Asian American

Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War

mandy — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

In Ends of Empire, Jodi Kim approaches the Cold War not as a period in United States history, but as an epistemology, a continued production of knowledge. How does the Cold War generate specific forms of knowledge about the world that reproduce the binary categories of nations as “good” and “evil”? The Cold War is now what Kim characterizes as a “protracted afterlife,” as its gendered and racialized logics and rhetorics are once again deployed in the War on Terror.

Ends of Empire is, therefore, a timely intervention. Kim traces how the rivalry between the US and the USSR was triangulated throughout Asia, and how this triangulation has been sustained through complex cultural formations that naturalize the values of imperialism.

Kim’s project draws heavily from Cultural Studies, as she looks into cultural production as sites of resistance. Since dominant historical accounts obscure the gendered and racialized logics of the Cold War as an epistemology, Kim turns instead towards Asian American cultural products. She skillfully turns her analytic eye on how such literary and cinematic texts make visible the mandated “forgettings,” and violent displacements that Cold War logic continues to unleash in Asia.

In Chapter Three, for example, Kim examines Ruth L. Ozeki’s novel My Year of Meats. Jane, one of the novel’s main characters, is the adult daughter of a Japanese mother and an American father who served as an Army botanist during World War II. In her capacity as producer for a television show, Jane promotes the cooking and consumption of US meat to Japanese housewives. Jane is thus part of an enterprise to recruit Japanese housewives as enthusiastic consumers of US products, a contemporary form of imperialist gendered racial rehabilitation for a nation that was once seen as an enemy.

Jane’s observations about the lingering cancers and contaminations in Japan and in American towns that produced plutonium for the bombs, as well as her meditations on her father’s death from cancer, highlight the transnational links between Japanese and US victims of the war, who are all but ignored in dominant historical accounts. In Chapter Five, Kim’s reading of the PBS documentary Daughter from Danang shows how the continued inequalities in political and racial economies made it impossible for a US transracial adoptee to know the lives of her Vietnamese mother and family.

Kim provides a good example of how cultural critique could be employed to make visible various narratives that are suppressed in dominant accounts of history. Many of the narratives of loss, violence, and haunting that she teases out would be impossible to articulate outside literary or cinematic forms. Ends of Empire thus serves to illustrate how cultural production not only serves to give voice to suppressed histories. By refusing to conform to the logics of the Cold War, these works also serve important sites of resistance.

Kim ends her book with the hope that her efforts to trace links between former and current manifestations of US empire would contribute to “a broader interrogation of the intersecting genealogies that have produced our contemporary moment of neoliberal globalization, imperial mandate, and enduring gendered racial regimes of domination.” It is a welcome invitation, as social critique is particularly relevant when it is oriented towards imagining ways of life and organizing that are not built around the need to reproduce empire.

Written by: Tanglad, September 14th 2010

Hello Kitty Must Die

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 23:59:00 +0000

By Angela S. Choi

Tyrus Books

To many, Hello Kitty is a mouthless cat in blue overalls who’s never spotted without her signature red bow, but to twenty-eight-year-old Chinese-American Fiona Yu, the feline is an embodiment of everything she hates and willing to kill for. Author Angela S. Choi makes her publishing debut with the crime novel Hello Kitty Must Die, and while it attacks nearly every stereotype that Asian American women face daily, it leaves a bad aftertaste that not even the saccharine sweet pop culture icon can cure.

Yu is that character readers will love to hate, but it’s not because of her cringing pessimistic personality or how she seems to despise everything that comes her way. Rather, Choi’s book is an unconvincing collection of bland one-liners and exasperating contradictions that fail to depict a tale of family values gone bad.

“My virginity will always be mine,” declares Yu in the first few pages of Hello Kitty Must Die as she decides to eliminate her hymen with a Lidocaine-coated dildo. Yet after making this bold choice that would have empowered some not wanting to wait for Mr. Right, she realizes that there’s no cherry to pop. As a result, Yu decides to have her hymen replaced solely to tear apart her “family honor.” It’s difficult to continue moving forward in the story as this is a poor attempt in showing readers that Yu wants complete control of her body, including the right to take her own virginity.

While it’s acceptable for any female to feel that she shouldn’t have a man just to “make her a woman," it isn’t believable that Yu would go through all this trouble simply to get rid of human tissue. Why would a woman purposely tear her hymen and then spend thousands of dollars to have it replaced just to prove she has full control of her womanhood? Choi doesn’t attempt to convince readers the purpose of making a sudden and very expensive decision, which leaves us wondering if embarking on Yu’s confusing journey is worth it.

Yu complains of her family’s desires to wed her off, yet she, a Yale graduate and corporate lawyer, chooses to live with them. Is this Choi’s way of showing her audience that Yu is just an American girl who won’t leave the bird’s nest and isn’t as independent as she implies? These issues are troubling, yet they’re tossed aside, like the family-picked suitors Yu secretly gets rid of because they’re too fat, hideous, or unable to pay for dinner. There’s one leading man who’s more serial killer than prince charming that does get Vuitton-loving Yu’s heart racing, but even he can’t close this Pandora’s box of problems.

Childhood friend Sean Killroy may relish the hunt for unsuspecting victims, but it’s Yu, not the psychopath she secretly admires, that hits reader’s nerves. It’s difficult to believe that she feels no remorse for the poor “Hello Kitties” in her life, all because they merely represent a fate she refuses to accept. For example, when readers discover that her skin bleaching obsessed cousin Katie was found dead from a broken neck, all Yu could think of was how she saved herself from an unwanted marriage because the morgue isn’t “a good place. They don’t serve fifteen-dollar bellinis there.” She later wonders if “morticians gave their clients pedicures. After all, no one would ever know.”

Yu despises getting set up on blind dates just to walk down the aisle faster and comments how Katie “fainted all the time” because she was 90 pounds, but didn’t mind “the modern version of Chinese foot binding” with Prada, Dior, and Blahnik. We couldn’t help but wonder why she’s willing to stay single, yet goes on tangents over every designer label she owns just to flaunt her looks, which are meant to show her poor excuses for suitors why she’s the catch they’ll never have? This is one major flaw that’s never solved in Hello Kitty Must Die, only displaying Choi’s inability to produce a heart-stopping murder mystery for those seeking a bad ass Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw. We’ll stick with cutesy cartoons any day.

Written by: Stephanie Nolasco, May 31st 2010

All That Work and Still No Boys

admin — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Kathryn Ma

University of Iowa Press

In All That Work and Still No Boys, Kathryn Ma writes short stories with one thing in common: the Chinese American experience in California. This book is not for those who like conventional storytelling. Each chapter is the story of a person or family, sometimes related to another person or family in the book and sometimes not at all. The stories jump through time and space—sometimes told in first person and sometimes in third—but each chapter brings a refreshing and unique look at the way different people deal with immigration, culture, and family.

It’s hard to write about what I enjoyed most in this book without going into detail about specific stories. I’ll briefly mention that I loved the grandmother, who is so dedicated to helping her aspiring actress of a granddaughter, and the overachieving student with a school prank gone wrong. With the grandmother, you see pride and dedication almost to a fault. The student, meanwhile, provides an unexpected spin on the stereotype of overachieving Asian student. These are a couple of my favorites because Ma breathed life into each character, no matter how short the story. I found myself connecting to some part of almost every story, seeing the weaknesses of the protagonists and sympathizing with the antagonists.

This is normally the point in a review where I would elaborate on what I didn’t like about the book, but there isn’t really much I didn’t like. If I had to offer a criticism, it would be that I find the characters a little underdeveloped and wish I could read more about all of them. I’d like to know how their stories continue and where they end up.

Admittedly, even though I love reading narratives that jump around and don’t always match up the way these stories do, it was sometimes hard to figure out what stories were actually connected and which were not. I look forward to reading the book again—not just to connect the dots, but simply because it was a very enjoyable read.

Written by: frau sally benz, December 2nd 2009

Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire

admin — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:08:00 +0000

Edited by Sonia Shah

South End Press

Incredible. Insightful. Inspiring. These are the words I use to describe Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, the pivotal textbook on the growing politics of Asian American women. Essays embrace wide-ranging issues that include domestic violence, health, exploitation in the global trade, the role of spirituality, and punk-rock culture—all in the light of organizing and activism.

The anthology’s key concern is with the attitude of mainstream feminism whose individualistic and essentialist views are at odds with the affairs and experiences of Asian women. Sonia Shah, editor of Dragon Ladies, believes that a singular Asian American feminist movement is essential in representing Asian American women’s interests. The term ‘Asian’ is problematic in that it corresponds to a diaspora of ethnic identities, but Shah nevertheless manages to take into account the realities that females face from this walk of life.

As Juliana Pegues points out in “Strategies from the Field,” unlike white activists, Asian women have to deal with invisibility as well as “exotic” racial stereotypes and labels like “well-behaved,” “hard-working.” and “obedient.” The trouble is that Asian women’s perspectives are ignored when race is viewed in terms of black and white. When it comes to organizing resistance, “groups in many cases act as all-white groups internally, and white perspectives and standards are the norm.”

Purvi Shah’s article “Redefining the Home” is very engrossing, though the entire text is by no means an easy read. In fact, a lot of the material is tough, but if you’re passionate enough about this topic, you’ll fly through it. Shah discusses the belief that the personal is political when it comes to abuse within the home. Community elites seem to be the culprits in seeding the idea that culture and politics are separate issues—matters of the Home/Marriage for instance are cleverly disguised as tradition; these leaders are in essence threatened by organizations that challenge their norms. Rightly so, Shah proposes that “a home in which violence occurs is a public space” and a political problem that is affected by a range of factors like social, cultural and environmental.

Many prominent figures have come together to comprise this collection of interviews, personal essays, and eye-opening historical and current facts such as on the slave-like treatments of overseas Filipina workers. The joint mother-daughter article “Bringing Up Baby: Raising a ‘Third World’ Daughter in the ‘First World’” was a piece I found quite amusing and relevant to my own view of reality. Shamita Das Dasgupta and Sayantani DasGupta talk about balancing their different identities—Indian immigrant and American-born Indian—against Western culture. The idea of community is important to Indian culture and therefore for Indian women, it forms part of their identity; adopting the model of western feminism whose emphasis lies on the ‘individual’ would inevitably further alienate them; the issues concerning white feminists do not always apply to women of Asian origin.

Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire in itself deconstructs the Asian woman stereotype conveying instead an image of the “virangana”—the ‘warrior woman’ thirsting to battle for change and victory. The contributors are good role models to rouse the next generation to self-reflect and take part in some form of action to empower the disadvantaged. From a spiritual standpoint, Cheng Imm Tan makes an important assertion: “When activism is fuelled by anger and hatred, we end up objectifying the ‘enemy’ just as we have been objectived.” What Tan then subtly suggests is that injustice can be met with compassion, and an intent to transform our aggressors rather than destroy them.

Certainly, this is a book with great ideas from women who not only breathe fire but speak with absolute conviction.

Written by: Payal Patel, July 14th 2009