss felt in Adorno’s sentiments. The modernist mode of exile can no longer be sustained in the global age. Exile and expatriation today should be more appropriately described as cosmopolitan diaspora. The circumstance of diaspora denotes less political victimization and more flexibility with identification and location. Together with cosmopolitanism’s global vision and cultural pluralism, the figure of cosmopolitan diaspora embodies more accurately the experience of displacement in our progressively more transnational world. In Kaplan’s analysis, the cosmopolitan diasporic subject, at once a displaced intellectual-writer represented by such figures as Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, Mario Vargas Llosa, and of course, Gao Xingjian, finds himself welcome in “metropolitan cultural capitals” not because of his struggles against ideological oppression but because his exotic presence and his writing can be “appropriated for hegemonic uses to manage diversity in the context of globalization” (Kaplan, 1996: 123–24).

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But Kaplan cautions us not to simplify what is in fact a complex production process of literature and culture. The cosmopolitan third world-diaspora writer is not a passive participant in this production process. As Kaplan continues to argue by way of analyzing Tim Brannan’s claim on cultural hybridity as an advantageous tool for the cosmopolitan diaspora writer, she proposes that, “our critical practices must focus . . . not on canonical virtues of individual texts, not on the aesthetic properties of seemingly ‘found’ objects, but on the dissemination through publishing, telecommunications, and entertainment industries of products whose conditions of production can be analyzed and made more meaningful” (1996: 124). The cosmopolitan diaspora writer certainly is an active player in this entire process of production. The question is: How does the awareness of being a diasporic writer producing in a metropolitan cultural center affect his or her writing? What kind of metamorphosis does his or her sense of self-identity undergo? If our critical focus ought to center on the conditions of production, as Kaplan proposes above, should not the cosmopolitan diaspora writer’s changed perception of self-identity also be considered as one of such artificially generated conditions?

One Man’s Bible To answer the above questions in the case of Gao Xingjian, One Man’s Bible certainly serves the purpose. Gao began writing the novel after more than a decade of living in Paris with the achievement of being a recognized painter and playwright. His paintings had been sold throughout Europe and they had served as a steady source of income to support his writing. He also had directed several of his plays: Dialogue and Rebuttal, performed by Theater des Augenblicks, Vienna, Austria in 1992, Between Life and Death performed by University of Sydney, Australia in 1993, the same play by Dionysia Festival mondial de Théâtre Contemporain, Veroli, Italy in 1994, and Dialogue and Rebuttal performed by Théâtre Molière in Paris, France in 1995. Almost all of his plays had been performed, discussed, and reported throughout Europe in countries such as France, Germany, England, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Poland, and Romania. His credentials as director and playwright in these European countries suggest that Gao has been able to meet the demand of language of an exile-diaspora person. The degree of comfort with a foreign language is an indicator of how well the displaced person has adjusted to his or her new environment, while at the same time it also shows how this person has managed to integrate himself or herself into the new culture and the economic system. By the time he wrote One Man’s

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Bible, Gao’s status as a cosmopolitan diaspora playwright was already established. He was no longer the same person who fled China and became a voluntary exile in Europe in 1987. Produced out of this new personal situation, One Man’s Bible becomes a particularly intriguing text that allows us to look into the process through which Gao negotiates between his original, native “Chinese” self and his later fashioned diasporic, “cosmopolitan” identity. Alongside this examination, I will argue that Gao’s by now famous call for “without isms,”—a singular belief in individuality and an insistence on leaving politics and national ideology out of creative activities including writing—in fact ostensibly reveals a significant fault in Gao’s envisioning of a new identity through this novel.

Forked Temporality, Divided Self The novel is juxtaposed with two temporal orders, one is the present here and now and the other is the past there and then. Accordingly, the pronouns used to designate the two narrator-protagonists in these two temporalities are respectively “you” and “he.” The “you” and “he” narrator-protagonists clearly suggest two very different dynamics with the author. The one in the present (“you”) stands more closely to the author because of its second-person voice and its situatedness in the present nonnative (Chinese) environments: Hong Kong, Sydney, and New York. Throughout the various trips abroad, “you” are involved in a series of intimate relationships with several Caucasian women. Paralleling this temporality is the narrator-protagonist “he” in the past. This narrator-protagonist who stands in distant China seems to have difficulty engaging fully with those women whom he encounters. As suggested before, the two pronouns are two distinct narratorprotagonists, each having its own relationship with the author. The novel should not be read as the present “you” remembering his (and hence “his”) past, but rather it is the author who conducts two simultaneous dialogues with his two selves. Despite their symmetry, it is important to note that one dialogue is not necessarily related to or conditioned by the other. The only artificial link between these two dialogues is our perception of temporal linearity. But the fact that they are contained within one larger narrative frame, the inter-relations inherent in the novel hence are twofold: the author’s individual relation with each narrator-protagonist, and the interaction between the two temporal lines. Readers of One Man’s Bible have often seen it as a remembrance of the Cultural Revolution. In fact, the author’s achievement in this novel has

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been attributed by the Nobel Prize committee to his depiction of the individual’s torturous existence during this horrifying period in China’s recent history unaccompanied by any moral judgment imposed on the violence inflicted upon the individual. In other words, One Man’s Bible is an objective testimony against cruelties perpetrated by the world’s largest socialist regime. But upon closer examination, it becomes clear that this novel is about the condition of exile “in which present-tense practices lack capacity in and of themselves, but attain significance vis-à-vis the inventiveness of the past.”21 The past is to serve the present in order for the displaced person to find meaning in his or her present condition that is diaspora. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the “he” narrative of the Cultural Revolution contains less conflict and retrospection than does the “you” narrative. The real tension of the novel exists primarily in the “you” narrative of the diasporic present. What would seem to be the most turbulent and treacherous experience, that of surviving the Cultural Revolution, in fact is presented with a great degree of calmness and a sense of direction as well as purpose. The narrator-protagonist “he” moves from one place to another, encountering political trouble after trouble, but he knows all he needs to do is to survive the present condition and maintain an emotional detachment from the world surrounding him. The perspective of this temporal line is distant and factual, as if a camera is documenting a series of events. Throughout this narrative, there is an unmistakable distance the author maintains between himself and the experiences the narrator-protagonist “he” recounts. Contrary to the decided soberness, the narrative of the diasporic present is full of sensual intoxication, an overwhelming sense of rootlessness, and self exposure, both physical and emotional. The storm of the novel occurs in this narrative of the present, and the seemingly turbulent memories of the Cultural Revolution are in fact the calming center of the overall experience of the novel. Because the two themes of the novel are presented in such contradictory styles, the main focus of our reading should be on how the two narratives negotiate with one another, and consequently how the outcome of the negotiation affects the positioning of the author in the meta-narratological level of the novel. It may seem that the author’s intention is to put a closure on his personal traumatic experience of the Cultural Revolution by way of exposing the violent nature of his political encounters and reflecting on the profound impact those events have on his psyche. However, the real challenge for the author lies in how to make a coherent connection between the traumatic past, culminated in the experience of “he,” and the diasporic present, manifested through the consciousness of “you.” Gao’s attempt to do so can be seen in three important final moments of the narrative of the past.

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In the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the narrator-protagonist “he” runs across a series of people who used to occupy a more or less important place in his past. Among them is none other than Chairman Mao, whose body “he” sees in the Memorial Tomb. Confronting Mao “in person” for the first time, the narrator-protagonist “he” is unable to clearly articulate what he really intends to say to this giant who has dominated the lives of billions of Chinese, including “his.” But years later when “you” narrate this experience in a temporal plane distant from the moment when “he” walks past Mao’s open coffin, those vague thoughts finally spring forth: “[T]his is what you want to say to this emperor who ruled as dictator over one billion people. Because you are insignificant, the emperor in your heart can only be the dictator of one person, and that person is yourself. Now that you have said this publicly, you have walked out of Mao’s shadow” (408).22 Clearly the present “you” is attempting to make a logical connection with the past “he” by identifying the rite of passage “he” has undergone to become the present “you.” But this fragile connection is soon broken in the last episode of the past narrative. The final scene takes place in a crowded Tiananmen Square with people marching and shouting “Good days are ahead!” Then all of a sudden, gun shots begin and blood is shed. “He” hides himself in a small corner and feels emotional and sad: “The good times will soon be here, no, for the time being they have been delayed, but they will come. The good times are sure to come. Sooner or later, they will come. . . . He hurried away. The good times terrified him, and he would rather sneak off before the good times had come” (434). This attitude is typical of “him” as a complete outsider, a ragpicker who is uninterested in any form of participation and lacks commitment to any causes. “He” does not put himself above the masses; instead, “he” chooses to stand in the margin of history so “he” can be exempted from history. Does it matter, then, whether “he” has gone through the rite of passage to be free from the shadow of Mao? “His” perpetual outsider attitude undermines any meaningful connection “he” can have with “you.” In chapter sixty, the penultimate chapter of the novel, “he” and “you” have a direct, extra-narratological dialogue. They are talking about their respective narrative, authorship, and relationship with one another. It is interesting to note how the play of pronouns can confuse our reading. Following is an excerpt of this dialogue: Enough! he says. What do you mean? you ask. He says enough, put an end to him! Who are you talking about? Who is to put an end to whom? Him, the character you’re writing about, put an end to him.

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You say you are not the author. Then who is? Surely, it’s clear, himself, of course! You are only his conscious mind. Then what will happen to you? If he is finished off, will you also be finished off? You say you can be a reader, you will be just like the audience watching a play. The he and you in the book are not of great significance. He says, you are really good at detaching yourself! Of course, you do not shoulder or acknowledge any responsibility—moral, ethical, or the like—toward him. (440)

It is important to bear in mind that in this chapter, both “he” and “you” are no longer within the frame of the two stories they tell, although they still remain within the structure of the novel. If this is a direct conversation between “he” and “you,” then a third person, the author Gao Xingjian, is indirectly present as well. The “he” in line three can possibly refer to the author and not necessarily the narrator-protagonist “he” since the dialogue here takes place outside the frame of the two stories, hence leaving it open for other voice(s) to come in. The dialogue here thus can be interpreted as: it is Gao Xingjian the author who feels enough is enough and demands that it is time for “you” to kill off the narrator-protagonist “he.” What is suggested here is abundantly clear: not even the author himself wants to assume any responsibility for the novel he writes and the characters he portrays. The author wants “you” the character to kill off the other character, as if he (the author) will have nothing to do with it and therefore is not responsible for the erasure of the “he” character. In fact, the author seems to think that it is “you” who has created “he,” while “you” immediately clarifies the matter that the author is a separate entity from him, and the narrator-protagonist “he” is only the author’s consciousness. Upon hearing this, “he” then makes the connection that “you” too is the author’s consciousness, and once “he” is gone, “you” will be gone as well. The narrator-protagonist “you,” again like “he” in the previous episode, reveals a tendency to walk away and become a bystander, such as a reader of the novel or an audience of a play. At the end of this chapter, “you” and “he” decide to part company. They appear like colleagues who have collaborated in a project—like actors who have just finished a play by Gao Xingjian: “At this instant, he stops, turns back to look at you, and just like that, you and he go your separate ways” (441–42). But, can they really be separated? Gao Xingjian struggles to tear them apart, but realizes that it is like dividing Siamese twins. The question here is: Why does Gao want to take the two apart? Why is he so insistent on alienating the two consciousnesses of his from one another, while retaining his own connection (as the author and the host of these consciousnesses)

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with them? Is it so necessary that he draw a clear line between his past and present? What is it that he wishes to hold on to, or get rid of, in the process?

Remembrance and Forgetting Apparently if it is “he” (the past) that Gao wants to get rid of (and “you” will transform himself from an actor to an audience), the present is what he wishes to preserve. This leads us back to a previous supposition: that the narrative of the present is the site of contention and ambivalence, hence the focal point of the novel. Contrasted against the immediacy of the present, the author’s memory of the past disappears like the fading of images on an old family photograph. The narrator-protagonist “you” is a political refugee who holds a French passport, and has been invited to Hong Kong to direct a play of his own. The Jewish German woman, Marguerite, with whom “you” has an intimate relationship, considers herself a person without homeland. Both of them are diasporic subjects, meeting in a place of transience: Hong Kong. On the eve of the 1997 handover, Hong Kong was like a crack in the time-space continuum having no connection with the past or the future. As colonial subjects and former émigrés, the people of Hong Kong are those who have little memory of their history. Such a place is the quintessential site of the diasporas. What troubles these diasporic subjects is the question of memory. “You” intends to bury his memory, or even to become a man without memory; while Marguerite is constantly haunted by her memory of rape, who wants “you” to tell her—essentially to relive for her—her experience of mental and emotional rape through “your” account of “your” experiences during the Cultural Revolution. Memory to “you” is a series of nightmares, but to Marguerite, it is what empowers her (60). Ironically, Marguerite, or more precisely, the body of Marguerite, is the sanctuary where “you” hides himself whenever his memory of China begins to find its way back to his consciousness. So he buries himself in the body of a woman in order to affirm his freedom: “With his eyes closed, there was freedom and he could wander within the female cavern, a wonderful place. . . . In this dark natural cavern he was minute, like a single sperm, moreover an infertile sperm, roaming about happy and contented; this was a freedom that exists after release from lust” (34). The diasporic subject’s search for freedom—that is, freedom from the haunting of memory—is here seen embodied in a sexual discourse. The present narrator-protagonist’s finding of complete freedom and relief in sex with women is drastically different from the past narrator-protagonist’s inherent distrust in women. Such dissimilar revelations of the two consciousnesses of the author indicates a few interesting things. They suggest a

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changed self-perception of the author—he is more at ease with and in control of not only himself but also his surroundings. But at the same time, they also show the eternal struggle a displaced person faces. Freedom comes at a high price, and only when the reward manifests itself in sexual ecstasy can the diasporic subject feel certain that such a costly price is worth paying. But as ephemeral as sexual rapture is, the assurance it brings is also short-lived, hence the need to repeat the process again and again. But the repetition does not shield one from the intrusion of memory. Here the role Marguerite plays is twofold: as the sexual sanctuary and as a witness to a traumatic past. It is the latter that distinguishes her from the women “he” encounters, hence the reason why “you” is able to trust and open up to her. It is the intention of “you” to relieve himself from the past through the act of telling/remembering his traumatic experience—to bring about a sense of completion, or to walk out of the shadow of Mao (hence the Cultural Revolution). By finding himself a trustworthy and understanding listener, a Jewish German woman who embodies the complex persona of victim, diaspora, and femininity, “you” is able to construct a narrative wherewith to articulate the unspeakable. As Marita Sturken points out, “The listener is the means through which the traumatic memory can be spoken, known, and made real.”23 Through narration, lost or fragmented memories are recovered. But the remembering cannot be done without the active participation of a sympathetic or interested listener. Marguerite is “you” ’s alter ego who bears similar desires, pains, and memories. She knows “you” since his days in China, thus represents an experiential continuation for “you.” On her, “you” can deposit his memory of the past and walk away not having to bear the burden of memory any longer. As a woman, she also is the site where “you” is able to recuperate from his wounded (and raped) masculinity and reemerge as a whole person. In sum, it is because of Marguerite who has been made the co-owner of “you” ’s traumatic past that “you” is now able to forget. Forgetting, like remembering, is an essential part in reconstructing one’s identity after a traumatic experience. Sturken continues to argue that forgetting allows the traumatized victim to “open [his] subjectivity to profound disrupture” (243), hence allowing the reconstruction process to begin: “Recovered memory designates subjectivities that are constituted through forgetting as much as through remembering. Forgetting is not a threat to subjectivity but rather a highly constitutive element of identity; indeed it is a primary means through which subjectivity is shaped and produced” (243). Because one is able to articulate one’s memory, one’s self is then split into two: the present “I” who speaks (i.e. the present narratorprotagonist “you”) and the past “I” who returns to the time remembered (i.e. the past narrator-protagonist “he”). These two identical and yet different

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selves figure significantly in the conception of the self. How, then, do these two split selves interact with one another? How is this interaction related to the dual act of remembering and forgetting? In psychoanalysis, memory is brought to the fore by two means: acting out (suppressing of memory/forgetting) and remembering. According to Paul Connerton, acting out often “takes the form of aggressive behaviour which may be directed against others or against the self. . . . [T]he crucial point is that acting out . . . is evidence of the compulsion to repeat. . . . But in compulsive repetition the agents fail to remember the prototype of their present actions. . . . The compulsion to repeat has replaced the capacity to remember.”24 “You” has been seen engaging himself in repetitive sexual intercourse with Marguerite during the time they are together. Later in the novel, he continues to have various sexual liaisons with women. In the past narrative, “he” has a similar behavioral pattern (in which he is always the seduced, not the seducer), but sex with women always results in either emptiness or disaster. In his present sexual endeavors, however, “you” is often the aggressor or initiator who controls and enjoys his sexual activities. Sex in the present also serves a specific purpose for him: to soothe and to liberate. So “you” seeks it out. “You” ’s compulsion for sex and the connection of sex with desire to be free from his memory of China are indicative of what Connerton diagnoses above: “you” acts out his sexual compulsion so as to forget. To remember, on the other hand, is a more controlled and calculated process. It requires a context in which one carefully weaves a picture of the past. Memory can never be constructed in isolation; context is necessary in order to give all recalled events a meaningful structure and coherence. The frame within which “his” remembering occurs is the narrative of the present. It is the condition of the present that provides “his” remembrance a purpose, that is, to eventually converge with the present narrative—the final meeting of “he” and “you.” Once the context is established, the narrative of memory can then begin. But the aim of recollection is not a truthful representation of past events but the control generated through representation. As S. J. Brison points out in his study of trauma narratives, although “traumatic memories . . . feel as though they are passively endured, narratives are the result of certain obvious choices (for example, how much to tell to whom, in what order, and so forth). . . . [O]ne can control certain aspects of the narrative and that control, repeatedly exercised, leads to greater control over the memories themselves, making them less intrusive and giving them the kind of meaning that enables them to be integrated into the rest of life.”25 When the narrator-protagonist “you” proclaims that he can transform himself to a reader/audience, and that the author demands that it is time that “he” be written off, the indication is clear: control over the traumatic

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memory has been gained and the reconstruction of the once broken subjectivity is complete. As her crucial role in the process of forgetting, Marguerite is the sympathetic other to the injured self ’s attempt to remedy the damage. This explains why the physical and emotional connection between “you” and Marguerite occupies such a significant part in their relationship and in “you” ’s narration. To the author’s project of remaking his selfhood, the woman too has a dual function: her sexual body (which is willing and open) is used as a site of forgetting and her tortured mind (which lends a sympathetic and understanding ear) serves as the site of remembering.

Riding on the Global Flow The life of Gao Xingjian as represented in One Man’s Bible is an incomplete quest for a new self among women and cities as others. Rejecting both the past and the future does not necessarily make his present any more meaningful. Gao Xingjian relies on using freedom as a term for his ideological struggle; but what lies at the end of the logic of freedom is self alienation— the total denial of need for others. It is clear that the freedom he constantly speaks of is only a fantasy of detachment. The fantasy of detachment inevitably must affect the sense of self. It is no wonder that Gao’s relations to his two consciousnesses are removed. “You” embodies the incomplete self while “he” signifies the detached self. Adding the two together does not make the self whole. In this novel, the ultimate choice Gao makes is to content himself with the self-image of a floating diaspora, a ragpicker of history outside of community. Paradoxically, the Nobel Prize has incorporated him into the apparatus of the global cultural industry. His newly gained literary fame in fact can make his existential choice appear more like a performative gesture. Now an active participant in the international publishing industry (no doubt sales of his books and plays have jumped up in scale since his winning of the Nobel Prize),26 Gao Xingjian may have to maintain this gesture in order to satisfy his readers’ imaginations, if not also the demand of the publishers for promotion. Winning the Nobel Prize has made him a global celebrity riding on the tidal wave of the global flow. The Nobel Prize also has reaffirmed his connection to China. How to maintain his personal agenda of being a free agent/individual in this new context may prove to be more complex than he would like it to be. In this novel, Gao Xingjian has chosen a total rejection of history, tradition, nation, community, and others in order to maintain his independence and to protect his artistic freedom. Gao seems to suggest that nonidentity is the only form of identity for the cosmopolitan diaspora. But it is clear that

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such a stance cannot sustain itself and at the end of the day, Gao is still faced with the fundamental question of identity, community, and a sense of belonging.

Global Citizen/ship: A New Cultural Identity Gao Xingjian has consistently proclaimed in his works, public talks and interviews that he much prefers to be an individualist and an exilic subject who pledges no allegiance to any nation-state or membership to any community. However, given the significant historical position he now occupies in modern Chinese literature and history, the issue of his identity as a public figure cannot be so easily dismissed. His Nobel status inevitably brings to the fore politics on two levels: national (between China and France) and international (between first world and third world). Juxtaposing Gao’s uncompromising position of a non-affiliated individualism and his high profile as the first Chinese Nobel laureate, Gao’s search for belonging and identity demands an alternative perspective that looks beyond conventional templates such as nation and ethnicity that bind a person to a fixed collective identity. Gao’s first novel Soul Mountain can be read as a point of departure for an alternative perspective on cultural identity, specifically seen in his concern for the environment, ethnic minorities, human rights, and his anti-Han hegemony mentality that inform the humanitarian position of the novel. Thomas Moran situates Soul Mountain in the post-Mao literature as a significant piece of “nature-oriented literature”27 in which ecological destruction functions as a national allegory that tells the disastrous aftermath brought on by “the Maoist revolution and socialist modernization” (220). But more importantly, the forest as a symbol of Nature serves as a metaphor of the original state of being that constantly challenges the individual to recover his lost soul or be united with his split self/subjectivity. Primitive culture, too, represents Gao’s other idea of Nature. The Yi folk song singer, the dancer with the animal-face mask, the female shaman, and the myth of Da Yu are all portrayed in the same way as the primeval forest is described to evoke a feeling of awe in the face of Nature’s might. It is in confronting the potent power of Nature that the self becomes aware of its fractured state—the same predicament that continues in One Man’s Bible. However, one point needs to be made clear here: so long as the narrator remains “lost in the woods,” at least there is hope that he may someday run into his lost self. But the same cannot be said about the lot of

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the narrators of One Man’s Bible. Therefore, what marks the main difference between these two novels in Gao’s continual search of the self is that, in Soul Mountain Gao clearly has a spiritual base (the forest) or vision of a nirvana state (the frog’s eyes) that the narrator seeks, whereas in One Man’s Bible this base or vision completely disappears, to be replaced by the flesh on which the narrators relies for any meager sense of meaningfulness. This difference tells most compellingly the changed condition faced by the individual after his transition from being rooted at home to a rootless diaspora. If Gao Xingjian has somehow lost his spiritualism in One Man’s Bible, which he wrote after leaving China, it is then our responsibility to summon back this spirituality. Henry Y. H. Zhao observes in Soul Mountain that the spirituality that prevails throughout the novel is rooted in a fusion of Daoism, Buddhism, and Shamanism which is “a pure oriental spirit, mainly embodied in the natural philosophy of Laozi and Zhuanzi, Wei-Jin metaphysical speculation, and Zen Buddhism. Men of letters for centuries escaped political oppression by turning to this way of life.”28 What Gao Xingjian seeks therefore is not so much folk culture as the essence of this unofficial, nonConfucian spiritual culture that is “the metaphysical and the quasi-religious founded by men of letters after escaping from the mainstream Confucianist culture” (Zhao, 104). This kind of spiritualism can, with benefit, be added to our thinking of the ethics of global citizenship because both respect the marginalized and the underprivileged, the environment, and the democratic spirit of equality and compassion for all. The consideration of global citizenship is important to the transnational, diasporic subject who stands on a less stable epistemological ground of identity formation. Nigel Dower and John Williams, editors of the first reader on the concept of global citizenship, Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction, argue that people who “would regard themselves as global citizens have thus been inspired and motivated not by a general philosophical worldview, such as Stoicism, Kantianism or Well’s ‘mental cosmopolis’, but by their response to social, political and economic problems in areas like development, the environment, human rights and globalization.”29 Only when Gao Xingjian builds the bridge between his existentialist individualism and the world at large by means of global citizenship can he find his proper community and a sense of belonging, thus attaining a coherent cultural identity.

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Chapter 7 Globalizing the Self: The Aesthetics of Hybridity

In this final chapter I will propose and discuss a new kind of aesthetics that is grounded in textual hybridity. This aesthetics of hybridity offers a new concept of cultural identity for our fast globalizing cultural context. Hillel Schwartz argues that in our culture of copy, “authenticity can no longer be rooted in singularity.”1 When an object is deemed original or unique, it then possesses authenticity. Authenticity thus does not necessarily conflict with hybridity as a hybrid is an entirely new (thus “unique” and “original”) product of different entities. Following this line of thought, we can also argue that a hybridized artwork-narrative can be authentic because the artwork has created for itself a new “aura” or style as manifested in the work’s aesthetics. The term “hybridity” can be used in different settings: biological, racial, cultural, linguistic, and textual. Historically racial hybridity—a hybrid— has been regarded as a marker of inferiority for it signals the negative results of interracial reproduction. In the nineteenth-century evolutionary hierarchy, a hybrid occupies the lowest level whereas genetic purity stands on the highest level of the pyramid. Hybridity thus always bears a metaphorical meaning of degradation. In searching for the best model of cultural identity in the current studies of mulitculturalism and identity politics, many scholars seem to agree that hybridity embodies features that can be most accommodating to various conditions and circumstances. However, in identity politics, promoting hybridity inevitably involves making reconciliation with the valuation of authenticity. Therefore we need to be cautious in embracing the concept of hybridity especially when tackling the identity politics of any group or community/society.

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Hybridity and Identity: Cultural, Linguistic, and Aesthetic A hybrid, to define it simply, is the result of two dissimilar organic beings, or “something of mixed origin or composition.”2 The condition of colonial culture can be characterized by cultural hybridity because it is a product of two or more dissimilar cultures meshed into becoming one. But hybridity also denotes a different effect, as Robert J. C. Young argues: “Hybridization can also consist of forcing a single entity into two or more parts, a severing of a single object into two, turning sameness into difference, as in today’s hybrid shares on the stock market.”3 Observing the two types of hybridity, Young concludes that “hybridity thus makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the difference no longer simply different. In that sense, it operates according to the form of logic that Derrida isolates in the term brisure, a breaking and a joining at the same time, in the same place: difference and sameness in an apparently impossible simultaneity” (26). This ambiguous and dubious nature of hybridity allows a great degree of flexibility whereby scholars can manipulate and fashion difference into a totality necessary for constructing cultural identities. And precisely because of the uncertain nature of hybridity and scholars’ manipulation of it, hybridity is hardly a stable concept. But to view it as a dynamic process of constant change is not helpful either. The problem arises from the essential nature of all forms of identity, and how to (re-)construct cultural identity based on the unstable concept of hybridity. In pursuit of a coherent and authentic cultural identity, hybridity actually poses a serious problem while at the same time a great potential. Here I propose a solution to formulate an aesthetics of hybridity in order that the subjectivity that is being shaped in the process of creating such aesthetics will have a coherent identity firmly rooted in the aesthetics. This identity then can become an index to cultural identity as both aesthetics and hybridity are located within the field of culture.

Cultural Hybridity Hybridity often is regarded as a threat to the very faith in a coherent and authentic cultural identity. But in postcolonial theory, hybridity ironically becomes the very tool by which the collective identity crisis is to be resolved. In Homi Bhabha’s analysis of the formation of hybridity, the hybridization process is always dynamic and incomplete. Tension existing in the interaction between the culture of the colonizing power and the

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indigenous culture gives rise to a “third space” in which the colonized can negotiate their cultural identity. Using Renée Green’s analogy of the stairwell, Bhabha identifies the third space to be occupied by the in-between mediator who joins the colonizer’s culture and that of the colonized, the artificial culture and the authentic/original culture, the usurper and the rightful. Hybridity is what transpires in this third space where the dominated/colonized articulates the difference for the purpose of authorizing the hybrid identity of their culture. To further illustrate the meaning of hybridity, it is necessary to understand that there is never a precise, one-on-one translation of one cultural signifier to another. That is to say, when the colonial subject translates the colonizer’s cultural signifier, difference emerges and “[i]t is through the emptiness of ellipsis that the difference of colonial culture is articulated as a hybridity acknowledging that all cultural specificity is belated, different unto itself.”4 The colonial pursuit of an authentic and authorial cultural identity is not a power struggle between the alien culture and the indigenous culture, but rather an ideological battle between the indigenous culture and its hybrids. Inherent in Bhabha’s theorization of hybridity is the productiveness of this very condition. Through hybridization the colonial subject may be able to invert the colonizer’s domination by turning its gaze back to itself, as it were. However, despite the hybrid’s capacity to raise questions or create ambivalence about the authorial power, this form of “fighting back” still cannot claim victory until the colonial subject itself can also legitimize its cultural hybridity. Bhabha’s conceptualization of hybridity as a “partializing process”5 not only greatly empowers the colonial subject but also considerably neutralizes the effects of the colonizer on the psyche of the colonial subject. The concept of hybridity thus is remarkably inclusive and overtly productive. Of course this concept is expanded by Bhabha beyond colonialism to the global culture phenomenon. Hybridity’s inclusiveness and productiveness actually fits rather well in a postmodern society’s pattern of culturation, but in postcolonial consideration of cultural identity, the lucid nature of hybridity can create a new paradox for the colonial subject in pursuit of postcolonial identity. Again, according to Bhabha, the colonial subject can develop in the third space a new cultural discourse to reassert new identities and power, inverting the authority of the dominant into “a mask, a mockery” (120); boundaries in the third space (contained within hybridity) are constantly blurred, freeing any authorial claim to a singular identity/difference. In this in-between space, the hybrid identity is no longer the colonizer’s alien culture or the indigenous originary culture, but a something else, something other than the Other or the self (219). If the hybrid identity is that “third thing,” how does it attain authority so that the new identity can be recognized and stand on its own, so

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to speak? A logical answer would be: this new hybrid identity must seek to endow itself with new authentication. But before that can be accomplished, it is important to understand how this new hybrid identity is formed.

The Aesthetics of Linguistic Hybridity Identity is constructed upon difference; the process of conceiving hybrid identity is especially entangled with cultural differences. In a postcolonial narrative, such a process is particularly intense and complex. The process of establishing hybrid identity is the same as the process of relating the self with multiple images of the Other. As these images are inscribed by the self, the totality of the self ’s splitting identities becomes the hybrid identity. Here the inscription is carried out not by a monolithic language but by an array of languages, the Bakhtinian heteroglossia. Linguistic hybridizationhybridity, in Bakhtin’s analysis, embodies much more than the mixing of languages; it signifies the merger of sociocultural-individualistic world views that are very conscious and concrete.6 This conglomeration of different languages is by no means in harmonious coexistence but is full of contention and competition, relating to each other dialogically. Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia illustrates how literary writing is inherently a discourse of linguistic hybridization reflecting the sociocultural condition in which it is situated. In “Discourse in a Novel,” Bakhtin argues that intentional hybridization is essentially the way to create the artistic image of heteroglot languages in the novelistic narrative. He states, “hybridization . . . is a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance . . . between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor. . . . The image of a language conceived as an intentional hybrid is first of all a conscious hybrid (as distinct from a historical, organic, obscure language hybrid) . . . a mixture of two individualized language consciousnesses (the correlates of two specific utterances, not merely two languages) and two individual language-intentions as well.”7 Through the discourse of the novel, the image of language can be developed into a system of images, thus creating the unique stylistic (a notion to which I will return) of the novel. The stylistic, or aesthetics, of linguistic hybridity is the order that structures the creation of the artistic image of the heteroglot languages within a novel. It embodies the ideological and social voices of the time of the novel. The interaction between (two) different sets of sociocultural itineraries leads to producing a new way to perceive the world. As I have pointed out in chapter 5, parody is in Bakhtin’s analysis, an extreme form of hybridization because in a parodic narrative, there is

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constantly a strong presence of two languages dialoguing and wrestling with each other. Within the parodic novelistic discourse, boundaries of languages are never stable. Furthermore, the two languages are organized by a unique artistic system into the representing language of the novel—“what is present in the novel is an artistic system of languages, or more accurately a system of images of languages.”8 This presence is important particularly for a highly hybridized narrative. When the system of images of languages is created, the subjectivity of the authorial voice is also formed. Bakhtin points out that the main task for the analyst is to investigate this intricate web of dialogic relationships, to seek to understand yet another dialogic relationship between the work, the author, and the broader sociocultural context that is outside of the work. What can be carried further is to articulate the subjectivity generated from the dynamics within this constantly dialogizing relationship of heteroglot languages which forms the system of images of languages. When this new subjectivity, arising from linguistic hybridity, dialogizes with the outside sociocultural context, its (cultural) identity then can be conceptualized, as the dialogical relationship between the discourse and its referential object(s) is based not on the purely linguistic aspect but the metalinguistic dimension of the discourse and its relation to the empirical reality.9 This identity belongs also to the author who creates the discourse (or utterances) through which his or her views of the world are expressed. The consciousness and position of the author, in Bakhtin’s dialogism, plays the role of expanding and communicating with “the autonomous consciousness of others . . . (human types, character, natural and social phenomena) . . . an active dialogic penetration into the unfinalizable depths of man” (68). The governing philosophical principle of the system of artistic images of languages can be understood as the stylistics or aesthetics of linguistic hybridity. Here Bakhtin elaborates on the concept of “stylistic”: “Stylistic must be based not only, and even not as much, on linguistics as on metalinguistics, which studies the word not in a system of language and not in a ‘context’ excised from dialogic interaction, but precisely within the sphere of dialogic interaction itself, that is, in that sphere where discourse lives an authentic life” (202). Stylistic, which is equivalent to “aesthetics” in our contemporary literary theory,10 thus can be the transpiring mechanism of the identity of the artwork’s subjectivity which, at first glance, may appear opaque and ambiguous. While the authorial consciousness contributes to the many voices in the discourse, it also structures the overall artistic form of the novel. Thus the subjectivity born of the aesthetic principle of the discourse’s hybridization is a refraction of the author’s subjectivity, and the subsequently formed identity can also become the author’s (cultural) identity

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in his or her relation to the empirical world (both the local environment and the world at large) where he or she lives and experiences life. To further illustrate this argument, it is necessary to discuss in detail how subjectivity is reified in aesthetics. Inherent in Bakhtin’s theorization of linguistic hybridity is his assumption of the national culture as a stable body which contains different subcultures. His conceptualization of heteroglossia takes place within one national tradition where the mixing and crossing of cultures is quite different from how we conceive of “interculturation” today. But Bakhtin’s theory is still useful for our understanding of cultural hybridity against a postcolonial and postmodern background. Out of the web of different discourses in a narrative, Bakhtin’s theory not only identifies but also legitimizes an authorial voice and subjectivity. Even though the context in which he defines “hybridity” is quite different from that of Bhabha’s, their ideas of this complex concept do intersect. They both attempt to institute in the process of cultural hybridization an authority whose power comes from the individuality, uniqueness, and unrepeatability11 of this cultural hybrid. With these analyses in mind, I will proceed to Adorno’s aesthetic theory, particularly on the notion of autonomy, and bring together these three theorizations of hybridity to form an aesthetics of hybridity, which will, in turn, serve as the foundation of a new conceptual foundation for cultural identity.

Aesthetics and Identity Within Bhabha’s “third space,” the postcolonial subject can create a discourse of its own. The hybridized cultural condition, which is intrinsic to the third space, is reflected in the heteroglot language the postcolonial subject uses to construct its identity. But how does the postcolonial subject legitimize and authenticate its new hybrid identity? There are many ways to achieve this goal—gaining political power in order to have certain degrees of representation is one, establishing an independent voice through artistic creation is another. In order to legitimize and authenticate a hybrid identity via an aesthetic discourse, the discourse itself must be endowed with autonomy, that is, it must occupy its own place alongside other nonaesthetic discourses. The main thrust of Adorno’s aesthetic theory lies precisely in the autonomous state of the artwork, and because of this autonomy the artwork is able to reflect the truth of the particular sociocultural-historical era in which the artwork is situated. In relation to any empirical reality, the identity of the artwork is not given by the world outside but comes from within the artwork

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itself. It identifies with “the non-identity,” the conceptually undefined content of identity or the Kantian idea of “thing-in-itself,”12 that is to say, the identity of the artwork is always a self-identity, or seeks to become the ideal of its self-identity—“only by virtue of separation from empirical reality, which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work’s own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence.”13 This “heightened order of existence” is what gives the artwork the ability to carry within itself a truth content by which it gains its objectivity. But this is not to ignore the role the subject plays in the creation of the artwork. The subject (as embodied by the artist) is the specific mediator through which the aesthetic quality of the artwork is achieved. The subject is historical and social as well as cultural—“in relation to the work, the individual who produces it (the artwork) is an element of reality like others. . . . The labor in the artwork becomes social by way of the individual, though the individual need not be conscious of society. . . . The intervening individual subject is scarcely more than a limiting value, something minimal required by the artwork for its crystallization.”14 The subjectivity emerging from the artwork belongs actually not to the individual subject—the empirical “I” or the speaking “I” or the latent “I”—but the collective historicalsocial-cultural We (Adorno, 167). The ultimate identity of the artwork therefore is the sublimation of the principle of history, culture, and society. The qualification of authenticity is inherent in this identity. The artistic truth content, being able to “crystallize” history, society, and culture, warrants the artwork authentic with its aesthetics which is the philosophization of the objective truth content. Autonomy thus is the major premise of the artwork’s authentic identity. There is an internal logic working within the artwork, despite the fact that the artist (the individual subject) himself or herself is situated in a specific historical condition. Adorno’s aesthetics regards the artwork as a product of its culture and social tradition as well as a divine or sublime experience that is beyond reason. Because of this dual nature, the subjectivity intrinsic in the artwork thus embodies universal and particular qualities all at once. In the following sections, I will take my understanding of Bhabha’s “third space,” Bakhtin’s linguistic hybridity, and Adorno’s autonomy of art as my theoretical framework to examine Zhu Tianwen’s attempt to resolve the polemics of hybridity and authenticity embedded in the postcolonial identity politics. What emerges from Zhu’s language is a subjectivity of a highly hybridized narrative. The novel thus presents to us a new kind of aesthetics—an aesthetics of hybridity, which signifies a new form of cultural identity for our globalized time.

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Notes on an Idiosyncratic Writer: Zhu Tianwen The postcolonial condition of Taiwan’s culture, combined with its capital city Taipei’s postmodern cultural milieu, is the context in which Zhu Tianwen considers ways to authenticate Taiwan’s hybrid cultural identity. Her later fiction is exactly the type of literary work that accentuates the elements of cultural and linguistic hybridization. Her idiosyncratic narrative style is marked by the deliberate application of translated foreign vocabulary and a high psychic intensity. Her representational aesthetics suggests that her approach to the world is narcissistic; but this is not to say that she is oblivious to the cultural and political milieu of her time and place. Precisely because Zhu Tianwen is remarkably sensitive to the cultural climate of Taiwan as embedded in the global market while also situated in the historical juncture of postmartial law era (post-1987), her peculiar insistence on returning to the self, mediated through material exoticism (including language as a system of “signs”), has important signification for us in our search for new existential meanings for the individual living in the postmodern commercialism who is also searching for ways to re-authenticate his or her identity. Zhu Tianwen is the oldest daughter of a prominent literary family headed by Zhu Xining. Her writing career started in the seventies when she was only sixteen. She immediately became, and has since been, one of the best selling writers in Taiwan. Her earlier works are primarily middlebrow romances, stories centered on her childhood memories, and collections of sentimental prose. In 1980s, Zhu Tianwen became involved in writing movie scripts for the director Hou Hsiao-hsien whose films15 not only have significantly changed the course of Taiwan’s movie industry but also brought Taiwan movies onto the international screen. At the age of thirty-five, after five collections of short stories— Qiaotaishou xinji (New stories of Minister Qiao,16 1977), Chuanshuo (Legends, 1981), Zui Xiangnian de jijie (Most memorable season, 1984), Yanxia zhi du (City of high summer, 1987), Shijimo de huali (Fin-de-siècle splendor, 1990), four titles of collected prose pieces—Danjiangji (Notes of Tamkang, 1979), Xiaobi de gushi (Stories of Xiao Bi, 1983), Sanziemei (Three sisters, 1985), Xiawucha huati (Afternoon tea conversations, 1992), and several major movie scripts, Zhu Tianwen finally produced her first full-fledged novel, Huangren shouji (Notes of a desolate man, 1994).17 Scholars and critics regard her short story “Fin-de-siècle Splendor” (1990) as a breakaway from her previous sentimental, nostalgic style of writing.18 This new style of writing is remarkably more sophisticated, reflecting “an aging voice,” as Zhan Hongzhi characterizes it;19 it is more experimental with the “materiality” of language; sharper, colder, and somewhat

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nihilistic in portraying urban existence. Although the characteristics of exoticism and narcissism have been consistently present in Zhu Tianwen’s fiction since the late 1980s, it is in her first full length novel Notes of a Desolate Man that these two characteristics seem to have delved into a much deeper level of the narrative. They are significant elements in the formation of a coherent subjectivity for Zhu Tianwen in her increasingly hybridized narrative.

Narcissism: Performative Subjectivity The narcissism characteristic of Zhu Tianwen’s post-1988 stories brings forth an aesthetics of performativity with an emphasis on the body. Performativity here is not merely an idiosyncrasy; it is closely connected to how an individual reacts to the role the society casts upon him or her, and how this role is played by the individual. The more narcissistic the individual, the more performative he or she is of this social role. The particular narcissistic practice of Zhu Tianwen is to fashion the self through a highly exoticized language by affirming the existence of the body through fetishism. She fetishizes the material in order to (re)assure the ex-sistence of the self, as if the material were the double of the self. To further elaborate this type of narcissism, let us visit the well-known story of Narcissus. In Ovid’s version of the myth, before this beautiful youth falls in love with his own reflection, he is approached by the nymph Echo whose love he rejected vehemently. One day, accidentally he sees a beautiful image in the water which he takes for another’s and falls in love with along with the voice he hears (which is his own reflected by Echo). Tragedy arrives when Narcissus comes to realize that both the image and the voice he fell in love with are actually his own. In despair over the unresolvable dilemma of being the object of his own love, Narcissus slowly wastes away. Later a lovely white narcissus flower is found by the river where Narcissus gazed at his reflection. The tragedy of Narcissus lies in his not being able to accept others’ love, while at the same time knowing the impossibility of being (physically) loved by himself. But in Zhu Tianwen’s twisted interpretation of this myth, she insists on a happy ending where her Narcissus-like characters do not see it a tragedy to be in love with the self. Mediated through material fetishism, the self is able to “feel” love from and for its self.

Exoticism: A Strategy Any sensation of difference, Victor Segalen argues, can be regarded as exotic.20 The initial confrontation with difference creates the sensation of

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“shock” and thereby arouses in us an awareness of the Other. Exoticism thus is a sharp and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility that is the exotic Other (Segalen, 27). Bakhtin defines exoticism in similar terms: “exoticism presupposes a deliberate opposition of what is alien to what is one’s own, the otherness of what is foreign is emphasized, savored, as it were, and elaborately depicted against an implied background of one’s own ordinary and familiar world.”21 Designating an exoticum, essentially a utopia-like location, allows one to establish an existential space for recuperation from loss of values as well as an escape from the confines of one’s native culture and society (Segalen, 23, 68). Viewed historically, exoticism by the Western colonial power since the late eighteenth century has already been widely criticized in studies of Orientalism and Postcolonialism. Recent studies on many canonical literary works and those that were less noticed have brought new understandings on the correlation between politics and culture, power and writing, and self and Other in terms of representation and domination.22 In retrospect to Orientalism, Xiaomei Chen has undertaken studies of Occidentalism23 in which she illustrates how the Chinese constructs the Occidental Other not to motivate outward political expansion and domination but to fulfill domestic political aims and needs. Situating her studies in the post-Mao period, Chen argues that Occidentalism—the systematic portrayal of the Western Other as antagonistic—has, on the one hand, been utilized by the Chinese government in order to legitimize, under the name of nationalism, its internal domination and oppression of its own people. Living under strict political and ideological control, Chinese intellectuals, on the other hand, attempt to create the West as China’s model and superior Other so as to create channels to express different ideas. The discursive practice of (mis)depicting the Other, such as Orientalism and Occidentalism, thus is not necessarily rooted in imperialism as Said has suggested. It actually depends on how it is put to use, by what interest groups, who is at the receiving end, and how it is received. Chen argues that Occidentalism and Orientalism provide a channel for an indigenous culture to understand the effects produced by misrepresentation of the Other. Chen thus contradicts the meaning implied in Orientalism that acts derived from it can only be viewed as cultural imperialism. She concludes that Orientalism and Occidentalism can help us better understand society’s internal cultural and political conditions as well as its relation to other cultures in any given historical moments. The misrepresentation of the Other as Chen proposes in her model of Occidentalism can find resonance in Zhu Tianwen’s stylistic method of exoticizing the Western Other. In the 1990s Taipei, the exotic is integrated into the protagonist’s familiar world of a postmodern city. She invents an exoticum manifested in the very materiality of the

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exotic objects themselves, in which the exotic Other is a void object made up of fantasies. Because the exotic is now integrated into the familiar world of postmodern Taipei, the meaning of “exoticum”24 must go beyond geographical restriction. Thus Zhu Tianwen invents an exotic space filled with evocations of exotic material such as foreign herbs and fabric. A pseudo-eternity is preserved in Mia’s dried flowers, herbs, and handmade paper (190). The record of her rebuilding the world and its history will be written on her own handmade paper of rose petal. Concerns for historicity are no longer important for Zhu Tianwen as she looks neither forwards nor backwards. She has her gaze only at the present. But what kind of present is she gazing at? Can this present serve as a mirror to reflect the image of the subject? Is there a limit to what this mirror can reflect and what the gaze can grasp? In his later theorization of the mirror stage, Lacan redefined the role of the mirror as limit and consequently the gaze as limit: “The mirror may on occasion imply the mechanisms of narcissism, . . . it also fulfills another role, a role as limit. It was that which cannot be crossed. And the only organization in which it participates is that of the inaccessibility of the object.”25 The mirror not only reflects our own image in a narcissistic way, it is also the reminder that we can never reach beyond the mirror and unify with the ideal self-image. But we can also argue that, it is precisely this realization of limit, our awareness of the lack that further intrigues the narcissistic subject to try to fill the lack. The desire for a narcissistic identification with the ideal self is powerful, but at the same time the subject is also aware that this desire can never be fulfilled. A way to compensate is to convert this desire to a fetishism of external materials for their usefulness in adorning the body as exemplified in Mia’s obsession with exotic plants, fragrances, and fashions. The same argument can be used to explain the stubbornness in Zhu Tianwen’s utilization of narcissism and fetishism for the construction of a self-sufficient subjectivity. Even though the self and its own reflection is always separated by the mirror, or more precisely, the gaze, the self ’s narcissistic ideal already preexists the gaze. The inaccessibility of the object therefore does not hinder the narcissistic self ’s infatuation with its own image. In other words, since the gaze is a narcissistic gaze, the reflection can become the ideal image whose perfection is inexhaustible—here we need to return to Ovid’s Narcissus story and see how it ends. As Narcissus slowly wasted away by the river bank, his soul crossed over to the underworld. Narcissus, though no longer a living mortal, still could not stop looking at his own reflection in the waters of the Styx. Such is the powerful mechanism of narcissism with its facility to maintain the integrity of the self ’s subjectivity— even beyond death, when Narcissus enters the realm of Hades. What would

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seem to be a de-subjectivizing reflection of the mirror, or the gazing object (the “other” self in the mirror), actually only reaffirms the narcissistic orientation of the gaze itself. What obsesses Narcissus even after his death is not the image reflected in the water that he sees/gazes at; rather, it is the image’s gaze back at him that captivates him. The spectator thus is the object of its own gaze—Narcissus cannot look away from the image he sees precisely because the gaze of the reflecting image (the Other) locks the two in an endless circle of their narcissistic gazing back at one another. The gaze of the Other thus is not de-subjectivizing; on the contrary, it is with the enjoyment of gazing that the self ’s subjectivity is supported.26 In Notes of a Desolate Man, the coalition of narcissism and fetishism for the exotic makes an even stronger case for subjectivity building in the postmodern and postcolonial situation when everything is either being or having been deconstructed; when subjectivity is contingent upon ideology and the logic of relativism; and when simulation and simulacra seem to be the only reality we can cling to.

Identity and the Aesthetics of Hybridity Although in some ways Notes of a Desolate Man27 is a continuation of the unusual writing style of “Fin-de-siècle Splendor,” it still stirred up a critical storm in the literary world of Taiwan. The novel’s provocative subject matter (male homosexual eroticism), unusual authorial perspective (a female writer assuming the voice of a gay man), excessively exoticized and floral language (mixed with Buddhist scripture language, English, transcribed foreign words and names, borrowed texts), and the indeterminacy of its genre—prose? fiction? allegory? theoretical monograph?28—all created heated discussions on issues of gender/genre crossing,29 gender politics,30 postmodern poetics and materialism,31 the author’s ideological conservatism, her nostalgia for the martial law era reflecting the social-historical complex typical of second-generation Chinese mainlanders such as the author herself,32 and so on. Whether to read the novel as the author’s attempt to reestablish an ethical order in a postmodern cultural disorientation, to envision a transnational queer community, or to articulate the dynamics between gender identity and nationalism33 is beside the point. What is the most unsettling, in my view, is probably the cultural and literary “unauthenticity” the novel’s hodge-podge style of language seems to implicate. Indeed, it is the issue of authenticity (that begs the question of hybridity) that touches the very core of the politics of identity in Taiwan—whether it transpires in forms of nostalgia, gender politics, or cultural origin complex.

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The narrative presents itself as a textual and linguistic mosaic; its complexity is especially noted by the English translators of the novel: “The translation of Notes of a Desolate Man has been a treasure hunt that has taken us back to books and writers and thinkers we haven’t encountered for years, has sent us to musty corners of video rental shops, and has enriched our collection of resource materials.”34 Such complexity resides not just in the content of the novel but also in how the narrative visually appears on the page. Inevitably this particular quality must create a problem for critics as how to situate this novel in the postcolonial cultural and political context of Taiwan. Not only the “generic” identity of the novel is in question, its “cultural” identity is also in question. In the following analysis, I will answer the question of whether it is possible to conceive an authentic identity from the aesthetics of hybridity in a highly exoticized and hybridized narrative such as Notes of a Desolate Man.

Utopia The novel is filled with an exoticized lexicon which is the language of the gay narrator in his narcissistic reflection on sexuality and the meaning of existence. The narrator perceives of himself as a gender hybrid—“I dissected myself, the bud of a feminine soul trapped in a masculine body. My mental activities were full of feminine characteristics, but my body, this body that carried the DNA of reproduction, could never escape its biologically determined state” (72).35 The narrator perceives men of his kind to be the “odd components screened out” by the time-space transcending deep structure of all civilizations as Lévi-Strauss has excavated it, prompting the narrator to ask: “Where would he (Lévi-Strauss) locate us in his matrix?” (39). In order to find ways to legitimize a gay man’s place in a human society, the narrator delves into the essence of civilization—knowledge. His search for a social, cultural and existential position for himself takes place in dialogue after dialogue with philosophers, thinkers, artists and scholars of both West and East, from antiquity to the modern. In his initial attempt to define who he is—a gay, a queer, a homosexual, or a “terminator of the kinship system” (46)—the narrator finds that it is only a game of naming, of playing with words. Definition derived from such game playing is fluid. In order to find a more stable and solid ground for his identity building, the narrator realizes that he needs to look for structure and order. He looks closely into Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, imitating the master’s neat grid in which every person or thing has a proper and functional position. But in the master’s structure of the kinship system, there is no place for the homosexual. From Lévi-Strauss’s study of how the Caduveo

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tribe preserved the essence of their culture through body painting, the narrator also realizes his “homosexual tribe” does not have its own language/ signs for the recording of its unique existence; without one’s own language, how can one even begin to define one’s identity? Finally the narrator contends that the “homosexual tribe” may have to borrow others’ languages, but at least they have their own body. His search for self identity thus boils down to language and body. He believes gays have an androgynous soul; they are “narcissistic neat freaks” who are the incarnation of Mallarmé’s lovely swan (73, 76). He adores the body refined and preserved by modern-day alternative cares and cleansing techniques. The narrator and his fellow gay friends practice all sorts of cleansing and preservation rituals to refine their body in order to maintain its youth, using creams made of extracts of exotic plants and crystallites from the Dead Sea, practicing therapies such as previous-life regressive therapy, hypnosis, rebirthing, herbal tea therapy, and the New Age music therapy of listening to natural sounds ranging from the deep ocean to the outer space. Though a paradox, it is precisely because the body is owned by oneself that the self is able to treat its body as something other than oneself—it becomes the exotic Other which can be imagined and manipulated by the self in accordance with its desire. The same desire also drives the narrator to indulge in the pure materiality of words, believing it can raise him to a higher ground of perception, pierce through the veil of reality to its very core where his existence as a gay man may have its rightful place. He believes he can find utopia in the magical realm of words—words that record mysterious sounds, names, phrases found in sutras, color charts, city maps, fashion vocabulary, botany—“My supernatural was words, writing” (124). The body being a concrete and tangible object and words being abstract and intangible, together they are the spell of turning imaginary utopia into a definable locale which also is itself an exoticum. As David B. Morris observes, “[U]topia in the postmodern era has largely fixed its new location in the solitary, private, individual body . . . the insistently private and secular postmodern utopias reflect a belief that the only valid remaining space of perfection lies, ready-at-hand, in our own individual flesh: a paradise of curves and muscles.”36 Although the narrator’s contemplation on his self-identity reflects his own hybridized cultural consciousness, what is more significant is his desire for structure, order, truth, and purity. A world built upon the principle of structure and order is a defining characteristic of utopia, as Ruth Levitas concludes from her systematic study of the different definitions and utilizations of utopia, that it is “the imagination of alternative worlds intended to represent a better way of being for the human beings in them.”37 The kind of utopia the narrator (and the author) desire is orderly: Lévi-Strauss’s structure,

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the mathematical music of Bach, the world led by the Great Man, a universe presided over by God where “there was no identity issue, for God was in his heaven, all was right with the world. . . . A world I long for, one I thought might exist only in the collective dream of human race” (38). Behind this desire lies a need for structure and order, indicating lack of an articulatable relationship between the self and the Other in this chaotic state of existence. The anxiety of the narrator lies precisely in his not knowing how to position himself in the epistemological maze of the postmodern world. The ultimate goal thus is to lay down structure and order for the intensely hybridized symbolic world of the novel and its cultural context so that identity can be established. The chaotic state is presented through Ah Yao, the narrator’s alter ego, his self-destructiveness. The order of his life is like the structure of a storm—vortical and violent. Whether through self-destructive energy and combatant passion as seen in Ah Yao’s promiscuity and involvement in gay rights and fighting against AIDS, or through persistent reading and research as demonstrated by the narrator’s worship of Western knowledge and Eastern spirituality, results of the confrontation of these two tendencies in the narrative, or “resolutions” for the two characters, is ambivalent only because neither the narrator nor Ah Yao has faith. Although Ah Yao fights until AIDS takes away his life, his belief in activism reveals not an unshakable faith but rather a cover-up of his deep doubts and anxiety. When he slips in and out of night clubs with a different lover each time, exhausting his senses in endless sex, he is actually a lost soul “tormented in the labyrinth of identity,” as the narrator once describes himself (26). In the narrator’s image of Ah Yao, this undaunted AIDS fighter becomes a human fly, “the tragic protagonist in The Fly, who, after finally finding his girlfriend, begs her to help change him back into a human being” (27). But no power can restore his human form because he himself always rejects any such opportunity. He simply does not believe in salvation. If he catches a glimpse of utopia, it would be when he gets temporarily lost in the brief moment of orgasm or when his senses are dulled by incessant sexual encounters. The story of the narrator, on the other hand, goes in the opposite direction even though in essence it is not entirely different from Ah Yao’s. The narrator diligently studies every philosophy, religion, literature he can find; searches through the cultural venues of film, fashion, art, popular spirituality and entertainment, wishing to find rational explanations and thereby ultimate salvation for his existence as a gay man who seems to have “no choice, and no way to change” (39). He yearns for the neat sociocultural structure Lévi-Strauss has established from his life-long studies of human societies; he also admires Foucault’s willingness to be different, his refusal to

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be labeled (43) as Foucault’s final work Histoire de la sexualité reveals to him. But no matter where he turns, he always finds himself trapped in the dialectical web of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Foucault’s deconstructionism. It is difficult to create a place for a gay man in the former’s structure of the kinship system, although the blue print it presents is clear; to derive answer or conclusion from the latter is no less difficult because deconstructionism, by default, resists conclusions. That is why Foucault can only remain silent at the end, leaving behind a dim revelation of erotic utopia (45), a place that Ah Yao longs for. In this linguistic utopia where words are pure signs, articulation of identity becomes futile and unnecessary; but does this mean the narrator has found a way to surpass Lévi-Strauss’s vision and Foucault’s conclusion? His solution actually is to resort back to the self. To answer his own questions— “What, exactly, is the existence of the self that has no choice? What happens if it is changed? Is changing oneself a negating act? What is the meaning of existence if the self is negated?” (39)—the narrator finds that the self cannot and must not be changed, for “each existence and its type has its own unique answer” (40). All negations and affirmations thus must be with and in the self. The self therefore exists like the pure signs of language. Thus in his contemplation, the narrator seamlessly moves from philosophical reflection to reciting his color table-sutra: “The material is existence, the only kind of existence. There is no meditation and no metaphysics, for what the subjective eye sees is the only thing that exists. Double vermilion red, rosy red, shell red, persimmon red, agate red, gray lily red, ivory red, pink oyster red . . .” (72). Underneath both the narrator’s apparent disorientation and Ah Yao’s extreme conviction of their gender-social-individual identity lies a strong subjectivity from which their desire for utopia is generated. The external chaotic state and the inner desire for order in the narrative both point to a common goal: an affirmation of identity which is an utopian unification of the two contradicting tendencies as demonstrated by Ah Yao (the erotic utopia) and the narrator (the linguistic utopia). The dialectical dynamics between these two tendencies is generated not only from the novel’s stylistic power but also from the very ambivalence of the confrontation of these tendencies. The gap or the discrepancy between extreme acting out and the lack of faith is the source of ambivalence. But the ambivalence is absolutely necessary because it is precisely where subjectivity is allowed to exist. Here Lacan’s later notion on the relationship between the “Real” and the Symbolic becomes relevant. Imagine if there is absolute clarity, that the barrier between the Symbolic and the “Real”—the kernel of jouissance (which is itself pre-discursive) that resists any symbolification—is broken

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down, subjectivity then will be dissolved in a psychotic state.38 Existence of subjectivity must rely on confrontation, or a dialogical relationship with the symbolic world, as otherwise it cannot maintain its integrity. The desire for utopia is an acting out of the lack.39 Utopia is where the subject imagines jouissance can be found and the lack can be fulfilled. As Ruth Levitas points out, utopia is also an “expression[s] of desire, or what desire is supposed to be, and not versions of a possible future. . . . Where utopia is not expected to be realised, one is constrained only by what it is possible to imagine, not by what it is possible to imagine as possible.”40 Both Ah Yao and the narrator therefore must wander between the two polemics. The search for utopia has ended for Ah Yao at the moment when his life is taken away by AIDS; but for the narrator, it proceeds in the sphere of writing, no longer reading, as he finds at the end of the narrative that, “Time cannot be turned back, nor can life. However, in the process of writing, I am able to turn back everything that otherwise couldn’t be. So my writing, it continues” (166).

Third Space In the narrator’s search for self-identity, he combs through many great books, converses with thinkers and philosophers across cultures, and even travels to far corners of the world to find his answers. His search presents itself as a visually and substantially dazzling tapestry, woven with Western postmodern philosophization of gender and sexuality by great names of Western figures, ancient Eastern scriptures and thoughts, cinematic visions and visualizations of reality, New Age spirituality combining Daoism and Tibetan Buddhism, and private sensitization of the world’s spaces from the Mediterranean to India to Japan as if the whole world actually stood on his palm. His encyclopedic exploration of the subject of identity and the meaning of existence takes him to the fleeting moment captured by Monet, the light reflecting on his dying wife’s face; it also takes him to the moment when Michael Jackson reveals to Oprah Winfrey in an exclusive interview in Neverland how he sometimes likes to ride the merry-go-round by himself at night. From these anecdotes the narrator sees the fleeting and lonely nature of existence. But he also learns life can be sacred and precious when he and his lover Yongjie travel to Rome, in St. Peter’s Basilica where they find validation of their love through the divine holiness revealed in religious ceremony. To try to transcend his generation’s pursuit of homosexuality, he looks to the “new new” generation’s belief in sexlessness as represented by the narcissistic, self-sufficient teenager Fido, son of erotic utopia. He also finds his explanation of such self-love in the Japanese director Naruse Mikio’s aesthetics of subtlety and passivity. But his best moment of clarity is

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probably when he chants the enigmatic words from Master Zhiding’s Treatise on the Sutra of the Ksitigarbha Bodhisattva’s Original Vow, or when he reads names of the visual imagery of red and green in Chinese poetry contained in a periodic table of color drawn from a Japanese book on Chinese colors, exhibiting 140 different reds based on the MUNSELL Color Chart, and the greens on 10 GY in the Green Chart: “moist red, light primrose red, fingernail red, vale red, light peach red, light poppy red, apple red, cheek red, melon pulp red . . . mugwort-back green, Jialing River green, tender lily green, grasshopper green, water green, hydrangea green, mantis green, pea green, chalcedony green. . . . When we escape the logic of words, abandoning even their semiotic functions, they become shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope that form magnificent visual scenes. I lost myself in this color garden of pure sensation, as if flying in a world seen through the multiple-lens eyes of a fly, and forgot to return to the real world” (65). This virtual space constructed by words devoid of syntax is the narrator’s linguistic utopia where he does not have the burden of finding meaning. As intricately and richly woven as is this tapestry of exploration, inbetween threads are many third spaces where the narrator’s strands are to have their trajectory. He reiterates others’ discourses and appropriates their experiences to constitute his own. The narrator deploys rhetorical, philosophical, and narrative power to question, obvert, or subvert established thoughts and ideologies to negotiate an in-between space for his own rationalization to stand. The narrator’s dialogue with Foucault and Lévi-Strauss particularly exemplify the utilization of a third space. The narrator erects the discourses of these two Western thinkers like two tablets in parallel and uses the in-between space as his locus of debate with the two scholars and with himself. What is shown here are three languages crisscrossing one another. The inscription is carried out not by a monolithic language but by an array of languages. These different languages are by no means in harmonious coexistence, instead, they relate to one another dialogically and their coexistence is one of contention and competition. Throwing his words and questions into this dialogical contention and competition, the narrator hopes to construct a sexual/social/cultural identity for himself. Walking inside Lévi-Strauss’s dense network of thoughts, the narrator finds himself falling into cracks because he sees himself, a gay man, the ultimate marginalized figure in the human society. He then turns to Foucault for the answer because after all Foucault is also one of his kind. But Foucault’s dark and depressing analysis and prediction cannot lead the narrator to a higher ground of realization. He suddenly finds himself standing between two visions, one the constant of structure and order, and the other the dark void of chaos. The narrator proceeds to the space of Taipei to find an exit to his identity labyrinth. The city’s language, spoken through its popular culture, presents

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to the narrator another dimension of erotic utopia, pure carnal pleasure filled with fragrances, sleek fashions, and faceless bodies. Bouncing back and forth between the city’s secret entrances, the narrator finds his conclusion in T. S. Eliot’s prophetic words: “I made love, but felt nothing” (115). But his dialogue with this city’s language leads him further to see a universe of postmodern materialism—boutiques filled with exotic merchandise, cultural fads, and fashions. In this universe, he discovers yet another universe which he can make up with incomprehensible shop names: KISS LA BOCCA, VINO VINO, Butterfly Feeds the Cat, 4T5D, Postmodern Graveyard, Stuffed Kitty, Alley 86, HOMELIKE—“The city appearing under my pen existing only in words, and when the words disappeared, so would the city” (122). Again he resorts to written words as the only method by which to construct meaning out of confusion. An in-between space appears when he, through words, ruminates on every moment he spends with his true love Yongjie. His rumination always relies on refracting the experience recounted on the screen of Othering—adopting Fellini’s golden rule of strict discipline to protect the fragile yet sacred tie he and Yongjie share with his family; articulating their experience of beauty and aesthetics through ancient mythologies of Japan and Egypt. With borrowed discourses, the narrator actually portrays an “unreal reality” of his experience of love. His is an empty discourse in which there is only fantasy, with no real communication in his language of realism. The narrator imagines that his existence as a gay man will be accepted in the erotic utopia where gender difference no longer matters and sex ceases to be regarded as an activity for reproduction purposes. But because “utopia” is a (happy) place of nowhere, the narrator’s conception of self-identity thus can only be realized in his pure land of words which is itself another kind of utopia built upon language. Utopia is also desired by Zhu Tianwen. Her vision is to form a subjectivity and to realize it in a total self-identity through the power of pure words as signs. Through this means she hopes to find a Lévi-Straussian golden structure where everything has its proper place. This desire of structure and order is directly influenced by her mentor, Hu Lancheng—in many ways, the figure of Lévi-Strauss in Notes of a Desolate Man is precisely the reincarnation of Hu Lancheng.41 Zhu Tianwen’s desire for structural and orderly utopia takes the form of a personal fetish for pure linguistic signs. There is a critical connection between utopia and fetishism, as Carol Thomas Neely points out. Neely argues that utopias and fetishes are not only “characterized and specularized, by their irreducible materiality or territoriality, and by narrativity,” but they also “protect against loss, impotence, and mutilation by screening them over with substitute objects whose stories provide the perfect satisfaction of bodily, psychic, or social desires.”42 Despite such significance, Neely goes on to argue,

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creators of fetishes and utopias are often regarded as “trivial or pathological— especially by the normativizing impulses of the dominant culture—European, male, politically conservative, and reproductively heterosexual— whose value systems they have disavowed and refigured” (60). The harsh criticism of Notes of a Desolate Man and of its author when the novel first appeared confirms precisely Neely’s observation. Utopias and fetishes should not be taken lightly. The desire for utopia and the cultural functions of the fetish actually reflect a deep sense of crisis that is both personal and cultural. Zhu Tianwen’s linguistic fetishism (which materializes language) represents a kind of feminine narcissism43 which must see itself realized through the desire for utopia. Zhu Tianwen is this narcissistic female fetishist who carves out a new place/space that is her linguistic utopia where subjectivity can be theorized in terms of an aesthetics of ornamentation and hybridization. In our case, utopia and fetishism reflect an anxiety of cultural hybridization and an ambiguity of identity situated in this cultural hybridity. But this is not to say that makings of utopia and fetish are passive activities— “Utopias accumulate and display objects that reflect back their makers’ desires and deny loss” (Apter, 67). Zhu Tianwen’s investment in conceiving utopia through her fetishism of pure linguistic signs is an active project of identity building.44 By writing a highly hybridized narrative and appropriating and replicating different discourses, Zhu Tianwen actually achieves an absolute authority and control of her situatedness in Taiwan’s particular historical juncture and its current cultural climate. She creates a process of disintegration and reintegration through which she is able to reassemble the self with the foreign—such as Western, Chinese, Japanese—cultures that threaten it. The identity the author desires thus embodies the cultural reality of Taiwan as both postmodern and postcolonial. This identity is rooted in the organizing philosophical principle of the system of artistic images of the novel’s heteroglot or hybridized languages. Situating herself in Taiwan’s intensely hybridized postmodern and postcolonial cultural milieu, Zhu Tianwen uses linguistic hybridization as her ironic means to form a complete sense of the self. Because pure linguistic signs are her fetishized objects, her seeking out of exotic linguistic signs is a natural tendency of such fetishism. Fetishism thus effectively subsumes materials and cultures. The material site which is constructed by fetishized objects then substitutes for the dominant ideologies and cultures which Zhu Tianwen wishes to resist as well as to subsume.45 Essentially this material site is a utopian site. The self who is fetishist is narcissistic. The narcissistic self must want utopia because it is the only place where he or she can realize his or her unrealizable desire. Functions of fetish and utopia thus reaffirm the self ’s narcissism, and it is only by maintaining an intensely narcissistic self that the Lacanian sinthome, the kernel of the self’s subjectivity,

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can be felt the strongest. Here Zizek explains: “In contrast to the object small a, there is nothing metonymic-unattainable about it: it is just a little piece of the real that we can hold in our hands and manipulate like any other object. . . . [I]ts very presence serves as a guarantee that we will be able to endure the inconsistency and absurdity of the universe. Its paradox is then the following: it is a little piece of the real attesting to the ultimate nonsense of the universe, but insofar as this object allows us to condense, to locate, to materialize the nonsense of the universe in it, insofar as the object serves to represent this nonsense, it enables us to sustain our self in the midst of inconsistency.”46 Zhu Tianwen’s piece of the real is comprised by the sutras, the red and green color table, and the incomprehensible shop names that she tirelessly copies and parades—it is, in short, her fetishism of (the materiality of ) language.

Palisade: The Location of Authenticity From the edge of a palisade, the narrator catches a glance of what he believes to be Foucault’s final vision: erotic utopia. The image of palisade suggests that the discursive rationalization of sex and sexuality must reach a dead end and can only be continued in the fantastic and the sublime utopia. The particularity of palisade connects a (dis)course on the one hand, and disconnects it but allows a new (though dangerous and unknown) vision on the other. This image appears in the novel where the narrator, after following Foucault’s discourse of sexuality, realizes that even though this distinguished scholar and thinker can effectively deconstruct “sexuality,” he still cannot de-marginalize the homosexual, nor is he able to escape from the grand institution of sexuality—“He appeared to have been liberated, but was not. He seemed to have found the answer, but had not. I followed him up to the lofty mountain crags, but the road ended at the edge of the sky, and there he disappeared. I shouted his name, but there was no answer” (44). From the palisade the narrator no longer sees any possibility of continuation of old discourses. But where land ends, skies begin. On another palisade, Palisades Park of 1943 where Tennessee Williams conducted his homoerotic adventure, the narrator sees a different (from Foucault’s) history of sexuality, or rather, a history of homosexuality: “From atop the palisade, a brief glance down was enough to make me dizzy. As I stood there, I felt something that maybe Foucault had experienced: erotic utopia. . . . an erotic nation built upon sensuality, artistry, aesthetics. . . . Standing there, I seemed to understand that many erotic nations must have appeared in the course of human history. They were like exotic flowers that disappeared after blooming but once. Later generations could only dimly detect their

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existence amid vanishing, decaying texts, for they could neither expand nor grow. They became extinct in the frozen sorrows of indetermination and slow degeneration. Yes, this was probably our sad yet beautiful destiny. The past, or the fleeting present, or the future all sail toward Byzantium. Sail toward an erotic utopia. In ancient times, tiny nameless countries that dotted the area around the Mediterranean like stars, those that didn’t pass down any myths, were terminators. We are the terminators of the kinship system” (45–46). There is a sense of mutilation and disruption in this process of thought. Not only palisade itself suggests geographical disruption, the image of “kinship system terminators” also indicates mutilation. At the moment when the narrator senses the disruption of the land and feels the effect of mutilation, his subjectivity is actualized. Here the Lacanian “symbolic castration” is useful to illustrate the point. The anxiety over the possibility of castration produces in the self an acute awareness of its subjectivity and a desire to define its self-identity. Standing on the edge of the palisade and thinking of himself as a terminator of the kinship system produces in the narrator anxiety of falling and failing, but it also creates for him a pessimistically optimistic vision of the erotic utopia. He is standing in-between possibility and actuality—the erotic utopia and the erotic nations are an empty possibility, but the narrator’s continuous striving for different visions of them through his relentless writing and reading on the subject matter bears witness to their actuality. His fantasy of erotic utopia is crucial to maintaining his subjectivity, for “being a subject depends on the split between its fantasmatic support and its Symbolic/Imaginary identifications. If the balance is disturbed, the subject will lose either its stake in the Real or its identification in the Symbolic.”47 This also explains why erotic utopia can only exist, potentially, in the labyrinth of heteroglot or hybridized languages and discourses. Zhu Tianwen has constructed many models of her utopia through an exotic lexicon and hybridized languages. The spiritual hierarchical universe of Buddhism is a utopia; the alternative social structure of Lévi-Strauss’s tribal worlds is another; the sublime state of Christianity materialized in St. Peter’s Basilica is yet another manifestation of her utopia. But what really represents her utopia are the sutras, the red and green color table, the literary classics which she tirelessly copies and recites throughout the text of the novel. In this intentional hybridization of her narrative, Zhu Tianwen locates her source of authenticity in the aesthetic quality of hybridity. That said, the “unauthentic” and hybridized narrative of Notes of a Desolate Man thus can be given an authentic identity. Adorno argues that the concept of originality under the capitalist law of consumption has been transformed from the so-called individual style to the invention of new types.48 With this novel, Zhu Tianwen has achieved, if not anything else, at least a new

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type of novelistic discourse. But if we look beyond the material-fetish facade of her narrative style, her invented new type actually has a soul, a substance, what Adorno calls the aesthetic truth content that is the crystallization of history, society, and culture.49 Hybridity thus becomes an important instrument of identity building for the postcolonial. It is so because in hybridity one can never find a precise correspondence of one cultural signifier to another; in other words, when the colonial subject translates the colonizer’s cultural signifier, difference inevitably emerges. With the emergence of difference, a new identity can be formed and the postcolonial subject can walk away from its colonial shadow to step into a new terrain where authenticity can be regained. The hybrid text of Notes of a Desolate Man is precisely the kind of narrative for a new formula of postcolonial identity building. The image of palisade thus can be designated as the location of authenticity. It is so because the fantasmatic effect resulting from its dis/connectedness of different discourses can on the one hand make the self aware of its subjectivity, while on the other inspire in the subject new conceptualizations of identity for itself. This double function resembles that of third space but the palisade image stresses the impact of disruption and mutilation as well as its stimulation of fantasy. Something other than the existing discourse and the yet-to-be envisioned discourse is what is produced, and the nature of this something new must be a third thing which comes out of the combination of the already-existing and the yet-to-be. In other words, it must be a hybrid. On the edge of her cultural palisade, Zhu Tianwen creates out of her position new conceptions of value and conceptualizations of identity. The postcolonial subject must realize that lost identity can never be brought back, therefore the only solution is to reconstruct a new identity. Similarly, the narrator also must accept that a gay man is not endowed, at first, with a socially acceptable gender identity, therefore he must strive to create a legitimate one for himself and his kind. With the novel’s intensely hybridized language, Zhu Tianwen has transferred the postcolonial struggle with identity construction from the field of sexual identity to the field of linguistic aesthetics. It is idealistic, but it also has great potential because defining hybridity in the aesthetic realm can take the concept out of many conventional and historical degradations surrounding it.50 Zhu Tianwen has a good justification for retreating to the field of linguistic aesthetics. Language (mimesis) is essential in articulating and philosophizing identity. In fact, as Adorno argues, the experience of language is the only course that can lead us to a realistic and materialistic understanding of identity and subjectivity, owing, precisely, to the dialectic nature of language. Situating the articulation of identity in the field of linguistic aesthetics is a way to avoid essentializing the subject of identity to the original, to something homogenic.51 But this is not to say that art is a clear reflection of

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the truth it embodies, as Adorno also points out the enigmatic nature of art—“[it] has truth as the semblance of illusionless”52—nevertheless, art provides a venue to locating authenticity in the aesthetics of hybridity. The narrator dialogues with a long line of thinkers and artists on the meaning of existence. He searches as well in cultures existing on the vast horizon of the world for the definition of identity, especially identity for people like him. In this course of exploration and articulation, he already offers a new context in which to (re)conceptualize an authentic identity for the gender hybrid. Zhu Tianwen also locates the authenticity of her narrative art in this highly hybridized style of writing. Here we must bring back Bakhtin’s differentiation of two types of linguistic hybridization: the “organic,” unintentional and the conscious, intentional. The former is a common linguistic practice which occurs often in interculturation; the latter, on the other hand, happens when boundary-crossing becomes necessary. Pnina Werbner correlates these two linguistic practices thus: “[O]rganic hybridity creates the historical foundations on which aesthetic hybrids build to shock, change, challenge, revitalize or disrupt through deliberate, intended fusions of unlike social languages and images. Intentional hybrids create an ironic double consciousness. . . . Such artistic interventions—unlike organic hybrids—are internally dialogical, fusing the unfusable. . . . What is felt to be most threatening is the deliberate, provocative aesthetic challenge to an implicit social order and identity, which may also be experienced, from a different social position, as revitalizing and ‘fun’.”53 Zhu Tianwen’s hybridization is undoubtedly intentional as her attempt to cross cultural and ideological boundaries is clearly the drive behind her practice. Throughout the novel, there are many passages which are superfluous in their connection to the main thrust of the narrative. These passages are Zhu Tianwen’s hidden personal discourse mixed in with the main discourse of the novel. On the surface they seem to suggest the author’s uncontrollable urge to display her knowledge of historical places and anecdotes of wellknown figures, as well as her enthusiasm in describing trends of material subcultures, particularly those concerned with style. But this urge or enthusiasm actually reflects her attempt to renegotiate a new cultural position by validating cultural hybridity, which is precisely what Werbner proclaims in the quoted passage above, “[an] aesthetic challenge to an implicit social order and identity.” Telling inside stories and anecdotes gives the impression of the story teller’s intimate relationship to her subjects. Those of Zhu Tianwen’s “superfluous passages” indeed portray a very personal connection or affinity she has with historically significant places in the world and influential figures from many cultures of different times. As a postcolonial figure/writer living

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in the postmodern city Taipei, she creates this intimate relationship not toward a re-designation of her (thus symbolically Taiwan’s) “power position” in its relation to dominant national cultures in the world; rather, she wants to suspend the realization of such a goal. What holds her back is that such a goal usually entails confrontational political gestures, while she prefers nonconfrontational measures. Through the example of Ah Yao she plays out this scenario, and Ah Yao’s tragic ending indicates Zhu Tianwen’s reluctance toward this option. Instead, if she recuperates her anxiety in the suspense, Zhu Tianwen not only can play with many possibilities, also through endless potentials she can even gain a form of power. She refuses to let the ultimate outcome arrive, thus suspending the process by denying herself the opportunity to become a so-called fighter for postcolonial identity. In this double negation—“began from the negation of the negative and the negation of existence” (162)—Zhu Tianwen actually is the postcolonial identity seeker/maker/ fighter, as Zizek explains: “This is what Hegel has in mind when he claims that, in the course of a dialectical process, the immediate starting point proves itself to be something already mediated—that is, its own self-negation: in the end, we ascertain that we always-already were what we wanted to become, the only difference being that this ‘always-already’ changes its modality from in-itself into for-itself.”54 Zhu Tianwen’s aesthetics of hybridity thus becomes an analogy for postcolonial identity politics.

Globalizing the Self The achievement of Zhu Tianwen’s novel is that it breaks new ground for the theorization of the concept of hybridity. Aesthetics of hybridity in Notes of a Desolate Man can provide a way for us to articulate the subjectivity within the artwork, thereby finding conciliation between hybridity and identity. The processes of authenticating and authorizing this hybrid product follows the logic of postmodern commodification of difference. Through a consumer market, the narrator and his likes are able to choose from seemingly endless styles and subcultures that stress “uniqueness.” Because of the open market of Taiwan, the circulation of cultural and intellectual products has been able to penetrate the cultural consciousness of its people, and this phenomenon is reflected in Zhu Tianwen’s appropriation and imitation of them. The aesthetic mode of the novel is seduction; the unique authenticity created is not to corral or be linked with ethnicity. Instead, it is reflexive under its aesthetic impulses. To many postcolonialists, Zhu Tianwen’s stance may seem less than aggressive and she may be considered too deeply steeped in postmodern indulgence in narration and appropriation.

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But the truth of the matter is, she is both postcolonial and postmodern in her cultural and political situation. Her aesthetics of hybridity which articulates the utopian desire is a hard won means of expression and realization. As a postcolonial subject, she feels the need to legitimize her cultural hybridity; as a citizen of postmodern culture in which anything goes, she feels legitimation is merely another institution to be deconstructed. It is therefore not surprising that she chooses to recuperate in aesthetic hybridity precisely because it is paradoxically both political and transcendental. In retrospect, the value of a novel such as Notes of a Desolate Man is not determined by how many copies it has sold in either its Chinese or English version; its value lies in that it has intricately articulated a very complex cultural experience we, people who live in a globalized world, all share. It places us in the multicultural world and forces us to think, if not also to imagine, what our cultural identity is. The truth this novel conveys lies not in how it shows us ways to construct a particular definition of cultural identity, but how it, through its own aesthetic standard and achievement, sets up the idea of “truth” in the first place. The experience of this novel thus is the experience of cultural identity in a globalized world. Zhu Tianwen envisions this globalized world with a center that is the self, thus the world is not mapped out according to national or geographical boundaries, but is seen as a whole composed of many different cultural parts. The cultural identity of the self in this vision does not follow the narrow definition of identity which must be bound to a place and determined by a collective group of people. Lawrence Grossberg along with Giorgio Agamben and Robert Young propose an alternative conceptualization of identity, the idea of singularity.55 Grossberg proposes an alternative logic of otherness; Agamben defines singularity as “a mode of existence which is neither universal (i.e., conceptual) nor particular (i.e., individual)” (103). Young suggests the openness of the idea of the singular can lead to more tolerance of difference than the relatively more stringent concept of identity. Their ideas are very close to Zhu Tianwen’s vision in which identity—gender identity (as in the case of her gay narrator) or cultural identity (as is in her concern)—does not exist outside of the self because the self can be more stable than its Other which is constantly changing. The community on and by which cultural identity is based and defined thus is replaced by a sense of belonging generated by the individual, a singularity, who is involved in that particular time and space. This explains why the gay narrator of Notes of a Desolate Man attempts to base his gender identity on the transnational homosexual/queer/gay community instead of his specific nation-state of Taiwan. Zhu Tianwen also tries to define her idea of cultural identity by transcending her ethnicity and nationality. As Grossberg interprets Agamben’s argument and further elaborates, “It is only at the

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intersection of the various lines at the concrete place of belonging that we can identify the different processes of ‘individuation carried out through groups and people’, new modes of individuation and even subjectivation with no identity. Such a community would be based only on the exteriority, the exposure, of the singularity of belonging. . . . A politics of singularity would need to define places people can belong to or, even more fundamentally, places people can find their way to. . . . [I]dentity can become a marker of people’s abiding in such a singular community, where the community defines an abode marking people’s ways of belonging within the structured mobilities of contemporary life. That would be an identity worth struggling to create” (104–05). Zhu Tianwen would agree with that. This community and identity which are of and above space and time are represented in Zhu Tianwen’s aesthetics of hybridity. With this aestheticnarrative mode, Zhu Tianwen situates herself well in the “global cultural village” of which she regards herself a member. This is not to say that she intends to ignore her postcolonial background; on the contrary, she is quite aware of it. There are moments in the novel when she laments through the narrator her awareness of the legacy of Western neo-colonialism in Taiwan (26) as well as her “cultural origin” complex toward China (150). To resolve these politics-laden issues, Zhu Tianwen embraces world civilizations which allow her to expand the horizon of her perspective. She does not offer writing as an expression of patriotism because she refuses to use patriotism as a way of resisting domination. She rather looks to “myth and forgetfulness” (155), to beauty created by artists like Nijinsky, Fellini, Satyajit Ray, and Ozu Yasujiro. But most of all, she admires the blind old prophet Tiresias of Greek mythology who shares her belief in the power of words (158–59). Finally in Sakyamuni’s process of achieving enlightenment, who at the end was able to see beyond life and death, happiness and misery, contention and harmony, Zhu Tianwen finds a path to ultimate peace (160–62). Her process of achieving enlightenment is through writing. By incorporating in her narrative all things under the sun and synthesizing them into the aesthetics of hybridity, she is able to achieve a new sense of cultural identity, one that is not based upon ethnicity or nationhood, but is built upon a sense of belonging to the community of cultures around the globe. The question is: Can she, a writer who shoulders the political and historical responsibility of the colonial legacy of Taiwan, afford to be so apolitical and ahistorical? This is a serious question because what is being asked is how we stereotypically expect a writer from a geopolitical location such as the postcolonial Taiwan to be “politically” minded, if not outright political. Zhu Tianwen’s retreat into the realm of aesthetics is a subtle way of testing

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the notion of whether her seemingly apolitical-ahistorical gesture can be considered as an alternative political stance, the “not so political” kind, for a postcolonial writer. If the answer to the last question is affirmative, then we must not easily dismiss Zhu Tianwen’s effort to try to get out of the politics in and the inter-politics of postmodernism and postcolonialism.

Coda: Cultural Identity and Cultural Globalization

The current phase of intensified globalization will bring changes to the ways in which we draw distinctions between the self and others as well as to produce the perception of the world, or the globe, as a finite space whose boundaries are now imaginable. Our global age is forcing us to dismantle our old identity and reassemble a new one, making us weary of our cultural identities. Global capitalism has magnified the impact of culture on our everyday practice as well as on national and international operations. The confluence of all of these phenomena has unexpectedly created a new paradox for us: understanding the finiteness of our world can actually open up countless possibilities to reassemble our cultural identities. How to better understand the nature of culture as it is today thus becomes yet another important task that we must undertake, and I hope this book has put forth a decided step toward this understanding. Finally, before I close my discussions of an open and flexible Chinese cultural identity, I would like to reflect on the growing new political tension across the Taiwan Straits among China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Specifically I want to go back to the weeks of nationwide protest in Taiwan against unfair results immediately after the general presidential election in March 2004, and place it side by side with the protest of Hong Kong people on April 11, 2004 against China’s attempt to withhold the pursuit of democracy for Hong Kong. Taiwan has been enjoying a democratic political system since 1987 and its people have gone through numerous elections, most notably, the three general presidential elections in1996, 2000, and 2004. The 2004 campaigns of the two competing parties, the DDP and the KMT coalition, were dominated by two issues: ethnic identity and Taiwan independence. It is completely shocking to see how the entire country is and can still be so deeply divided along strict ethnic lines. It is as if the past struggle and hard work toward building Taiwan to be an open society and a democratic country has all been for naught.

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Meanwhile, the people of Hong Kong have to maneuver within a very small negotiating space with limited political means to preserve its democratic freedom and in the long run, its cultural identity. The enormous solidarity the people of Hong Kong have exhibited since the 1997 handover is impressive. Looking at both societies side by side, I cannot help but wish that the people in Taiwan treasure their still fragile democracy and will not allow fundamentalist interpretations of race, ethnicity, and nationalism erode the cohesiveness of the society. But perhaps the most important question here is: How will China handle the proliferating democratic and independent sentiments in both Taiwan and Hong Kong? Will China be able to develop a more tolerant attitude toward ideological diversities? Perhaps I should not have taken for granted the democratic spirit in conceptualizing a new paradigm for constructing Chinese cultural identities. But the spirit of democracy is important. It is only when people across all Chinese communities in the world come to understand and embrace cultural hybridity as a norm and a reality in their cultural condition that the current political divides within Taiwan society, between Taiwan and China, and between the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and China can be overcome. Perhaps it is necessary to take for granted the democratic spirit so that all will be allowed to fashion cultural identities that best reflect who they are, regardless of their race, ethnicity, nationality, and heritage. The journey that started this book has led me to a deeper understanding of the make-up of my cultural identity. I am much more aware of how the flexibility of my hybridized cultural identity allows me to at times feel more Taiwanese than Chinese, at times feel more Chinese than American, and at other times feel a blend of all three identities. Comprehending the working of hybridization and appreciating the unique beauty of hybridity makes me feel much more at ease with what and who I am. It has been a long process of self-discovery, but it has been well worth the effort.

Chinese Names and Terms

Introduction: Dis/Claiming “Chineseness” Chen Yiyuan Huayan Jing Taiwan Guji Quanji Yiyuan gu cuo

Chapter 2 Negotiating China’s Cultural Authority: Technology of Genealogy and the Self “Benci lieche zhongdianzhan” Changhenge Dangdai wenyi sichao Dushu gaichaohuandai geming hangchuang de duoshou “Guiqulai” “Huangshan zhi lian” Jiangnan Jingcheng dixingtu “Jinxiugu zhi lian” Jishi he xugou: chuangzao shijie fangfa zhi yizhong Jishi yu xugou: Shanghai gushi “Jiushu yu xiaofei” “Lan gaizi” “Liushi” Lun wenxue de zhuti xing

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Mugulü Nanqishu Nanshu “Nü nü nü” ren Roran Ru Rujialou Sanlian shi “Shushu de gushi” tongzhi Tongzhi—shizu lue Tujue Tuobashi wailaihu Weishu wenhua taolun Wenxue pinglun Wenyi lilun yanjiu “Xiaocheng zhi lian” Xingge zuhe lun xinnian “Yu, shashasha” zhenli zhiqing Zhongshan

-

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Chapter 3 Refashioning Cultural Authenticity: Taiwan benshengren Cong sishi niandai dao jiushi niandai Fangzhou shang de rizi Gudu hanjian Huayi qianshen Jian Tan

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179

Jinsheng jinshi juancun “Langman miejue de zhuanzhe— ping Zhu Tianxin xiaoshuoji Wo jide” “Liangwei qunxun huiyou de yu— wo suo zhidao de Zhu Tianxin” Ruhe xiandai, zenyang wenxue shengji wenti Shiyi shiwang Sishinianlai zhongguo wenxue “Taida xuesheng Guan Lin de riji” Taohuayuan Taiwan tongshixu waishengren Weiliao “Weinisi zhi si” Xiang wo juancun de xiongdimen Xiaoshuo zhongguo xin Taiwanren xinxing minzu Zhongsheng xuanhua Zuori dang wo nianqing shi

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Chapter 4 Hong Kong Androgynous: Embodying Cultural Hybridity Anzuozhenni: yige bu cunzai wuzhong de jinhua Dituji du fukan Lianhe bao Nanshanjing Sanguo yanyi Shanhaijing zhuan Shuang shen Shuihu zhuan V cheng fansheng lu

:

V

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Chapter 6 Chinese Diaspora and Transnationality: Envisioning Global Citizen/ship Bi’an “Chengren de zhengzhi yu bei chengren de qidai” Duihua yu fanjie Lingshan Meiyou zhuyi Ming Pao Shanhaijing zhuan Shengsi jie Taowang Yigeren de shengjing Yeyoushen Zhoumo sichongzou

Chapter 7 Globalizing the Self: The Aesthetics of Hybridity “Baidong zai xiandai yu hoxiandai zhijian: Zhu Tianwen jinqi zuopinzhong de guozhu, shidai, xingbie, qingyu wenti” Chuanshuo Danjiangji Huangren shouji Ji Hu Lancheng bashu Qiaotaishou xinji Sanzimei “Shenji zhi wu—hou sishihui? houxiandai qishilu?” Shijimo de huali “Shoukun zhuliu de tongzhihuangren— Zhu Tianwen Huangren shouji de tongzhi yuedu” “Wenhua gongyexia de gexingdian” Xiaobi de gushi Xiawucha huati

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Chinese Names and Terms Yanxia zhi du “Yizhong laoqu de shengyin” “Zai huangyuanshang zhizao tongxinglian shengyin: yuedu Huangren shouji” Zui xiangnian de jijie

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Notes

Notes to Pages 1–9 Introduction: Dis/Claiming “Chineseness” 1. There exist a small number of articles and books on the island’s most prominent families that date back to the Qing period. My family and its mansion, known as the Chen Yiyuan, is ranked in terms of size and age the third largest family after the two Lin families of Ban Qiao and Wu Feng. Please see Taiwan Guji Quanji (The complete collection of Taiwan historical sites) (Taipei: Huwai shenhuo zhashishe, 1980), vol. 2, p. 231, under the heading: Yiyuan gu cuo (The Yi Yuan old mansion). 2. Definitions of the term “diaspora” have been expanded to encompass all immigrants. My usage of the term specifically refers to people who are forced to leave their native country because of political prosecution. 3. Francis Harold Cook, Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), 2.

Chapter 1 The “Right” to Copy and the “Copyright”: Authenticity, Hybridity, and Cultural Identity The epigraphs to this chapter are drawn from Hillel Schwartz (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 11 and Michael Taussing (New York & London: Routledge, 1993), 129 respectively. 1. The term “globalization” is so commonly heard nowadays that it almost requires us to revisit the question: What is globalization? John Beynon and David Dunkerley, editors of Globalization: The Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), begin the book by citing the “love bug” incident that took place on May 4, 2000. This incident involves a computer virus contained in an e-mail entitled “I Love You” that was sent out from Manila. Within hours, as people in Europe woke up and

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Notes to Pages 10–18 started to open their e-mails, the virus spread from computer to computer like wild fire. Not only were millions of computers in Europe infected by this virus, computers in other parts of the world were also disabled by it. Financial and personal losses caused by this “love bug” were enormous. This example demonstrates one of the many facets of “globalization”; but most importantly it illustrates this “interconnectedness” we have come to find ourselves in not only on the intercontinental and international levels, but also on the interpersonal level. “The Truth about SARS,” May 5, 2003, 48. Gopal Balakrishnan, “Virgilian Visions,” new left reviews, 5 (Sept.–Oct. 2000): 143. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2000, 190. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 137. Please see his Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), especially the first chapter. Terry Eagleton has made a compelling argument in linking together “culture” and “identity.” Please see his The Idea of Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Oxford: Westview Press, 1997), 16. “The Global in the Local,” Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 31. Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 20 (Winter 1991): 354. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York & London: Routledge, 1993), 10. In classical Chinese aesthetics, “authenticity” carries quite a different set of value judgments from that of its Western counterpart. My discussion of “authenticity” here excludes any consideration within the framework of classical Chinese aesthetics. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York & London: Routledge, 1988), 230. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984), 16. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Aglaser, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 6. Emphasis original. Jeff MacGregor, “Copying Copies: Stardom to Celebrity,” March 19, 2000, Sec. 2: 27. “Fake: A Mediation on Authenticity,” FAKE, May 7, 1987–July 12, 1987 (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987): 41. “The Art of Appropriation,” The Art of Appropriation, Sept. 26–Oct. 26, 1985 (New York: Alternative Museum): 6. The intricate relationship between the Copy and the Original is further illustrated in an article in The New York Times, “The Master of Fake Masterpieces” (April 27, 2003). Amy Serafin, the editor of Where magazine in Paris, reported an unusual gallery in France run by Christophe D. Petyt that sells nothing but

Notes to Pages 18–29

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23. 24.

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27. 28.

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faux masterpieces. It has been a successful business for Mr. Petyt who has toured his collection of imitations around the world. All the customers of Mr. Petyt want to have a Van Gogh or a Degas (that appears original) to hang on their walls. But, according to the article, none of them “are willing to go on the record as owning fakes.” In fact, one of Mr. Petyt’s clients, according to the report, a French-Costa Rican heir who has adorned his various mansions with fake masterpieces, never reveals the truth to his guests who assume his artworks are authentic. However, the truth is, all of Mr. Petyt’s copies are clearly identified as such by a notation on the back of the canvas. So, despite these fake paintings’ indistinguishable quality from the originals, both the law (that demands the notation) and the client (who refuses to admit of owning fakes) still find it necessary to maintain and respect the line between the fake and the original. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 93. New York & London: Routledge, 1993, 61. Taussig has discussed this notion and the complex network of power in the context of colonialism in his previous book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980). “Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today,” Textual Practice, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 39. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, eds. Introduction, Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), xi. The Location of Culture (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), 113. “Modernism’s Last Post,” Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism, ed. by Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1990), 4–6. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), 22. Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 10–11.

Chapter 2 Negotiating China’s Cultural Authority: Technology of Genealogy and the Self 1. Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Xiaomei Chen, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

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Notes to Pages 30–38 Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Discovering Chinese Nationalism in China: Modernization, Identity, and International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46–66. Shui-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern. Jingcheng dixingtu (Topography of the mirror city) (Taipei: Lianhe wenxue chubanshe, 1999). Ibid., see the chapter, “Jiushu yu xiaofei” (Salvation and consumption). As a result of Deng Xiaoping’s ideological and economic reforms, the central government has become more tolerant toward intellectuals’ critique of domestic and international affairs. Its more relaxed cultural policy has generated a series of cultural debates, which is what Jing Wang calls a “high culture fever”— fever about knowledge, enlightenment, the polemics of the collective (nation/the people, history) and the individual (self, identity, familial genealogy), and most of all, the future (or lack thereof ) of China’s hegemony as a nation, a people, and a culture. Among his many scholarly works, the most representative of his particular theory on subjectivity and literary creation are “Lun wenxue de zhuti xing” (On the subjectivity of literature), published in Wenxue pinglun, 5:13, 6:14 (1985), and Xingge zuhe lun (On personality formation) (Shanghai: Shanghai shidai chubanshe, 1989). Both Jing Wang and Liu Kang extensively discuss Li’s complex philosophical construction of the idea of Enlightenment. Please see Liu Kang’s article “Subjectivity, Marxism, and Cultural Theory,” Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China, ed. by Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1993), and Jing Wang, High Culture Fever (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). A recent study on this topic is Rong Cai’s The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004). I have written a review on this book, published in China Review International, vol. 11, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 287–91. Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997), 11. Wang, High Culture Fever, 33. The original publication of this novel was in China by Renmin wenyi chubianshe. Its Taiwan publication came out the following year, by Rye Field in Taipei. What is worth noting is not the slight difference in the main title but rather its subtitles in these two publications. In its China edition, the novel is titled Jishi he xugou: chuangzao shijie fangfa zhi yizhong, but in its Taiwan edition, there is a slight word change in the main title with a totally different subtitle: Jishi yu xugou: Shanghai gushi. The intrigue suggested in the Chinese edition’s subtitle will be elaborated later in this chapter. The same discussion is then again articulated in Wang’s next novel Changhenge (Song of everlasting sorrow, 1995). This is the story of Wang Qiyao, a former “Miss Shanghai” who has lived through the Cultural Revolution and witnessed

Notes to Pages 38–51

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

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great changes in society. The novel also presents the city Shanghai as a social vessel that holds the grand history of the nation as well as small histories of many individuals. This is a novel of the passage of time contained in a specific space of the city, or more specifically, in the space of Wang Qiyao’s small apartment located in one of the obscure and dark alleys of Shanghai. Song of Everlasting Sorrow is another of Wang’s attempt at narrating history. In this novel, Wang changes her perspective from looking out to the massive spatial stretch of the Mongolian prairie in Reality and Fiction to gazing on a localized space where mundane lives are lived out. Against the background of national turmoil, Wang Anyi narrates national history through insignificant individuals’ stories. National time is crystallized in the chronology of Wang Qiyao. In this novel, Wang Anyi has convincingly portrayed the self as significant as, if not more important than, the nation. Taipei: Rye Field, 1996. The novel was first published in China by Renmin wenxue chubanshe in 1994. All pages quoted here are according to the Taiwan edition. Ru is indeed the last name of Wang Anyi’s mother. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 25. Islands of History (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 49. “Realism and Desire,” The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 155. “Identity, Genealogy, History,” Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), 130. “Technologies of the Self and Self-Knowledge in the Syrian Thomas Tradition,” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 60. The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London & New York: Verso, 1998), 44. The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 231. For a discussion of “detail” in relation to history, nation, and modernity, please see Rey Chow’s “Modernity and Narration—in Feminine Detail,” Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between East and West (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). This is an indirect quote from Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York & London: Routledge, 1993), 122.

Chapter 3 Refashioning Cultural Authenticity: Taiwan 1.

See his “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” collected in Jonathan Rutherford’s Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990),

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4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

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Notes to Pages 51–54 and “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. by Hall (London: SAGE, 1996). “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” Questions of Cultural Identity, 88. Under the Treaty of Shimonoseki between the Qing dynasty and the Japanese government. The separation of Taiwan from Chinese rule has been established for 105 years and not the commonly believed 50 years. There were numerous cultural and educational policies that were designed to focus solely on Han-Chinese cultural heritage and history. Taiwan’s local culture and history were completely excluded. For example, students were strictly forbidden to speak Taiwanese at school; all history and geography textbooks from elementary school to college focused solely on mainland China. This was a campaign slogan for the KMT candidate Ma Yingjiu for the Taipei city mayoral election in December 1998. Hsu used the term as a book title, The Rising People (Taipei: Yuanliu chubanshe, 1995), to promote a new way to historicize and conceptualize ethnicity in Taiwan. He seeks to transcend old ethnic categories by redefining ethnicity in terms of particular immigrant characteristics of the people living in Taiwan. This is of course an effort motivated by DPP’s political agenda to legitimize the call for Taiwan’s independence. Nevertheless, this new concept indicates a less confrontational strategy than the party’s earlier approach to separate native Taiwanese (benshengren) from Chinese mainlanders (waishengren). “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory,” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 195, 197. Thomas B. Gold has a comprehensive study of the causes and consequences of this wave of Taiwanization. Please see his essay “Civil Society and Taiwan’s Quest for Identity,” Cultural Change in Postwar Taiwan, ed. by Steven Harrell and Huang Chün-chieh (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994). Please see two large-scale conference paper collections, Sishinianlai zhongguo wenxue (Chinese literature in the past forty years) (Taipei: Lianhe wenxue chubanshe, 1995), and Cong sishi niandai dao jiushi niandai (From 1940s to 1990s) (Taipei: Shibao wenhua chubanshe, 1994). Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang in the concluding chapter of her Modernism and the Nativist Resistance: Contemporary Chinese Fiction from Taiwan (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1993) briefly describes these writers, among others, as those who have led Taiwan literature into a “new era.” Situating her discussion against the social, cultural, and political changes that took place in the 1980s in Taiwan, Chang establishes the basic outlook of this new generation of Taiwan writers as having more “tolerance of pluralistic coexistence of the incommensurable . . . appetite for indeterminacy” as well as being “more keenly aware of the self-other dichotomy” (180). David Der-wei Wang in his numerous articles and books also discusses writers whose works carry significant historical importance as well as literary impact on the development of this new phase of Taiwan literature of the eighties. Please see his Zhongsheng xuanhua

Notes to Pages 54–56

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

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(Heteroglossia) (Taipei: Yuanliu Publishing, 1988), 269–88; Xiaoshuo zhongguo (Fiction(al) China) (Taipei: Rye Field, 1993), 161–92; Ruhe xiandai, zengyang wenxue (The making of the modern, the making of a literature) (Taipei: Rye Field, 1998), 405–15. Among Taiwan’s various ethnic groups is one labeled the second-generation Chinese mainlanders (Zhu Tianxin is considered one of them). These secondgeneration mainlanders are people whose parents followed the Nationalist army to Taiwan during the 1949 retreat. Their ethnicity clearly separates them from the aborigines and the local Taiwanese whose lineage can be traced several hundred years back in Taiwan since their ancestors immigrated (mostly) from southern China. These second-generation mainlanders’ cultural identity thus is particularly ambiguous because they themselves can claim to be either “Chinese” or “Taiwanese,” or both; but by the same token, they can also face possible rejections by both the mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese. The community of juancun is a kind of military housing compound, built right after the 1949 retreat of the nationalist armies for military personnel dependents. A subculture was developed among the residents who did not seek to integrate themselves into the larger Taiwanese community. They also tended to regard themselves as the vanguard of traditional Chinese culture and believed that China was their true homeland and Taiwan a temporary place to live. But much of this mentality has been changed with the death of President Chiang Ching-kuo. The succeeding President, Lee Teng-hui, a native Taiwanese himself, is largely responsible for a relatively more open and more democratic Taiwan, which has brought great cultural and social impact to the juancun culture. Born out of such a unique background, the so-called juancun literature represents a subculture of the Taiwan society. Representative juancun writers are Zhu Tianxin and her sister Zhu Tianwen, Yang Zhao, Yuan Qiongqiong, Li Yungping and a few others. Writing in their twenties, these writers often situated their stories against the backdrop of the military housing compound to depict lives of the mainlander military retirees as well as their second-generation children raised within this self-enclosed cultural environment. Her first publication of collected short stories was in 1977, Fangzhou shang de rizi (Days on the boat). Subsequent publications were in 1980: Zuori dang wo nianqing shi (Yesterday when I was young); 1982: Weiliao (Unfinished affairs); 1989: Shiyi shiwang (Passages of things past), which was originally published in 1984, under a different title, Taida xuesheng Guan Lin de riji (Diary of Guan Lin, a student of National Taiwan University). “Prisoners and Spiders Surrounded by Signs: Postmodernism and the Postcolonial Gaze in Contemporary Australian Culture,” Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism, ed. by Jonathan White (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 191. (The Phrase, “timeless, cultural China,” is borrowed from Shu-mei Shih, “The Trope of ‘Mainland China’ in Taiwan’s media,” positions, vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 1995),157. See “Of Mimicry and Man,” in The Location of Culture (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), 86.

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16. All translations of Ancient Capital (Gudu) are my translations. 17. Names and works quoted include Stephen King, Garciá Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Maurice, Elvis Presley’s songs, Jung’s theory of the archetype and the collective unconscious, William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, Pablo Picasso, Edgar Degas, Rollo May, and John Keats. 18. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. by Gregory Rabassa (New York: Avon Books, 1971), 12. 19. With this particular reference, Zhu Tianxin has mistaken the century. In this short story, she has it as a suit of “sixteenth-century armor,” whereas in the original text it is actually a suit of “fifteenth-century armor.” See p. 64 of Zhu (Cité, 1997), and p. 12 of García Márquez (Avon, 1970). 20. Michael Thompson has done an interesting anthropological study of how value of a cultural object can be transformed from being of value to becoming rubbish, and vice versa. Please see his book, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Jonathan Culler later reviewed and applied Thompson’s rubbish theory in his own study of cultural rubbish. See also “Junk and Rubbish: A Semiotic Approach,” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, vol. 15, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 2–13. 21. Kawabata Yasunari, The Old Capital, 1961, trans. by J. Martin Holman (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987). 22. David Der-wei Wang has once commented that “walking” is Zhu Tianxin’s favorite activity for her characters. See his foreword in Ancient Capital, 27. 23. The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 4. 24. Conrad Schiokauer, A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations, 2nd ed. (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1989), 332. 25. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 44. 26. Fictional Realism in 20th-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 253. 27. Modern Japanese Fiction and Its Traditions: An Introduction (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1978), 180. 28. Accounts of Hu Lancheng’s intimate friendship with the Zhu family and his tremendous influence on the two Zhu sisters’ literary endeavors can be found in articles by Yang Zhao, “A Romantic and Annihilating Twist: Critique of Zhu Tianxin’s Collection I Remember” (Langman miejue de zhuanzhe—ping Zhu Tianxin xiaoshuoji Wo jide ), Zili Literary Supplement 7, 8 Feb. 1991, and “Two Swimming Fish—The Zhu Tianxin I Know” (Liangwei qunxun huiyou de yu—wo suo zhidao de Zhu Tianxin), China Times Renjian Weekly Magazine Jan. 20, 21, 1994. Although not directed on Zhu Tianxin, two articles collected in A Flower Remembers Her Previous Lives (Hua yi qianshen) (Taipei: 1996) by Zhu Tianwen and Huang Jinshu can provide a more comprehensive view on the overall influence of Hu on the Zhu sisters.

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29. Hu Lancheng has recorded this period and his controversial involvement with Wang Jingwei in his book This Life, This World (Jinsheng jinshi) (Taipei: Sansan shudian, 1990). He is best known for being the former husband of Eileen Chang and a collaborator with Japan and Wang’s bogus government in occupied Shanghai during the Sino-Japanese War. Because of this connection with Wang, Hu has been accused by the Nationalist government of being a traitor to China (hanjian). 30. Jean Baudrillard argues that “the history that is ‘given back’ to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a ‘historical real’ than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real. Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance . . . they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance, the empty form of representation.” Please see his Simulacra and Simulation, 45. 31. Colonial Taipei as a site of urban modernization by the Japanese seemed to share many similarities with the modernization plans for Tokyo which was going through centralized city planning after the 1923 earthquake. Please see Jinnai Hidenobu, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). I owe this reference to Professor Joseph Allen. 32. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York & London: Routledge, 1989), 140. 33. “Allegories of Atlas,” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), 361. 34. The Peach Blossom Stream story is told in the preface of the poem “The Peach Blossom Stream” (Taohuayuan ji) written by Tao Yuanming (AD 365–427), one of China’s most prominent poets in history who lived during the Six Dynasties, a time of China’s disunity. The story is about a Shangri-La like village which is accidentally discovered by a fisherman who is lost on his way up a stream. This village is situated in an open plain with rich fields and beautiful ponds, where chickens and dogs can be heard from farm house to farm house. The villagers are simple men and women. They tell the fisherman that their ancestors had come to live in this obscure part of China in order to escape the troubled times of the Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) and generations have passed but none has ever gone back to the outside world. Everyone seems happy and carefree. They entertain the fisherman with hospitality and curiosity about the outside world, but ask the fisherman not to disclose their village to anyone once he goes back. After a few days the fisherman takes his leave and follows the same route back to his town, taking note of the places he passes. But when he tries to show the governor and his fellow townsmen the way to this village, he cannot retrace the route. Gradually the story is forgotten, and no one ever asks about this Peach Blossom Stream. 35. A Japanese term for middle-aged married woman. The term is very much ingrained in Taiwan’s two spoken languages, mandarin Chinese and local Taiwanese.

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Chapter 4 Hong Kong Androgynous: Embodying Cultural Hybridity 1. The map of Hong Kong as we know it today was completed in 1898 after Britain obtained the New Territories, which was followed by the takeover of Kowloon in 1860. 2. Steve Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong (London & New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2004), 58. 3. At this historical juncture, it is important to mention the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong from December 1941 to August 1945 and the colony’s brief brush with fate, so to speak, when there was a window opportunity for Hong Kong to be returned to China. The Great Britain deemed the loss of its Crown Colony to Japan a tremendous national humiliation. Upon the Japanese aggression, both Chinese and Westerners alike in Hong Kong put up great resistance but the island was no match for Japan’s military might. Those who survived the battle or were left on the island suffered incredible hardship and cruelty in the interment camps in Sham Shui Po and Stanley. When Japan was defeated by the Allied powers in 1945, accordingly, Japan should have surrendered all of its occupied territories of China (excluding Manchuria), Taiwan, Hong Kong, and French Indo-China north of 16 degrees latitude to Chiang Kai-shek’s government. But Britain would not abide by China’s sovereign right over Hong Kong and was determined to reclaim its former colony. According to Steve Tsang’s thorough research on the diplomatic handling of Hong Kong between China and Britain, the matter was settled with Britain’s “highhanded diplomacy” and Chiang Kai-shek’s willingness to make compromises on this dispute so as to concentrate his forces on troubles in China proper, mostly coming from the Chinese communist army led by Mao. Hong Kong was once again lost by China to Britain, its former colonial ruler, without the people of Hong Kong knowing about it. Please see Tsang, 133–44. 4. From 1978 to 1981 there was an influx of both legal and illegal immigrants from China to Hong Kong. 5. Examples can be found in Ka Ming Wu, “Discourse on Baau Yih Naai (Keeping Concubines): Questions of Citizenship and Identity in Postcolonial Hong Kong” Gender and Change in Hong Kong: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Chinese Patriarchy, ed. by Eliza W. Y. Lee (Toronto: UBC Press, 2003), 113–150. 6. Michael Curtin, “Media Capital: Toward the Study of Spatial Flows,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 6, no. 2 (June 2003): 202–28. 7. “Labyrinth of Hybridization: The Cultural Internationalization of Hong Kong,” Hong Kong’s Reunion with China: The Global Dimensions, ed. by Gerard A. Postiglione and James T. H. Tang (New York & London: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), 169–99. 8. “Hong Kong Diaspora Film and Transnational TV Drama: From Homecoming to Exile to Flexible Citizenship,” Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, vol. 20, no. 2–3 (Winter–Summer 2001): 137–46. 9. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Notes to Pages 84–94

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10. Natalia Sui-Hung Chan, City on the Edge of Time: Hong Kong Culture and the 1997 Issue, Dissertation (University of California, San Diego, 2001), 140. 11. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 12. The number of people who immigrated out of Hong Kong peaked during the period 1987–1994, and gradually stabilized after 1997. Canada, one the most popular immigration destinations, reported that in 1994, Hong Kong immigrants alone represented 20% of all immigrants. Please go to website: ⬍http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/pubs/immig/imm97lst.pdf⬎ 13. “Postcolonial Cultural Trends in Hong Kong: Imagining the Local, the National, and the Global,” Crisis and Transformation in China’s Hong Kong, ed. by Ming K. Chan and Alvin Y. So (New York & London: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 344. 14. “Hong Kong after 1997: Self-Determined Democratization and Modernization,” Hong Kong after Reunification: Problems and Perspectives, ed. by Achim Güssgen, Reimund Seidelmann, and Ting Wai (Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos, 2000), 25–56. 15. “Postcolonial Cultural Trends in Hong Kong: Imagining the Local, the National, and the Global.” 16. Luc Brisson, Sexual Ambivalence: Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in GraecoRoman Antiquity (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 2002), 77. 17. Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (Charlottesville & London: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 2. 18. Luc Brisson has a note regarding this myth: according to Ovid, the creature that came out of the fusion of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis changed from a double (nec duo, sed forma duplex, biformis) to a half (semimarem, semivir). Please see Brisson’s Sexual Ambivalence, note 40 for Chapter Two. 19. Catriona MacLeod points out that, “the androgynous myth seems to hold particular fascination for those historical moments when cultures are actively engaged in rethinking the most basic assumptions about gender and sexuality— whether that be the late eighteenth century, . . . or the second half of the twentieth century. . . .” See her Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 13. 20. Unitas (Lianhe wenxue) is a popular literary magazine in Taiwan. 21. The United News (Lianhe bao) is one of Taiwan’s oldest and most widely read newspapers. 22. Although mainland Chinese writers have not been allowed to participate in such competitions, their works are often published in Taiwan first and then travel back to China. In many ways, it is fair to say that Taiwan is the main engine generating contemporary Chinese literary productions for all Chinese speaking communities in the world. 23. Dituji (The atlas) (Taipei: Lianhe wenxue chubanshe, 1997), 60. 24. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, 116. 25. Taiwan writer Ping Lu in her commentary of the novella commented that certain sceneries in this story remind her of the 1996 film The Piano (written and

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directed by Jane Campion) and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Anzhuozhenni, 78. 26. Shuan shen (Taipei: Lianjing chubanshe, 1997), iv.

Chapter 5 Chinese American? American Chinese? Community Building as Subject Making 1. By using the term Chinese American instead of the pan-ethnic Asian American, I wish to highlight that it is the “Chinese component” among all other ethnic components on which I will focus my discussion of the identity politics in Asian American literature. Rather than disclaiming other Asian groups such as Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Filipino Americans, I want to make it clear to my readers that my interest lies primarily in the Chinese American and their problematic relationship to “China.” Many Chinese American writers, including our author in this chapter, deliberately choose to identify with the term Asian American instead of Chinese American as a strategic self-representation to fight racism and mainstream historical discourse of exclusion of Asian immigrants in the United States. But this self-categorization is not unilaterally accepted by all Asian American writers. There has been a rising awareness and contestation in recent Asian American literature of Asian American cultural plurality and the suppression brought about by this self-categorization of what is and should be recognized as a heterogeneous cultural reality within the Asian American community at large. 2. Jingqi Ling, Narrating Nationalism: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6. 3. The notion of the “yellow peril” is precisely the product of such thinking. Proposed by Henry George in an article in the New York Tribune on May 1, 1869, the idea that a massive Chinese invasion led by the over 60,000 Mongolians on the west coast was deemed highly possible. Therefore measures must be taken and the Chinese must be kept out “while there is still time.” For a more complete quote of this article, please see Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850, by Roger Daniels (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1988), 40. 4. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993. 5. Please see chapter One of her dissertation, “Model Modernity: Representing the Far East,” Columbia University, 1999. 6. William Wei argues that, since many Asian American workers saw the parallel between their fight for civil rights and the widespread liberation movements in Asia such as in Vietnam and China, “they readily identified with Asians struggling to free themselves from Western colonizers, especially American imperialists. . . . They (the Asian American) had to rethink who they were and re-create their

Notes to Pages 102–105

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own cultural identity, forging distinct Asian ethnic group identities into a panAsian one.” The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 42. The stereotyping of Chinese immigrants in the United States since the midnineteenth century consists of the following features: that Chinese are exotic and mythic because of their ancient history and culture, hence are perpetual aliens; that Chinese are “backward” and “inferior” because the Chinese immigrants’ adhere to their own ways of life and live in dirty Chinatown, work in low-level jobs such as mining, railroad construction, or run noodle parlors, restaurants, and laundries; that Chinese are passive, “inscrutable,” and male Chinese immigrants are perceived as feminine because of their docile mannerism and their jobs as tailors, cooks, and servants in private homes and hotels; that Chinese are inacculturable because they are very traditionbound, and because the high cultural differentiation between Chinese and most other Americans has made the acculturation of Chinese a slow process, hence they are usually not regarded as Americans but definitely “Chinese.” Of course the discourse of Chinese stereotyping goes along with changes in American domestic political-economic situations as well as international politics. The representation of Chinese and Japanese Americans as a model minority is precisely a product of the political climate change in and outside the United States in the 1960s and the 1970s. In this representation, Chinese and Japanese immigrants are portrayed as hard-working, law-abiding, and the most economically improved of immigrants among all ethnic groups in the United States. Ironically, what American mainstream society attributes to the success of the Chinese and Japanese immigrants is precisely their Asian cultural heritage, with its emphases on family value, education, discipline, and industry. Narrating Nationalisms, 22. It has been a widely acknowledged observation that Kingston’s protagonist bears strong resemblance to Frank Chin, that this novel is Kingston’s reply to Chin’s harsh criticism of the cultural strategy in Kingston’s previous novels, beginning with, of course, The Woman Warrior. A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-Century Art Works, 38. Please refer to chapter 1 of this book. “Discourse in Dostoevsky,” Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. & trans. by Caryl Emerson, intro. by Wayne C. Booth (Minnesota & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 193. Emphases mine. There are exceptions with chapters 3, 4, and 5, in which chapter 3 ends with an open question and chapters 4 and 5 with a statement from the narrator. There are numerous studies on American ethnic writers’ particular interest in and utilization of their national culture’s oral tradition. With regard to Kingston’s employment of Chinese oral tradition in this novel, John Lowe has done an intriguing study by examining the role of humor—telling jokes—in Wittman Ah Sing’s dealings with cultural stereotyping and his critique of American as well as Chinese American cultural practices. Please see John Lowe’s article

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Notes to Pages 106–107

“Monkey Kings and Mojo: Postmodern Ethnic Humor in Kingston, Reed, and Vizenor,” MELUS, vol. 21, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 103–26. 15. “Tripmaster Monkey: Kingston’s Postmodern Representation of a New ‘China Man’,” MELUS, vol. 20, no. 1 (spring 1995): 103–04. 16. The parallelism between Kingston’s novel and the two Western works has been established by A. Noelle Williams, Margit Wogowitsch in her Narrative Strategies and Multicultural Identity: Maxine Hong Kingston in Context (Austria: Braumüller, 1995), John J. Deeney in his “Of Monkeys and Butterflies: Transformation in M. H. Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, and D. H. Hwang’s M. Butterfly” (MELUS, vol. 18, no. 3, Fall 1993), among others. 17. Here I am referring to Margaret A. Rose’s analysis of parody and its different variations. Found in Parody: Ancient, Modern, and Post-Modern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 89–90, in which Rose draws the following diagrams to differentiate parody from irony and satire, as well as parody’s other uses. Rose designates the following: “if A is the code of the author, B the code of the quoted text or work, C the object of criticism or contrast within the code of the author;—⬎ the direction of criticism or refunctioning from the message or messages of the code, and ⬍—the direction of reflection back to the meaning of the author, then: IRONY ⫽ A ⬍—⬎ C; PARODY ⫽ A⫹B ⬍—⬎B ⫽ C; SATIRE ⫽ A —⬎ C. . . . Parody, as has been suggested, may also identify its target with a certain reader (R) or with the attitude of a particular group of readers, and make the latter a target of its critical analysis and comedy, or A⫹B ⬍—⬎ B ⫽ R ⫽ C. Two other uses of parody can be summarized as: (1) The use of parody as a mask for the author, through which the latter is ironically identified with their target for some time, or A ⫽ B ⬍—⬎ B ⫽ C. (2) Parody used as a mask to describe the object of the parodist’s satire (as in the criticism of other poets as unwitting parodists), or A⫹B ⬍—⬎ B ( ⫽ X) ⫽ C. Kingston’s relationship with her chosen literary canons is not a matter of identification with the target, nor is her object the writers of her appropriated texts. Parody is therefore not Kingston’s overarching method of imitation and appropriation, but rather it is pastiche, with a tinge of parodic effect. 18. “Parody and Pacifist Transformations in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,” MELUS, vol. 20, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 83–100. 19. Kingston’s interview with Donna Perry. See “Maxine Hong Kingston,” Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out: Interview by Donna Perry, ed. Donna Perry (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 173–93. 20. Maxine Hong Kingston (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999), 146. Following this statement, Simmons also quotes the same passage from the novel favored by other critics such as Jennie Wang (106) and John Deeney (37) when making a similar observation: “We keep the men’s Chinese names, we keep the women’s

Notes to Pages 107–108

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names untranslated too, no more Pearl Buck Peony Plum Blossom halofied missionary names. No more accessible girls and unspeakable men. The women: Hoon Ngoak, Fa Moke Lan, Ku San the Intelligent, Mrs. Shen the Earth Star. Let the gringo Anglos do some hard hearing for a change” (Tripmaster Monkey, 138). An interesting response from Kingston regarding critics’ interpretations of what “fake book” means came to mind. In the interview with Laura E. SkanderaTrombley in 1997, Kingston expressed her wish that her “fake book” would be used by her readers in much the same way that jazz musicians use their fake book to improvise their music: “My idea of the fake book, that’s a term that comes from jazz. . . . They are semi-illegal, because you know they’re breaking all kinds of copyright laws, but that book’s not original, a fake book doesn’t have original stuff, but I was hoping that the reader could use Tripmaster Monkey as a fake book in the same way musicians use a fake book. When they read Tripmaster Monkey, I give lots of suggestions, ‘Well, here’s a trip you might take, here’s a part of a story, you finish it.’ ” (41). There is an undeniable didactic tone in Kingston’s voice. She seems to be quite sure that her intention for her fictional device is “more correct” than any otherwise different readings. Kingston also has her own idea as how the reader should treat her novel. Kingston may wish that Tripmaster Monkey to be an interactive type of narrative, but a wish is only a wish—whether she actually has succeeded in making her text to be such and whether her readers can or are willing to take up the challenge are quite different matters. An interesting thing about writers or artists giving interviews is that it gives them an opportunity to critique the critics and also to add commentaries to their own works, in a way, to shape how their works should be perceived. This interview is collected in Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, ed. by Laura E. Skandera-Trombley (New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1998). Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin have edited a useful book, Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), in which Kingston’s most important interviews are collected. Kingston has provided information and clarifications on her writing of Tripmaster Monkey as well as discussions of the novel, in interviews with Kay Bonetti, Jody Hoy, Paula Rabinowitz, William Satake Blauvelt, Marilyn Chin, Paul Skenazy, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Donna Perry, Joan Smith, Neila C. Seshachari, and Eric J. Schroeder. Regarding the impact Kingston’s personal commentaries on her novels has on critics and the political implications of such impact, I have a section at the end of this chapter to discuss these issues and likely consequences. Yan Gao suggests that “fake” here means “improvise,” mirroring not only Wittman Ah Sing’s theatrical endeavor, but also referring to a kind of chain story-telling game designed by Kingston which allows endless stories to be told. The Art of Parody: Maxine Hong Kingston’s Use of Chinese Sources (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 143–44. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1997), 56. James T. F. Tanner, “Walt Whitman’s Presence in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,” MELUS, vol. 20, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 67.

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Notes to Pages 109–120

26. Cantonese for “the white devil,” meaning Westerners, here refers to white Americans. 27. “Whitman’s Presence in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book,” 64. 28. I owe this observation to Professor Ursula K. Heise, a point that is so apparent but poignant nonetheless. It raises a very intriguing question: Why did Kingston find this over-a-hundred-year-old political utopia interesting enough to be her possible blueprint of a pan-ethnic utopia? 29. “Writing the Other: A Conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston,” Poetry Flash, 198 (September 1989): 1, 4–6, 17–18. Collected in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, ed. by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998). 30. Trombley, Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston, 21, 23. 31. Sandra A. Zagarell, “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre,” Revising the Word and the World: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. by VèVè A. Clark, Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres, and Madelon Sprengnether (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 250. 32. “Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fake Books,” Memory, Narrative and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures, ed., Joseph T. Sherret, Amrijit Singh Jr., and Robert E. Hogan (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 255. 33. The idea of the photograph is inspired by a solo performance by Byron Yee, which I saw on March 30, 2000 in Minor Lathan Playhouse at Barnard College of Columbia University. Entitled “Paper Son,” Byron Yee told his personal story of growing up as a Chinese American in Wichita, Kansas: his personal struggle with being in “ethnic drag,” as he called himself; his deliberate distancing of himself from his parents because he felt ashamed of them, which also has affected his ambivalent feeling about his Chinese heritage. When he was faced with his father’s sudden death, he realized how little he actually knew about his father and his paternal family. Yee thus began a long and winding search for stories and documents of his father’s immigration to the United States. Finally he got hold of his father’s papers from the archive of U.S. Immigration Service on Angel Island. Inside the folder were documents of his father’s detention on Angel Island, questionnaires his father had to answer in order to prove his legal immigration status, and most of all, clues to a story that gives the performance its title, “paper son.” Yee discovered that his father was actually a paper son of his elder brother, Yee’s uncle. Among the documents appeared a photograph of the entire family, including Yee’s father and uncle. Yee’s father was still a child in China, many years before he and his older brother set sail for America; the uncle was already an adult when the photograph was taken. In the photograph there are also Yee’s father’s other older siblings and their spouses, as well as Yee’s grandfather, grandmother, and the grandfather’s concubine. At the end of the performance, Yee pointed at the photograph, which at that time was being projected on a screen set on the stage, and said, “This is where I came from. This is my history.” This linking of his family’s immigration past with the moments before it all began contributed significantly to Yee’s understanding and grasp of his family history. It was

Notes to Pages 120–127

34. 35. 36.

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not based merely on his mother’s memory or stories, but has a clear image of the Yee family and their house, concretely situated in a small village in China. There is no ambiguity, no suspicion, and no manipulation. Yee’s sense of selfidentity thus is clear, which in turn helps him further understand what it means to be a Chinese American. The actual image of that photograph serves as a physical evidence of that historical link that has often been mythified or obscured by many Chinese American writers, including Kingston. Therefore I believe it is crucial for Chinese Americans to push their search for the historical and cultural origin further back to the particular point in time and space when the immigration actually began. “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” Diaspora, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 28. “The Emergence of Global Contemporaneity,” Diaspora, vol. 5, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 119–39. Please see “Localism, Globalism, and Cultural Identity” by Mike Featherstone in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1996). Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 165.

Chapter 6 Chinese Diaspora and Transnationality: Envisioning Global Citizen/ship 1. The term “diaspora” has been applied across the board to include all those who do not live in their native or birth country for reasons such as immigration, migration, or exile. Dislocation can be either voluntary or involuntary. Here in this chapter, by “diaspora” I refer only to the involuntarily displaced persons such as émigrés or political dissidents who have been forced out of their native country to reside in another. Because the set of theoretical issues discussed in this chapter involves specifically the conditions surrounding involuntary diaspora, I therefore choose a narrow definition of the term to work with. For various definitions of diaspora, please see Theorizing Diaspora, ed. by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). 2. “Citizenship and Belonging: Beyond Blood and Soil,” The Transnational Self: Belonging and Identity, ed. by Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 134. 3. Gilbert C. F. Fong comments that the banning of The Other Shore (Bi’an 1986) marks a turning point for Gao Xingjian who wrote this play soon after his first trip abroad to visit Europe and witnessed the creative freedom and individualism

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

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Notes to Pages 127–128 enjoyed by artists of the West. In this play, Gao questions the legitimacy of the Chinese authorities who claim power in the name of the masses. The prosecution of the individual in order to protect the collective is merely a political tool of a totalitarian regime. When The Other Shore was banned and subsequently the establishing of an experimental theater was stopped, Gao realized that as long as he stayed in China, he would never be able to write freely and his works would never see the light of day. Please see the “Introduction” of The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xingjian, trans. by Gilber C. F. Fong (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1999). According to Gao Xingjian himself, he made the announcement of leaving the Chinese Communist Party in Paris in 1989, while the Tiananmen massacre was taking place while before the Chinese Communist Party revoked his membership upon the publication of Fugitives. The play was first published in Today Literary Magazine (Jintian) in its revived overseas edition, issue no. 1, 1990. The first performance of the play was by the Swedish Royal Theater in 1992. Please see Taowang: Gaoxingjian xijuliuzhong disiji, 72 (Taipei: Di jiao chubanshe, 1995). The New Yorker 1998 (Oct. 5): 46–55. Specter cited numerous cases such as Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Toni Morrison, Knut Ahnlund, among others, to make such a point. C. T. Hsia, “Appendix 1. Obsession with China: the Moral Burden of Modern Chinese Literature,” A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press), 533–54. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 14, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 1–50. “Chengren de zhengzhi yu bei chengren de qidai” (Politics of recognition and the anticipation of being recognized), Ershiyi shiji shuangyuekan (Twentiethcentury bi-monthly journal), no. 26 (Dec. 2000): 18–23. The production budget was reported to be NT$15,000,000, which is about US$430,000. The play debuted on Dec. 19, 2002 in the National Theater in Taipei. It was then moved to Masse Opera House in Oct. 2003 for a month’s engagement. In an interview with Sinorama Magazine (Sept. 2002: 80–86), the chairwoman of Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA) Yu-chiou Chen stated that, when this “made in Taiwan” play is performed all over the world, people of the world will realize that Taiwan is the only country today that is able to provide the best Chinese opera actors, a completely open and free creative environment, and artists from various fields who truly understand the spirit of the East. It is also worth pointing out that, before he won the Nobel Prize, Gao Xingjian had begun talks in 1997 with a few academic friends and contacts in CCA in Taiwan about staging Snow in August. But for various reasons Gao’s effort was of no avail. When Gao’s Nobel Prize was announced, he was invited to visit Taiwan and talks about Snow in August resumed immediately. CCA chairwoman Yu-chiou Chen not only promised to give Gao all necessary support, she even became the producer of the play herself! The invitation was sponsored by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the City University of Hong Kong and Ming Pao, the most reliable newspaper in

Notes to Pages 129–141

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Hong Kong ⬍http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Pao⬎. Reports of Gao’s visit tend to downplay Gao’s political stance and emphasize that the visit is Gao’s “return to the native soil” as a Nobel laureate. Receptions of Gao were low key and nonofficial. Gao was also urged not to discuss politics but only literature in order to avoid unnecessary embarrassment. Please see The International Chinese Newsweekly (Yazhou zhoukan), Feb. 5–11, 2001: 46–48. Ming Pao published a special edition on Gao Xingjian and the Nobel Prize through its subsidiary, Ming Pao Monthly, in November 2000, which carries articles by literary scholars and art critics discussing Gao’s novels, plays and paintings, interviews with Gao himself, and discussions by Göran Malmqvist and some Swedish scholars on Gao Xingjian and Nobel Prize in general. In Ming Pao Monthly’s subsequent issues of December 2000, January, February, and March 2001, there appeared more articles dissecting the Swedish Academy’s previous considerations of Chinese writers and its decision on Gao Xingjian, as well as several post-Nobel ceremony reflections, more interviews with Gao Xingjian and reports of his Hong Kong visit. Anonymous discussions and debates on the Internet, however, are an entirely different matter. Please see Julia Lovell’s article. Gilbert C. F. Fong points out that, with the exceptions of Between Life and Death (Shengsi jie, 1991), Dialogue and Rebuttal (Duihua yu fanjie, 1992), Nocturnal Wanderer (Yeyoushen, 1993), and Weekend Quartet (Zhoumo sichongzou, 1995), in which Gao Xingjian explores universal quandaries of the psychic, all of his other plays, short stories, and novels have a substantial amount of “Chineseness” in their essence and design. “Introduction,” The Other Shore: Plays by Gao Xiangjian. Gao mentioned in an article that after finishing The Soul Mountain (Lingshan) and The Story of the Classics of Seas and Mountains (Shanhaijing zhuan), he felt he had finished with nostalgia for China. Please see Unitas (Lianhe wenxue), special issue of Gao Xingjian 196 (Feb. 2001): 36. The Nobel Prize also brought Gao Xingjian one of France’s premier orders, Légion d’honneur, in the same year. Terms I borrow from Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourse of Displacement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996). Globalization: The Human Consequences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). The slogan, “You are now free to move around the country,” is a TV commercial for Southwest Airline. Yasemin Nuboglu Soysal, “Citizenship and Identity: Living in Diasporas in Postwar Europe?” The Postnational Self, ed. by Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 137. The English translation of the novel is by Mabel Lee, published by Harper Collins Publishers (New York, 2002). The Chinese edition of One Man’s Bible I consult with is published by Lian Jing chubanshe, Taipei, 2000. “Narratives of Recovery: Repressed Memory as Cultural Memory,” Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover & London: University Press of New England, 1999), 237.

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24. How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 25. 25. “Trauma, Narratives and the Remaking of the Self,” Acts of Memory, 47. 26. According to a news report on the Internet, after the announcement of the Nobel Prize, Gao’s first novel, Soul Mountain, immediately went into reprint in Taiwan and sold 100,000 copies; One Man’s Bible also went into reprint and has sold 60,000 copies. ⬍http://news.1chinastar.com/news.shtml⬎. English translation of One Man’s Bible immediately went underway when the Nobel Prize was announced. Its hardcover edition came out in October 2002. Soul Mountain is ranked number 985 in Amazon.com Sales. The novel is also available for download. In addition, Soul Mountain has been chosen to head the launch of HarperCollins Publishers’ first Global E-Book Publishing Program in February 2002. Please see the website: ⬍http://www.harpercollins.com/hc/perfectbound/ news_1.asp⬎. 27. “Lost in the Woods: Nature in Soul Mountain,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 14, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 207–36. 28. Towards a Modern Zen Theatre: Gao Xingjian and Chinese Theatre Experimentalism (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2000), 104. 29. “Introduction,” Global Citizenship: A Critical Introduction, ed. by Nigel Dower and John Williams (New York: Routledge, 2002), 4.

Chapter 7 Globalizing the Self: The Aesthetics of Hybridity 1. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likeness, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 17. 2. American Heritage Dictionary. 3. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), 26. 4. The Location of Culture (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), 58. 5. Ibid., chapter 6. 6. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (first appeared in 1975 in Moscow), ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 358–61. 7. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 358–59. 8. Ibid., 416. Emphasis original. 9. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in Dostoevsky,” Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. by Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). This book was first published in 1929 in Leningrad, under the title, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art, then was expanded and republished in 1963 in Moscow under the current title. 10. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of Aesthetic. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. 11. M. M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment in Philosophical Analysis,” Speech Genres and

Notes to Pages 153–156

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14. 15.

16.

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Other Late Essays, trans. by Vern W. McGee, ed. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996, 1986), 105. Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge & London: The MIT Press, 1994), 145. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (originally published in Germany in 1970), trans. and ed. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), “Art, Society, Aesthetics,” 4. Ibid., “Subject-Object,” 167. Hou’s movies that have won international recognition include Good Men, Good Women (Haonan haonü, 1985), Dust in the Wind (Lianlian fengchen, 1986), City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 1989), Puppet Master (Ximeng rensheng, 1993), Goodbye South, Goodbye (Nanguo zaijian, nanguo, 1996), Flowers of Shanghai (Haishang hua, 1998), and Millennium Mambo (Qianxi manbo, 2001), among others. All the English titles of Zhu Tianwen’s works, with the exception of Fin-de-siècle Splendor, Notes of a Desolate Man, and A Flower Remembers Her Previous Lives, are my translation. In 1996, David Der-wei Wang edited a new collection, A Flower Remembers Her Previous Lives (Taipei: Rye Field, 1996), comprising seven of Zhu Tianwen’s earlier but most representative short stories, two chapters of what Zhu Tianwen called the “predecessor” of Notes of a Desolate Man—an incomplete novel which she titled Descendants of the Sun Goddess (my translation), and two chapters from Notes of a Desolate Man. The significance of this collection lies in its two prefaces and scholarly criticism by Huang Jinshu at the end of the book. The two prefaces are, “From ‘Diary of a Mad Man’ to Notes of a Desolate Man: On Zhu Tianwen, Hu Lancheng and Eileen Chang” written by the editor himself, which is an overview of Zhu’s literary development, and one which bears the same title as the collection but with an important subtitle: “Remembering Hu Lancheng in Eight Essays” (Ji Hu Lancheng bashu) written by the writer herself. From this article we learn how decidedly and deeply Hu Lancheng has shaped Zhu Tianwen as a writer and a thinker. Huang’s solid critical analysis at the end of the collection, “Descendants of the Sun Goddess—the Last Forty Chapters? The (Post)Modern Revelation ?” (my translation; Shenji zhi wu—hou sishihei? houxiandai qishilu?), traces precisely how the central thought of Notes of a Desolate Man can be attributed to Hu’s lasting aesthetic, philosophical, ideological, and moral influence on Zhu Tianwen. Scholars and critics such as David Der-wei Wang, Yvonne Chang, Huang Jinshu and many others in Taiwan all regard Fin-de-siècle Splendor as a landmark work that separates the early Zhu Tianwen from the present more mature Zhu Tianwen. “A Kind of Aging Voice” (Yizhong laoqu de shengyin), Fin-de-siècle Splendor, “Foreword” (Taipei: Yuanliu chubanshe, 1990). Essai sur L’Exotisme: Une Esthétique du Divers (Notes) (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1978), 23. The Dialogic of Imagination, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas, 1992), 101. For example, works of Gustove Flaubert, Émile Camus, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad: the list is long. Their

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24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

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Notes to Pages 156–158 novels have been further examined for cultural as well as imperialist implications that have not been explored before. Please see her 1992 article, “Occidentalism as Counterdiscourse: ‘He Shang’ in Post-Mao China” (Critical Inquiry, vol. 18, no. 3–4), and her recent publication of a book with similar title but on a broader scale, Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). In Notes of a Desolate Man, the need for exoticum is replaced with the necessity of utopia. The difference of exoticum and utopia lies primarily in the former’s reliance on material fetishism and the latter’s basis on spiritual visions or beliefs in eternal happiness. Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. by Jacques AlainMiller (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 151. In his final analysis of human psyche (Seminar XX), Lacan moved toward examining an empty psychic space where the ex-sistence of the self is—what Lacan calls le sinthome. According to Zizek, sinthome is a point that “functions as the ultimate support of the subject’s consistency, the point of ‘thou art that,’ the point marking the dimension of ‘what is in the subject more than himself ’ and what he therefore ‘loves more than himself ’ ” (Looking Awry, 132). It is precisely these two traits, “the subject more than himself ” and “loves more than himself,” that lie at the heart of the mechanism of narcissism. English translation of this novel is published by Columbia University Press (New York: 1999), translated by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin. The Chinese version is published by Shibao wenhua chubanshe, Taipei, 1994. The novel was first presented by Zhu Tianwen not as a book but as an entry to a major fiction competition held by Zhongguo shibao (China Times) in June 1994. This novel won Zhu Taiwan the first prize with one million New Taiwan dollars. This comment, made by one of the judges of the fiction competition, Tsai Yuan-huan, is included in the appendix of the novel in its original language. Chi Ta-wei, “Making Queer Sounds on the Waste Land: A Reading of Zhu Tianwen’s Huang-ren shou-ji” (Zaihuangyuanshang zhizao tongxinlian shengyin: yuedu Huangren shouji), Isle Margin (Sept. 1995): 81–88. See Zhu Weichen, “A Desolate Man Trapped—A Gender Reading of Zhu Tianwen’s Notes of a Desolate Man” (Shoukuen zhuliu de tongzhehuangren— Zhu Tianwen Huanren Shouji de tongzhi yuedu). Chung-wai Literary Monthly (Taipei: Taiwan daxue waiwenxi), vol. 24, no. 3 (Aug. 1995): 142–59. Shi Shu, one of the judges of the competition from which the novel won its initial recognition, remarked that this hodge-podge writing style of mixing the latest theoretical jargon and cultural issues reflects the author’s “postmodern” sensitivity in her relentless pursuit of the latest intellectual trends. She argued that the novel essentially is a product of Taiwan’s cultural industry, an “exotic boutique”—to borrow the novel’s English translators’ phrase. Please see her comments, “Exotic Boutiques under Cultural Industry” (Wenhua gongyexia de gexindian), collected in the appendix of the novel in Chinese.

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32. See Liu Liangya and her article, “Swinging between Modern and Postmodern: Issues of Nationality, Generation, Gender, and Desire in Zhu Tianwen’s Recent Fiction” (Baidong zai xiandai yu hoxiandai zhijian: Zhu Tianwen jinqizuopinzhong de guozhu, shidai, xingbie, qingyu wenti ). Chung-wai Literary Monthly, vol. 24, no. 1 (June 1995): 7–19. 33. All of these specific issues raised by the Taiwan critics whose articles I refer to here will be further discussed in the following sections of this paper. 34. Goldblatt and Lin, “Translators’ Preface,” Notes of a Desolate Man. 35. T’ientven Chu, Notes of a Desolate Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 36. “Postmodern Pain,” Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politics, ed. by Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), 152. 37. The Concept of Utopia (Hemel Hertforshire: Philip Allan, 1990), 180. Levitas’ study is probably one of the most comprehensive studies of this subject to date. 38. The idea here is closely linked with my earlier discussion of l’objet petit a. For detailed analysis, please see Slavoj Zizek, “The Undergrowth of Enjoyment: How Popular Culture can Serve as an Introduction to Lacan,” New Formations, vol. 9 (1989): 7–29; later collected in The Zizek Reader, ed. by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). 39. My reading of Zhu’s use of utopia coincides with Lucy Srgisson’s function-based approach to utopianism (an umbrella term equivalent to Levitas’ “utopia”), which does not interpret any kind of construction of utopia by way of either its content or form. Srgisson’s function-based approach sees utopianism/utopia not as narrowly as a model of sociopolitical critique (content) or a genre (form), but rather as creating a position or a new place/space to critique (41). Please see her Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (New York: Routledge, 1996). 40. The Concept of Utopia, 193. 41. In his preface, David Der-wei Wang has a paragraph describing Hu Lancheng’s “unusual” type of scholarship as “utopian” (A Flower Remembers Her Previous Lives, 9). Indeed Hu has developed a very distinct style of scholarship and system of thought. A man of broad ranges of knowledge, Hu has attempted to construct his own brand of cosmology. Taking an ancient Chinese mythology of creation as a starting point, Hu further assimilated sciences and philosophies from both East and West to explain the law of nature and a common pattern of civilization formation. To many Chinese scholars and readers, Hu’s brand of knowledge and vision of the cosmos seem excessively romantic, subjective, and even absurd. Evaluation of Hu’s achievement is not the concern here; what I like to stress is that what stands out in Hu’s scholarship is his obsession with “structure” and “order,” and such impulses have taken root in Zhu Tianwen and her ways of approaching and perceiving life as reflected in her fiction. 42. “Women/Utopia/Fetish: Disavowal and Satisfied Desire in Margaret Cavendish’s New Blazing World and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderland/La Frontera.” Heterotopia, 59–60. 43. I am borrowing this term developed by Emily Apter in her study of women and fetishism in Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-of-Century France (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1991).

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44. A trait that has already appeared in her earlier work, “Fin-de-siècle Splendor.” Zhu’s highly ornate language that narrates Mia’s fetishism of exotic materials has evolved into an intense linguistic fetishism in this novel. 45. I am borrowing Neely’s argument from his concluding statement: “They (Anzaldúa and Cavendish) construct very different women’s texts out of the materials of different historical and cultural moments. They use, however, similar strategies of substitution, mortification, and restoration to create utopia-fetishes: alternative material sites that substitute for—avow by disavowing—the polarities, hierarchies, and exclusions imposed by a particular historical version of patriarchal authority” (93). 46. Looking Awry, 134–35. 47. “Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach,” The Zizek Reader, 88. 48. Aesthetic Theory, ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 172. 49. “Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics,” Aesthetic Theory; Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994). 50. The historical degradations surrounding hybrid/hybridity is clearly delineated and analyzed by Robert J. C. Young in his Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London & New York: Routledge, 1995). 51. See Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1995). 52. “Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics,” Aesthetic Theory, 132. 53. Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of AntiRacism, ed. by Pnina Werbner and Tariq Modood (London & New Jersey: Zed Books, 1997), 5. 54. “There is No Sexual Relationship,” The Zizek Reader, 178. 55. “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. by Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: SAGE Publications, 1997).

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Index

Abbas, Ackbar 84, 91–92 Adorno, Theodor 134, 152–53, 168–70 aesthetics of hybridity 8, 147–48, 152–53, 158–59, 170–73 Ancient Capital (Gudu) 64–66, 68, 75–76, 190 Anderson, Benedict 47, 114 Androgyny (Anzhuozhenni) 89, 91–8 the androgyny 87–89, 91–92, 96–98 versus the hermaphrodite 88–89, 91, 95–97 annulment of martial laws (in Taiwan), the 53–54, 63 Asian American 47, 99–105, 110–11, 114, 116, 118, 120–21 assimilation 41, 83, 102, 104 Atlas (Ditu ji),The 89–91 authenticity 4–8, 14, 16–18, 49, 54, 57, 60, 63–64, 73, 76, 91, 99–100, 105, 107, 147, 153, 158, 167–71 cultural 6, 8, 49, 100 historical 76 authority 48, 57, 127–28, 149, 152, 166 cultural 6, 24, 49, 57, 99, 127 ethnic 52 of heritage 47 of history 39 of modernism 17

autonomy 33, 84, 86, 113, 121 of artworks 152–53 see also Adorno, Theodor avant-garde literature 34 Bakhtin, Mikhail 11, 24, 105, 150–53, 156, 170 Benjamin, Walter 19, 131–33 Bhabha, Homi 11, 22, 56, 148–49, 152–53 Baudrillard, Jean 15, 72 Chiang Kai-shek 3, 54, 68, 80 China and the global network 9–10 Chinatown 101, 103–4, 109–10, 112–13 Chineseness 3, 5–7, 30, 43, 86, 102, 109 Chinese: (cultural) identity 5–6, 8, 36, 44, 49, 67, 71, 79–81, 175 intellectuals 30–31, 34, 36–37, 46–47, 127–28, 156 writers 6, 29, 34–35, 49 Chinese American 5–7, 99–104, 107, 109–10, 113–15, 117–19 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 100 Chinese mainlanders (in Taiwan) 53, 158 collective, the 6, 14, 31, 34, 36–37, 40, 46–47, 83–84, 119, 127, 148, 153, 161 colonial mimicry 21–22, 56

Index colonialism 11, 20–3, 71, 74–77, 86, 91, 149, 173 community 5, 10, 21, 24, 26, 46, 48, 51, 79–80, 82, 101, 103, 107–08, 110–20, 129, 131, 133, 143–45, 147, 158, 172–73 imagined/imaginary 47, 113–15 copy, the 9, 14–23, 26, 58, 92 cosmopolitanism 82, 134 cultural debate (in China), the 32–33 cultural heritage 3, 5, 41, 47, 70, 73, 102–03, 113, 118 cultural identity 3–8, 12–14, 23–26, 29, 31, 36, 38, 41–44, 49, 51–52, 54–56, 58, 63–65, 67, 71, 74–76, 78, 80–87, 89, 93, 100, 102–04, 114–15, 118–21, 126, 144–45, 147–49, 151–54, 159, 164, 172–73, 175–76 see also identity Cultural Revolution, the 33, 37, 43, 46, 126–27, 130–31, 136–38, 140–41 Death in Venice (Weinisi zhi si) 56–63, 66, 68, 76 Deng Xiaoping 10, 30, 33, 36 diasporas 7, 125, 132, 135, 137, 140–41, 143, 145 Chinese 6–7, 129 cosmopolitan 8, 132–36, 143 diasporic subject 126, 130, 134, 140–41, 145 difference 11–13, 24, 45, 48, 49, 51, 89, 93, 96–97, 104–05, 108, 121, 149, 155, 169, 171–72 ethnic 107, 118, 120 and identity 45, 149–50, 169 sameness and 12–13, 96, 148 Dual Body (Shuang shen) 89, 95–6, 98 Dung, Kai-cheung 89–90, 92

219

ethnicity 3, 5, 7, 18, 21, 25–26, 43, 47, 51–52, 83, 103, 121, 144, 171–73, 176 exile 126, 129–30, 132–37 compare cosmopolitan diasporas the exiled 132 modernist exile 133–34 self-exile 126, 130 exotic, the 21, 156–58, 160 exoticism 154–56 exoticum 156–57, 160 fake 17 compare the original, the copy fetish/fetishism 19, 155, 157–58, 165–67, 169 first world 13, 22, 58, 126, 144 see also third world flexible citizen/citizenship 85 forgetting 7, 140–43 compare remembrance Foucault, Michele 45, 90, 162, 164, 167 Gao, Xinjian 125–32, 134–35, 139, 143–45 gaze 56, 65, 112, 149, 155, 157–58 globalization 9–10, 13–15, 49, 121, 132, 134, 145, 175 globalized 10–11, 26, 82, 153, 172 global citizen/citizenship 144–45 Hall, Stuart 11, 51 Han, Shaogong 35 heteroglossia 150, 152 see also hybridity, linguistic history 4–7, 11–12, 30, 33–35, 37–49, 53–54, 56, 64–76, 83–84, 90–91, 93, 100, 104, 109, 114, 118–20, 126, 130–33, 137–38, 140, 143–44, 153, 157, 167, 169

220

Index

Hong Kong Chinese 6–7, 78–81, 83–85 Hong Kong (cultural) identity 77–78, 80–86, 129 Hong Kong popular culture 78, 82 HKSAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) 86, 176 hybrid 12, 21–25, 147–48, 150, 152, 154, 159, 169–71 conscious 150 intentional 24, 170 organic 24, 170 hybridity 5–8, 11–12, 22–26, 54, 56, 63–64, 66, 83–84, 88–89, 91, 95–99, 120–21, 147–49, 151–53, 158–59, 168–73, 176 cultural 5–7, 51, 56, 59, 63–66, 76, 83, 97, 99–100, 135, 148–49, 152, 166, 170, 172, 176 linguistic 150–53 hybridization 14, 22–24, 66, 89–90, 93, 148–51, 166, 168, 170, 176 cultural 51, 65–66, 83, 99–100, 152, 166 identity 3–5, 9, 11–13, 15, 18–22, 24–26, 29, 31, 35–36, 38–43, 45–46, 48–49, 51–55, 59–60, 64, 68, 74–76, 78–79, 84, 88, 92–93, 95, 97–98, 100–03, 105, 108–10, 113, 115–20, 125–26, 129, 136, 141, 143–45, 148–54, 158–59, 161–64, 166, 168–73, 175 Chinese 67, 71, 79–81, 128 collective 4, 47, 49, 67, 79–81, 121, 144, 148 colonial 25, 56, 78–79, 83 crisis 20, 33, 45, 54, 56, 63, 66, 85, 89, 108, 128, 148 ethnic 42, 71, 103, 108, 121, 175 politics 12, 29, 49, 52, 99, 129, 147, 153, 158, 171

national 30, 125, 128 see also nationalism postcolonial 6, 21–22, 67, 85, 149, 153, 169, 171 self 3, 4, 12, 41, 44–45, 64, 101, 135, 141, 153, 160, 163, 165, 168 Taiwan(ese) 4, 53, 68, 71 imitation and appropriation 7–8, 13–24, 49, 53, 55–56, 58–61, 63, 65, 69–70, 76, 90–92, 103–06, 108, 171 individual, the 6, 8, 13, 15, 25–26, 34–38, 46, 48, 51, 54–5, 67–8, 70, 76, 111, 117, 119–20, 126, 133, 137, 144–45, 153–55, 172 individualism 8, 117, 145 individuality 8, 12, 18, 119, 129, 136, 152 individual versus collective 6, 34, 36–37, 46, 119, 153 intertextual(ity) 23, 61–62, 68, 104–05 Jameson, Fredric 15, 45 Japanese colonization (of Taiwan) 54, 73–74

6,

KMT (Kuomintang) 52–53, 67, 69, 73, 175, 188 Kingston, Maxine Hong 103–20 Lacan, Jacques 56, 157, 166, 168 legitimacy 4, 7, 34, 40, 44, 53, 57, 67, 86, 98 location 5–6, 25, 43, 71, 74, 108, 133–34, 156, 160, 169, 173 locale 59, 72, 133 Mao Zedong 29–32, 36, 68, 80, 138, 141 post-Mao 30, 144, 156 map, the 65, 73–75, 90, 192

Index memory 7, 19, 33, 35, 38, 64–66, 70, 73–75, 88, 95–96, 110, 119–20, 125–26, 140–43 collective 73 historical 30, 75 personal 67, 71, 74 mimesis 9, 18–20, 169 mobility 6, 134 model minority 101, 121 modernism 34, 131, 133 modernist 11, 17, 19, 53, 57, 133–34 modernity 29, 48–49, 79 modernization 29–30, 34–35, 80, 127, 144 narcissism 155, 157–58, 166 nationalism 7, 29–33, 36, 38, 80, 128, 156, 176 new realism literature 34, 36 1997 handover (of Hong Kong), the 83, 85, 89, 140, 176 Nobel Prize committee, the 70, 137 the Nobel Prize for Literature 126–27, 129 nostalgia 5, 31–32, 56, 64–65, 68–69, 72–73, 75, 130, 133, 158 Notes of a Desolate Man (Huangren shouji) 154–55, 158–59, 165–66, 168 Occidentalism 29, 156 One Man’s Bible (Yigeren de shengjing) 126, 130, 132, 135–37, 143–45 Orientalism 101, 156 original, the 14–22, 57–9, 63, 68, 74, 87, 89–90, 92, 105–6, 108, 114–15, 144, 169 compare the copy originality 14–19, 53, 57, 105, 168 other(s), the 19–21, 45–47, 79, 81, 115, 132, 149–50, 156, 158, 161 compare the self

221

parody 23, 55–57, 63–64, 104–06, 108–09, 112, 150 pastiche 15, 56, 64–65, 69–70, 73, 75, 104–06, 108 performative/performance 12, 18, 103, 108, 133, 143, 155 postcolonial identity 6, 21, 67, 85, 149, 153, 169, 171 postcolonial imitation 20, 22 postcolonialism 8, 11, 14, 22–23, 34, 91, 156, 174 postcoloniality 21–22, 63, 84, 91 (Taiwan’s) post-martial law era 53 postmodernism 7, 11, 14–15, 22–3, 34, 174 postmodern 8, 11, 13–18, 20–22, 55–56, 61, 63, 91, 132–33, 149, 152, 154, 156–8, 160–61, 163, 165–66, 171–72 postmodern imitation 18 postmodernity 22 race

3–5, 7, 11–12, 107, 117, 161, 176 racial 12, 100, 102, 107–10, 113, 117–18, 120–21, 147 Reality and Fiction ( Jishi yu xugou) 38, 48–49 remembrance 136, 140–43 compare forgetting root-seeking literature 33–34, 36 sameness 9, 12–13, 96, 148 compare difference self, the 8, 12, 19–21, 25, 34–37, 45–46, 74, 87, 92, 96, 111, 115, 117, 120, 129, 132, 142–45, 149–50, 154–55, 157–58, 160–62, 166–69, 172, 175 compare the other simulacra/simulacrum/simulation 15–17, 21, 35, 64, 68, 71, 75–76, 90, 158

222

Index

Soul Mountain (Ling shan) 126–27, 130, 144–45 Spivak, Gayatri 49 stereotyping 101, 107, 113–14, 118, 195, subject/subjectivity 23, 33–36, 38, 47, 92–95, 98, 132, 141, 143–44, 148, 151–58, 162–69, 171, 186

trauma/traumatic 7, 46, 63, 126, 137, 141–42 travel 6, 12, 132, 134 Tripmaster Monkey 102–04, 107, 115–19, 196–98

Taiwan postcolonial 55, 173 writers 6, 53, 89, 188 Taiwanese (benshengren) 52–53, 68–69, 73, 75, 84, 176 Taussig, Micheal 9, 18–21, 185 third space 149, 152–53, 163–64, 169 third world 13, 22, 126–27, 135, 144 see also first world the Tiananmen Square Incident 84–85, 130, 138 transnational 13, 125, 134, 145, 158, 172

Wang, Anyi 36–42, 44–49, 76, 187 Wang, Der-wei David 38, 131, 188, 190 Wang, Jing 34, 36

utopia 16, 32, 75, 107, 111, 156, 159–68, 198 versus dystopia 75

Young, Robert J. C.

12, 148

Zhang, Xudong 34, 36, 128 Zhu, Tianwen 54, 154–55, 157, 165–66, 168–73 Zhu, Tianxin 54–57, 59–76 Zizek, Slavoj 167, 171