ABSTRACT
Title of Dissertation: ARTICULATING
IDENTITIES: RHETORICAL
READINGS OF
ASIAN AMERICAN LITERACY
NARRATIVES
Linnea Marie
Hasegawa, Doctor of Philosophy, 2004
Dissertation directed by: Professor Kandice Chuh
Department
of English
This
dissertation examines how Asian American writers, through what I call critical acts of literacy, discursively
(re)construct the self and make claims for alternative spaces in which to
articulate their identities as legitimate national subjects. I argue that using literacy as an analytic
for studying certain Asian American texts directs attention to the rhetorical
features of those texts thereby illuminating how authors challenge hegemonic
ideologies about literacy and national identity. Analyzing the audiences and situations of
these texts enriches our understanding of Asian American identity formation and
the social, cultural, and political functions that these literacy narratives
serve for both the authors and readers of the texts.
The
introduction lays the groundwork for my dissertation’s arguments and method of
analysis through a reading of Theresa Cha’s Dictée. By situating readers in such a way that they
are compelled to consider their own engagements with literacy and how
discourses of literacy and citizenship function to reproduce dominant
ideologies, Dictée advances a
theoretical model for reading literacy narratives. In subsequent chapters I show how this
methodology encourages a kind of reading practice that may serve to transform
readers’ ideologies. Part I argues that
reading the fictional autobiographies of Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan as
literacy narratives illuminates the ways in which they simultaneously critique
the contradiction between the myth of American democratic inclusion and the
reality of exclusion while claiming Americanness through a demonstration of
their own and their fictional alter egos’ literacies. Part II argues for the hyperliteracy of Frank Chin’s The
Chickencoop Chinaman and Chang-rae
Lee’s Native Speaker. I posit that the narrator-protagonists’ acts
of hyperliteracy are performances of identity that mark and contest their
indeterminacy as minority subjects.
Finally, the conclusion investigates the debates surrounding Hawai`i
author Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging
and the use of Pidgin as a resistant discourse in the text. I argue that examining literacy in the
context of U.S. imperialism points to both the increasing need for and
difficulty of using literacy as a theorizing framework for the study of Asian
American literatures.
ARTICULATING
IDENTITIES: RHETORICAL READINGS OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERACY NARRATIVES
by
Linnea
Marie Hasegawa
Dissertation
submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University
of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of
Doctor
of Philosophy
2004
Advisory Committee:
Professor Kandice Chuh, Chair
Professor
Jeanne Fahnestock Professor Shirley Logan Professor
Sangeeta Ray
Professor Marylu McEwen
©
Copyright by
Linnea
Marie Hasegawa
2004
For Mom and
Dad, with love ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are a
number of people I would like to thank for their guidance and support as I
worked to complete this dissertation. I
am indebted to my director and advisor Kandice Chuh for her thorough readings and
insightful commentary on multiple drafts, for always challenging me to think
more critically, and for her mentorship and support for the past eight
years. Professors Jeanne Fahnestock and
Shirley Logan also read and commented upon chapter drafts, for which I am
grateful. Collectively, their
constructive feedback helped me to shape and sharpen my analysis into a more
cohesive argument. I thank Professor
Sangeeta Ray for her support throughout the years that I have been a graduate
student at the University of Maryland.
Professor Marylu McEwen I thank for serving as the Dean’s Representative
on my dissertation committee. I also owe
a debt of gratitude to Morris Young, who assisted me in thinking through some
ideas at the earliest stages of my writing, and whose insightful and thoughtful
work on Asian American literacy narratives served as an inspiration for this
dissertation.
Tracy Chung
and Meryl Sirmans, my dear friends and colleagues at the University of Maryland
whom I have known since college, have provided invaluable intellectual and
moral support as I worked towards
completing this degree. I thank Meryl
for being a compassionate listener, for her sound advice, and for commiserating
with me as we both struggled to reach our goals. I am forever indebted to Tracy for her time,
keen eye for detail, insightful feedback on chapter drafts, and helping to keep
my spirits up when things seemed to be falling apart. I cannot express enough my appreciation for
her continuous support and sense of humor.
I also thank my friends and colleagues Crystal Parikh and Min Kim, who
earlier graduated from the program at Maryland, for reviewing portions of my
dissertation.
Scattered
across the globe are my friends from the American School in Japan— Clara
Barnett, Karen Cotter, Joy Fuyuno, Susan Coleman Olesek, Betsy Olson, Ayako
Seki, and Jennifer Speri—who listened to my rants and raves throughout my years
in graduate school, but more importantly have given me the gift of their
friendship for so many years.
My husband’s
parents, Annie and Win Aung, along with my sister-in-law Maybelle and her
husband Harry, have graciously welcomed me into their lives and have
enthusiastically cheered me on as I took each step toward completing my degree. I am thankful for their encouragement, love
and support. For reminding me how to
play and for making me laugh, I thank Caroline and Matthew Jordan.
My dear
husband Rob listened and responded to the excitement and fear that I expressed
about this undertaking with patience, thoughtfulness, and wisdom, for which I
am deeply grateful. I am thankful for
his meticulous proofreading skills, his assumption of day-to-day household
tasks, his faith that I would indeed someday finish, and above all his
partnership, love and support.
My parents,
Pam and Souk Hasegawa—to whom this work is dedicated—and my brother, Sergei,
have sustained me in so many ways and never doubted my commitment or my ability
to overcome the challenges I have faced.
The inspiration for my dissertation topic emerged from my experience
growing up in a bi-racial and bi-cultural family. My parents exposed me to diverse cultures
throughout my childhood and adolescence, and taught me to respect and
appreciate difference through their marriage and in innumerable other
ways. For my family’s unbounded love,
support, and confidence in me, I am and will always be grateful.
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
Introduction:
Reconfiguring Literacy and Subjectivity............................................. 1
Chapter 2: Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart ...................................... 93
Part II: Hyperliteracy, Hybridity and Disguise ..................................................
Chapter 3: Frank Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman..................... 127
Chapter 4: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker .............................................. 162
Notes .................................................. 226
Works Cited........................................ 239
Introduction: Reconfiguring Literacy and
Subjectivity
In the sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped
the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the
difference between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision. Ripe ones are soft and
brown-spotted. Sniff the bottoms. The
sweet one will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear
the meat. Chew on the skin, suck it, and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit, so sweet all of it, to the heart …
Other words that got me into trouble were fight and fright, wren and yarn. Fight was what I did when I was
frightened, fright was what I felt when I was fighting. Wrens are small, plain
birds, yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds out of yarn. I
loved to watch her tie the stuff; a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.
Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to
class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it
wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but watched the other faces …
—Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons”
I begin my discussion with Lee’s
poem because it resonates with the issues and queries with which this
dissertation is principally engaged.
Though the poem explicitly addresses issues relating to language,
culture, and race, it also problematizes the relationships among these
constructs as the teacher both asserts her authority as the arbiter of cultural
citizenship and publicly installs the speaking subject as foreign. The speaker and the “Chinese apple,” which
Mrs. Walker brings in for her students to taste (possibly for the first time),
are juxtaposed in such a way as to suggest that both are foreign and
distasteful. The speaker tells us,
“Knowing / it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat / but watched the other
faces.” The significance of the speaker
refusing to participate lies in his refusal to conform to the narrative that
has already placed him outside of the nation.
By creating a speaker who challenges his teacher’s and, by extension,
dominant culture’s systematic hierarchization of students based on their
pronunciation and the value that American culture places on speaking English
without an accent, Lee argues for his speaker’s legitimacy as a participant in
cultural criticism and illustrates the inadequacy of hegemonic standards of
evaluation.1 Mrs. Walker
suggests that knowing the difference between the denotations of the two words
is not as important as being able to recognize (and enunciate) the subtle
nuances in how each word is pronounced.
Lee then critiques this ideology by constructing Mrs. Walker as the one
who displays a shallow understanding of the two words.
I use the excerpt from Lee’s poem
as a point of departure for the following analysis because it so poignantly
illustrates the problematics I aim to address.
Appropriately situated in the classroom where dominant
ideologies are reproduced, Lee’s speaker is being indoctrinated with the
prevailing U.S. ideology that equates Americanness with accentless speech and
that conflates Asian accented speech with “foreignness” and
undesirability. My goal in this
dissertation is to contribute a critique of literacy as an analytic to the
fields of Asian American literary studies and literacy studies in particular,
and to American literary and cultural studies more broadly. I hope to demonstrate how an
interdisciplinary study such as this can help shed light on both Asian
Americans’ and non-Asian Americans’ engagements with, perceptions of, and
stereotypes about literacy (in all its variegations) and race with the ultimate
hope of persuading my academic and non-academic readers that more critical
attention along these lines—both inside and outside the classroom—is necessary
in order to bring about real social change.
This project draws upon traditions
of rhetorical theory and criticism—specifically literacy studies—and Asian
American cultural criticism. My aim is
to conceptualize and identify the multiple ways in which Asian Americanness is
rhetorically constructed by various writers and to ask how these constructions
contribute to and interrogate current theoretical investigations of literacy,
race, and citizenship.
Critics attending to the work of
Asian American literary studies have long been concerned with examining the
relationships between narrative constructions and representations of social and
political categories such as language, race, class, gender, sexuality, and
nation. By exploring the intersections
of these constructs, one can better understand social structures and the
processes of identity formation and thus begin the work of dismantling current
ideologies that continue to subordinate, homogenize, or exclude people on the
basis of difference.
This project is in conversation
with Asian American cultural criticism, and yet it differs from much of that
criticism by focusing on specific rhetorical strategies that certain authors
use as well as the rhetorical effects of those strategies. My particular concerns are with literacy and
the multiple ways in which literacy and the discourse of literacy are
inextricably linked to the workings of power.
Because literacy is not just about the ability to read and write, but
about who can participate in cultural production and nation-building,
literacy—as a way of gaining legitimacy or access to social and political
power—becomes even more essential (and problematic) for those who are denied
access on the basis of gender, race, national origin, class, etc. As Morris Young writes, “literacy often
becomes the marker of citizenship and this assignment of legitimacy is often
‘required’ to enjoy the full benefits of citizenship or even of basic human
rights” (6). Recognizing the power
structures and social relations invested and embedded in the discourses of
literacy and citizenship directs attention to the intersections of race,
literacy and subjectivity and compels us to conceive of Asian American
literature and the discursive constructions of identity in this literature as
rhetoric.
Critics have examined certain Asian
American literary and other cultural “texts” using rhetorical theory and
criticism. The studies that pay
particular attention to specific rhetorical strategies include King-kok Cheung’s
Articulate Silences, Jinqi Ling’s Narrating Nationalisms, and Morris
Young’s PhD dissertation, “Literacy, Legitimacy, and the Composing of Asian
American Citizenship.” Though Lisa Lowe,
in her indispensable work, Immigrant Acts,
does not identify them as rhetorical strategies per se, her examination of the
strategic identifications and disidentifications (between and
among Asians, Asian immigrants, Asian Americans, and
non-Asian Americans) that help to reveal heterogeneities and contradictions in
identificatory, culturalist, and nationalist practices are akin to what Kenneth
Burke identifies as identification and consubstantiality, terms which I discuss
at greater length below.
Additionally, scholars such as
Patricia Chu, Rachel Lee and Leslie Bow have recently published studies that
examine the rhetoric of “claiming America” as specifically gendered and
sexualized acts, though their critical focus is more on the literary than the
rhetorical function of these articulations.
In Assimilating Asians: Gendered
Strategies of Authorship in Asian America, Patricia Chu looks at novels of
subject formation— bildungsroman —to
determine why and in what ways Asian American male and female authors position
themselves differently in their fictional narratives of assimilation. Rachel Lee’s The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation
and Transnation contributes to the growing body of work in Asian American
studies that challenges the traditional nationalist framework of America by
arguing for a reconsideration of diasporic, postcolonial, and transnational
identities for the ways in which they are shaped by gender and sexuality. In Betrayal
and Other Acts of
Subversion:
Feminism, Sexual Politics, Asian American Women’s Literature, Leslie Bow
looks at the gendered and sexualized nature of the rhetorics of betrayal and
allegiance in Asian American women’s literature. Her study is in conversation with current
discussions of globalization and transnationalism as the “language of
betrayal,” she argues, “signals the artifice of naturalized racial, ethnic, or
national belonging” (11). Bow engages
feminist, literary, postcolonial, and rhetorical theory by examining female
strategic identifications (what she calls “alliances”), sometimes “enabled,”
she claims, by “disguise” or “masquerade,” in order to understand how these
alliances and affiliations function as “tools of political persuasion” (34) and
how “gender regulates group belonging” (177).
This study of Asian American
literacy narratives examines arguments that Asian American writers make about
literacy and how their narratives of literacy function with respect to
audience. The analyses I offer here aim
to contribute to the understanding of Asian American literary/cultural
production and consumption through investigations of the rhetorical strategies
that Asian American writers use to claim Americanness or to critique “America”
within cultural, material, and historical contexts that are specific to Asian
Americans. Combining literary analysis
with rhetorical criticism and sociocultural approaches to literacy provides
Asian Americanists (and others) another vantage point from which to explore and
assess the texts’ social function and potential power to effect change.
I argue that examining what I call critical acts of literacy opens up
possibilities for destabilizing power structures that discriminate, homogenize
and oppress and also allows for alternative forms of and sites for articulation
and expression. By challenging the
dominant narrative through these articulations, writers and readers participate
in cultural production and hence make claims for their own legitimacies as
national subjects. Although literary and
other kinds of critical analysis may lead to similar conclusions, the process
of conducting a rhetorical analysis reveals features of narratives that can, I
believe, illuminate the text in ways different from what might be revealed by
other types of analysis; it prompts us to utilize a different vocabulary in our
theorizations and in doing so brings to surface other perspectives on how
language is used, to borrow from Kenneth Burke, as “symbolic action.”
One of the basic tenets of
rhetorical theory is that rhetoric is addressed—in other words, arguments
evolve out of an understanding or interpretation of the rhetor’s audience. By its very nature, then, rhetorical analysis
seeks to break down hierarchies and challenges authorial dominance. What this means is that there is a shift in
focus from what the text says to who the text addresses, in what situation or
context the text is addressed, and why and what elements of the text, audience
and situation lead us to make these conclusions. Analyzing the audiences and situations of
certain Asian American literary works enriches our understanding of Asian
American identity formation and the social, cultural, and political functions
that these literacy narratives serve for both the authors and readers of the
texts. Moreover, by focusing on the
rhetorical dimensions of the text, we can learn about the author’s conception
of the audience, what the author may hope to achieve by writing to this
audience, and what the author may be struggling with as she constructs
arguments for her readers. Rhetorical
analysis can thus help us better understand our roles as readers and also how
authors make sense of their world to themselves through a process of
self-deliberation (Perelman and Olbrechets-Tyteca 41).
Of critical importance to this
study is also whether and how the authors and characters in the texts that I
examine are in fact perceived as
legitimate. In the context of this
dissertation, “gaining legitimacy” signifies not only the acquisition of
social, cultural and/or political power but also the acquisition of social,
cultural, political and symbolic “capital” (Bourdieu). The key concept here, as in discourses of
citizenship, is the idea of recognition or the bestowal of recognition by
another person, party, government, nation, or state that signifies one’s
acceptance as a member of the national community.2 In
order to examine how writers use rhetoric and literacy to make these claims and
critiques, it is important to assess these writers’ conceptions of
America. As my analysis will show,
“America” is multiply determined—it is at once a democratic nation, a “land of
opportunity,” but it is also a nation that excludes people on the basis of race
and/or limits opportunities for those who are marginalized because of race,
gender, national origin, language, accent, religion, sexual orientation, class,
etc. America is also an imperialist
nation that exerts control over native populations (both within the U.S. and
abroad) and problematizes the Asian immigrant subject’s relationship to both
Asia and
America. As Lisa Lowe explains,
The material legacy of the repressed history of U.S.
imperialism in Asia is borne out in the
‘return’ of Asian immigrants to the imperial center. In this sense, these Asian Americans are determined
by the history of U.S. involvements in Asia and the historical racialization of
Asians in the United States. (16)
Because of America’s political and economic
involvement with Asia, and yet despite the contributions that Asian immigrants
made in the building of America, Asians are always seen as immigrants or
“foreigners-within,” even if they were born in the United States (Lowe 6). Thus, the conceptions and constructions of
America and what it means to be American that we see in these texts are often
contradictory and always complex. By
invoking the terms “postcolonial” and “transnational,” I acknowledge what
Sau-ling Wong calls “denationalizing” trends in the field of Asian American
cultural criticism;3 that is, I recognize the uneven histories of
Asian Americans as well as the sometimes contradictory positions in which
Asians find themselves in the U.S.
My reading of Asian American
literacy narratives is informed by a number of scholars and critics including
Mikhail Bakhtin, Kenneth Burke, Homi Bhabha, Paulo Freire and Morris Young, as
well as ideas put forth by speech act theorists and fantasy theme analysts.4 In distinct and productive ways, each of
these theorists and ideas contributes to an understanding of how literacy can
be used as an analytic for reading these texts as rhetorical. They help us to see the multiple dimensions
of rhetoric and literacy and assist us in theorizing why Asian Americans, as
racialized liminal subjects, might choose the particular strategies that they
do to challenge the dominant ideologies that construct them as Other.
To be clear, I do not mean to
suggest that reading literacy narratives is unique or specific to Asian
American literature; rather, the ideas and arguments articulated in this
dissertation are also relevant to American studies and literary studies more
broadly because so much of what it means to be American is entwined with the
acquisition of English and the literacy practices in which we engage
daily. However, these ideas are
particularly significant for Asian American writers because, as marginalized
writers, they are specifically marked as “foreign” and hence their literacies
and legitimacies are always suspect. My
project therefore also engages composition literacy theorists who are
interested in assisting marginalized students in their negotiations with
language and dominant culture through acts of reading and writing. Reading these Asian American texts as spaces
in which authors articulate cultural difference and challenge readers’
ideologies about literacy, race, and U.S. citizenship contributes to a
“critical multiculturalism”—it is this kind of counterreading or
counterhegemonic reading practice that I argue for in this project and that I
ultimately believe can bring about social change.
Reading
Literacy Narratives
The aim of this study is to examine
both the ways in which literacy functions as an analytic of citizenship and
identity in Asian American literary works and the rhetorical dimensions of such
works. The narratives I examine are
rhetorical in the sense that they make specific arguments about their
characters’, authors’ and readers’ literacies and legitimacies as national
subjects, thereby challenging and disrupting our notions of what it means to be
a “literate” “American.” My use of the
term “literacy narratives” comes from Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen
who define literacy narratives as “stories, like Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, that foreground issues of
language acquisition and literacy … that are structured by learned,
internalized ‘literacy tropes’ … by ‘prefigured’ ideas and images … that
sometimes include explicit images of schooling and teaching … [and that]
include texts that both challenge and affirm culturally scripted ideas about
literacy” (513).
While literacy is defined in
multiple ways and used in a myriad of contexts,5 the definition that
resonates most with me and which is most relevant to my project is the one
offered and utilized by New Literacy Studies scholars who view literacy as more
than just mastery of written language. Literacy
is also about learning how to speak and knowing the appropriate discourse and
how to use that discourse in a particular situation. In other words, literacy practices are
“dynamic,” “fluid,” and very much “context-bound”; they
are also hierarchically structured and “positioned in
relation to the social institutions and power relations which sustain them”
(Barton, Hamilton, and Ivanič 1).
James Paul Gee asserts an important
paradigm shift in the study and discourse of literacy. He writes, “Paradoxically put: a person can
speak a language grammatically, can use the language appropriately, and still
get it ‘wrong’. This is so because what
is important is not just how you say
it … but who you are and what you’re doing when you say it”
(124). Literacy standards have been used
in this country both during slavery and more recently in the debate over the
use of Ebonics to subjugate blacks and to justify their treatment and
categorization as subhuman. Similar
standards have also been used since non-English speakers began immigrating to
the U.S. as a means for maintaining a social and racial hierarchy.6 That race, gender, class, and national origin
are inextricably tied to the discourse
of literacy is obvious. What is not
always obvious are the ways in which discrimination based on any of the above
constructs is masked by linguistic discrimination. Literacy standards, much like the
contradictory immigration and naturalization laws based on “race,” have thus
been used to justify one’s legitimacy or illegitimacy as an able/unable,
desirable/undesirable citizen or participant in the social, political, and
economic life in the U.S.
By analyzing our culture’s
conception of literacy, we gain greater insight into what our culture deems
normative and, conversely, what our culture deems deviant or non-standard with
respect to literacy practices. Furthermore,
the ideology of literacy, embodied in the view that schooling, literacy, and
economic success are interrelated, is deeply embedded in the ideology of
American citizenship. President Theodore
Roosevelt’s inter-agency commission codified this viewpoint on naturalization
in 1905 when it proclaimed, “the proposition is incontrovertible that no man is
a desirable citizen of the United States who does not know the English
language” (qtd. in Leibowitz 34). The
belief was that without the ability to speak English, let alone the ability to
read and write, one could not understand American institutions. In his effort to “elevate the body politic,”
President Roosevelt demanded an education requirement of those seeking
immigration or naturalization. Moreover,
with what might be perceived as a racist impulse, the Immigration Restriction
League of 1894 devised a mandatory literacy test in an effort to restrict
undesirable immigrants (Leibowitz 35-37).
Reading texts as literacy
narratives thus illuminates the dynamics of the society and culture in which
they are written. It further enables the
social, cultural, or literary critic to examine the “literacy myth”—that is,
that one can gain entry into the social, cultural, political, and economic
spheres of America through the acquisition of “standard” English—and its
function both within the particular text and for the audience to which it is
addressed.7 Though the above
quotations refer to turn-of-the-century immigration and naturalization
requirements for non-citizens, the contradictions inherent in America’s
democratic liberalism continue to play out in current ideologies of literacy,
especially as they relate to race and national identity formation. A contemporary text that offers a compelling
illustration of the ways in which specific rhetorical tools are employed to
argue for a reconsideration/reconfiguration of literacy as it relates to
subjectivity, nation and empire and that will serve to introduce my arguments
and method of analysis, including terminology and critical framework, is Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée.
I begin my analysis with Dictée because it allows me to introduce
many of the concepts and theories that I discuss in subsequent chapters, it
provides the best illustration of how a writer might influence her audience to
think differently about literacy and legitimacy, and it highlights the
challenge of thinking through the term “postcolonial” as it relates to Asian
Americans—a thread that runs through each of the other chapters.8 Dictée
treats both Korea’s history as a colony of Japan and Korean immigration to the
U.S. as conceptions of transnationalism.9 Reading Dictée
as a “postcolonial” and “transnational” text therefore challenges us to
consider it in relation to other Asian American texts and formulations of Asian
American identity.
My approach to studying Dictée and the narratives anchoring the
other chapters centers on how these texts foreground issues of language
acquisition and linguistic practices as they relate to social, cultural, and
political power. A more detailed summary
of each chapter appears at the end of this introduction. Briefly, in chapters 1 and 2 I examine the
immigrant autobiographies of Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan and discuss the
ways in which their texts argue for their legitimacies as Americans and also
serve to critique “America”; chapters 3 and 4 explore the literacy acts of
contemporary writers Frank Chin and Chang-rae Lee and their respective
narrator-protagonists in The Chickencoop
Chinaman and Native Speaker; and
the conclusion directs attention to the politics of language use in the context
of Hawai`i through a reading of Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging and the controversy surrounding her work. Reading these texts as narratives of literacy
allows for a subversive critique of the ways in which dominant culture uses
language and literacy to construct Asian Americans as Other, and of the ways in
which Asian American writers, through their critical acts of literacy,
discursively (re)construct the self and make claims for alternative spaces in
which to articulate their identities and to interrogate narratives that have
placed them outside of the nation.
Dictée
argues for a reading practice and understanding of what it means to be literate
and legitimate in ways similar to but also very different from the other texts
in my dissertation. As in Lois-Ann
Yamanaka Blu’s Hanging, the speaking
subjects of Dictée are living in a
society that was, and in many ways continues to be, deeply impacted by
imperialist domination. The struggles
that they endure while trying to negotiate nationalist and colonialist
ideologies are reflected in their literacy practices and in the disjointed
structure of the text. Though it shares
much with Yamanaka’s works in the way of critiquing the colonizer/colonized relationship,
specifically with regard to language (i.e., the characters’ negotiation of
multiple literacy practices; schooling in the dominant language; the
hierarchical relationship among languages as they connote specific colonial and
linguistic histories; and the text’s call for what Juliana Spahr calls a
“decolonizing practice of reading”), Dictée
presents a unique challenge to my study of literacy in that it is a text that,
often, its audiences do not know how to read.10 In fact, any reader who is not proficient in
English, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Latin, and Greek will not be able to read the text in its entirety because
each of these languages is present in the text.
Those who are proficient in all of these languages may be able to read
every word in the text but still may have difficulty “reading,” for example,
the photographic images that are displayed intermittently throughout the text
because they are not accompanied by captions or other contextual information.
Rather than arguing for its
characters’ and/or authors’ literacies, and hence legitimacies, as the early
immigrant narratives of Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan do, Dictée challenges our conceptions of
what it means to be literate by forcing the reader into the role of a person
with a compromised literacy.11
Readers are confronted with so many forms of discourses, images,
languages, and varying subject positions that it is extremely difficult to
determine precisely what is going on throughout the text. The text is not only circular in form (there
is no determinate beginning or end), but it is also intentionally elliptical
and therefore extremely difficult to comprehend in its entirety. By demanding that its readers perform acts of
literacy with which they may be unfamiliar, Dictée
offers a methodology for a new kind of reading practice—one that not only
encourages readers to interrogate structures of power in the context of
colonialism, but also compels readers to read themselves.
Dictée
illuminates my study of literacy narratives by calling into question not so
much whether one can “master” a text or decipher the meaning behind Cha’s
language, but more so what happens to the reading process when one encounters a
foreign language or foreign structure in a text. Cha, through her amalgamation of voices,
languages, and visual images, both interrogates the relationship between
literacy and nation by representing various literacy practices within colonial
contexts as well as demands that her readers participate in the performance of
those practices. By forcing her readers
to grapple with the complex form, fractured speech and syntax, and interweaving
of multiple languages, Cha invokes the experiences of a (post)colonial
immigrant subject thereby urging her readers to consider what it means to be a
literate subject or citizen of a nation.
As her narrator moves between multiple discursive worlds while
struggling to make utterances, so too do her readers struggle to translate, or
understand the meaning behind those movements or utterances. This “decolonizing practice” of reading, as
Juliana Spahr notes, serves as a reminder to readers that they do not have
access to multiple “language patterns” and that language is neither “easily
appropriated” nor “owned as sovereign territory” (32).
In addition to introducing the
dissertation’s arguments, this introduction also serves as a model for the
format of the subsequent chapters’ discussions.
In each chapter, I provide autobiographical information about the author
whose text is the focus of that chapter, historical context in which the text
was written and published, and overviews of the critical reception of the text
both to illustrate its social function and to provide exigence for my own study
by demonstrating how specific attention to literacy and the rhetorical
functions of the text are lacking.
Following that, I provide my own reading of the text as a literacy
narrative using various theories on audience and rhetoric as a framework for my
analysis. I emphasize throughout this
investigation that an analysis grounded in rhetorical theory and criticism
offers us insight into our roles and responsibilities as readers (and writers)
and further persuades us of the need for more critical analysis of the ways in
which texts can engage readers in their own processes of reading and subject
formation.
Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha and Dictée
Born in Pusan, South Korea in 1951
in the midst of the Korean War, Theresa Cha immigrated to the United States
with her family at the age of ten. They
moved first to Hawai`i and then settled in San Francisco in 1964, where Cha and
her sister attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart School. Cha went on to study ceramics, film theory,
and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. It was here that she began working as a
performance artist, combining film, still images, recordings of her voice on
tape, objects, her own bodily movements, and text-objects (Wolf 11). As Susan Wolf describes, one of Cha’s most
“outstanding” performances, Reveillé dans
la Brume, involved “lap-dissolve
projections, synchronous interaction with them by Cha, live voices and
pre-recorded voice-overs, and a controlled distribution of light” (11). In this performance, in which Cha plays with
light, darkness, words, movement, and multiple voices, Cha attempts to explore
what she herself describes as a “specific, isolated time and space between two
images when a dissolve occurs, and the perceptual and psychological effects of
those processes on viewers” (qtd. in Wolf 11).
Her interest in the effects that language has on its hearers (and
viewers) and in language’s “stratified” nature continued to manifest itself
throughout her career and studies as a performance artist and later as a
writer, as we see in her only full-length text Dictée.
In 1976 Cha moved to Paris for a
year where she continued her studies in film and film theory with Christian
Metz, Raymond Bellour, and Thierry Kuntzel at the Centre d’Etudes Américaine du
Cinéma á Paris. Upon returning to
Berkeley shortly thereafter, Cha received her M.A. and M.F.A. degrees in art
and continued her work as a performance artist, writer, and filmmaker in the
Bay Area. In 1980 she moved to New York
to work as a writer and filmmaker, and on November 5, 1982, shortly after the
publication of Dictée, Cha was
murdered by a security guard in New York City.12
Though it is arguable where the
text in fact begins and ends, one can say with certainty that the reader is at
first confronted with a black and white cover image of what appears to be rock
formations on an otherwise flat plain of barren earth. The first page of text, the frontispiece, is
another black and white image. Though
Cha does not provide a citation for either photograph, scholars have determined
that this frontispiece is a photograph of an inscription on the wall of a
tunnel in Japan made by a Korean laborer either during or after the Japanese
occupation of Korea.13 What
follows, aside from an additional page with an apocryphal quotation by Sappho,
consists of verse and prose primarily in English or French, typed and
handwritten letters by unknown authors, quotations from various reference
books, Chinese and Japanese characters, translations, dialogues, cinematic
scripts, still images from film, photographs, a map of Korea, and anatomical
diagrams, all organized into nine sections based on the names of the nine Greek
muses.
The
(Post)colonial context(s) of Dictée
By constructing a text that is
primarily a series of dictations and translations, Cha engages questions of
authority and ownership of language, for the very act of dictation assumes an
originary speaker and a (more often than not) subservient transcriber whose job
is to record accurately the speech and correct punctuation of the speaker. By creating a subject who records
inaccurately or who records the pauses or emphases in the oral delivery by
spelling out the punctuation (“Open paragraph
It was the first day period She had come from a far period . . .” [1]), Cha illustrates the
disjunction between speaker and writer and critiques the hierarchical structure
of the practice of dictation. In a
colonial context, this disjunction, expressed by the narrator’s unwillingness
to conform to the “correct” procedures of dictation, represents the failure of
the colonizer to wholly colonize its subject.
Rather than accepting her role as dictated colonial subject, Cha’s
narrator offers a critique of colonialism, nationalism, and patriarchy through
her multiple literacy acts.
The colonial context that
undergirds Cha’s text is Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and its continued
occupation until 1945. Japan’s
annexation was facilitated by the United States when, after the Japanese defeated
the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War, the U.S. government stepped in and
agreed to let Japan occupy Korea on the condition that Japan not interfere with
the United States’ interest in the Philippines.
During the period of Japanese colonial rule, Koreans were forced to give
up many of their rights. They were
forbidden to speak their own language, to study Korean history, to celebrate
Korean culture or to demonstrate any form of patriotism; instead, they were
forced to take on Japanese names, to learn to speak the Japanese language, and
to worship the Japanese nation. As a
result, many Koreans fled their home country seeking refuge in places like
Manchuria and the United States. Cha
utilizes and references this history in her text in order to interrogate
colonialist and nationalist practices (and projects), and to argue for a
rewriting of history that acknowledges both the oppression of colonized Korean
subjects and their resistance to this oppression.
Cha further questions the
writing/recording of history and the Korean national subject’s relation to
history and language through her references to the Korean War. In the section “Melpomene/Tragedy,” for
example, she begins by offering her readers a map of North and South Korea with
the DMZ (demilitarized zone) clearly marked.
The narrative which follows, written in the form of a letter from Cha to
her mother upon returning to South Korea eighteen years after the family
immigrated to the U.S., speaks to the suffering her family and other Koreans
endured in the aftermath of World War II and the subsequent division of Korea
at the 38th parallel. When
Japan relinquished control over Korea after its defeat in 1945, the Soviet
Union and the United States agreed to divide the peninsula into Soviet and
American occupation zones. The result
was an even greater divide between the northern radical nationalists (supported
by the Soviets and later Communist China) and the southern moderates (supported
by the U.S.). War broke out in 1950 when
North Korean forces invaded the South, and while the war unofficially ended in
1953, relations between the North and South remain strained today.
Cha draws a connection between the
forced division of Korea and the fractured experience of one who has been
colonized/displaced. Writing to her
mother from Seoul, she remarks, “There is no destination other than towards yet
another refuge from yet another war” (80), suggesting that the subject, once
colonized, is in a state of perpetual exile.
Through the predominant use of English, as well as her depictions of the
enforcement of the Japanese language and the language and dictates of French
Catholicism (due to the presence of French Catholic missionaries in Korea
beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century), Cha argues for the various
ways in which language is used hegemonically to support imperial (in this case
U.S. and Japanese), national (Japanese and Korean), and patriarchal (including
imperial, national, and Christian) projects.
Even though she is writing from the country of her birth and the
fighting in Korea has ended, she “speak[s] in another tongue now, a second
tongue a foreign tongue” (80). Her
insistence on the use of English as her “second,” “foreign” language is
particularly significant in light of the role the U.S. played in both the
colonization and division of Korea.
Paradoxically, the U.S. is both complicit in the family’s exile from
post-war Korea and yet it becomes the future country of residence for Cha and
her family, along with thousands of other Korean immigrants.
Critical
Reception
Though first published in 1982 by
Tanam Press, Dictée was largely
ignored until roughly a decade later.
During the decade following Cha’s death, Dictée received attention from a few small but “steady” groups of
admirers of her art and a small group of Asian American scholars (Lin 36). Unfortunately, the only written responses or
reflections on the text that seem to exist that give us any insight into how
the book was first received are the one book review and the two chapters in
book-length studies that were, significantly, all written by non-Asian American
men. The first review of the book
appeared in the Japan Times on July
23, 1983. The author, Donald Richie,
calls the book
“a remarkable achievement,” a “massive tumulus which
is the book itself, the extraordinary many-layered, multi-faceted written
experience, dictated as though by Clio herself, muse of history” (10). In the same year, Michael Stevens described Dictée as a “recitative” (191), “a
fiction, a prose, a daring and poetic work brilliantly original” (196). While both Richie and Stevens applauded the
text, they did not provide any critical examination but simply offered
summaries of the work and biographical information on Cha.
In Open Form and the Feminine Imagination (1988), Stephen-Paul Martin
takes a more critical approach by arguing for the text’s “feminine” qualities
of language use and claims that because Cha is “searching for a true
matriarchal voice, she must locate the kind of verbal resources that can
penetrate the underworld” (191).
Martin’s discussion offers little insight into the text and instead
makes essentialist claims about masculine and feminine discourses and thought
processes. For example, Martin argues
that seeing things in “larger contexts … combining apparently unrelated parts
of our own lives and seeing them in a more significant light” is a “feminine
process” (203). Martin’s reading of
every aspect of Cha’s text (its fragmented structure, the invocation of the
muses, the combined stories of Cha, her mother, Demeter, Persephone, St.
Theresa, Jeanne d’Arc, and Yu Guan Soon, and every possible symbol) as a
representation of the “feminine mode” (204) is not surprising given that it
appears in a chapter in a book-length study of feminism and literary form.
Unlike the other critics of the
1982 edition, Susan Wolf saw hints of postmodernism and poststructuralism in
Cha’s text. In her 1986 essay in Afterimage, Wolf acknowledges that Cha’s
book “cannot be categorized” (13), and that Cha’s work aims to “identify and
somehow embody unnameable experiences and to transcend purely objective
experience” (12). Wolf’s analysis,
though largely focused on Cha’s performance art, resembles the kind of analysis
that we see much later in Writing Self,
Writing Nation, though Wolf spends very little time actually discussing the
content of Dictée.
It was not until ten years after
its initial publication that Dictée
began to gain currency within the fields of Asian American, postcolonial, film
and feminist studies. In 1994, Third
Woman Press founder Norma Alarcón offered to both reprint the text and publish
it alongside a series of critical essays on Dictée. The collection, Writing Self, Writing Nation, features illustrations by artist Yong
Soon Min and essays by Laura Hyun
Yi Kang, Elaine H. Kim, Lisa Lowe, and Shelley Sunn
Wong. Cha’s work continues to challenge,
engage, and excite scholars in a wide array of fields, as evidenced by the
number and focus of articles and dissertations that have been published since
the text’s second printing.14
In September 2001, the Berkeley Art Museum paid tribute to Cha by
exhibiting her works of film, video, mail art,15 and artists’ books
in The Dream of the Audience. The exhibition, now documented in a book of
the same title, has traveled within the U.S. to New York, Illinois, and Seattle
as well as internationally to Seoul and Vienna, and will be on display in
Barcelona beginning in January of 2005.
Critics suggest a number of reasons
why Dictée received little attention
when it was first published in 1982, including the fact that the press was
quite small and therefore had a limited audience; it was not easily understood
and therefore ignored or rejected; and it did not conform to the identity
politics of the Asian American literary community at that time. As Shelley Sunn Wong explains, the two main
factors for determining the literary and political value of Asian American
texts throughout the 1970s were how authentic and representative they were of
the Asian American community; Dictée,
she maintains, was clearly a text that refused to be representative or
authentic
(“Unnaming”103).
Laura Hyun Yi Kang notes that before 1991, the year in which the
Association for Asian American Studies presented a panel discussion solely on Dictée, only six literary scholars had
examined or referenced the work although none of them “substantively” examined
it in an Asian American literary, historical or cultural context.16 Kang further suggests that the lack of
attention to the text might be attributed to its generic ambiguity since more
critical attention in Asian American literary criticism has been paid to novels
and autobiographies than other genre-ambiguous works. She adds that another reason could be that
the book concerned itself primarily with Korean history as opposed to Asian
American history, and that its references to Greek mythology and French
Catholicism may “exceed the geographical and cultural boundaries of a narrow
Asian American identification” (34).
Kang is referring here to the
social and political climate of the Asian American literary community during
the 1970s and 1980s—a period in which critics debated and determined the
“value” of certain works over others based in part on the degree to which the
texts engaged in cultural nationalist discourse.17 A fragmented, elliptical text about the
complex imperial history of Korea and the resulting conflicted and fragmented
Korean American female immigrant subject did not fit in to the largely
masculinist Asian
American cultural nationalist project. As I discuss in chapters 1 and 2, texts such
as Younghill Kang’s East Goes West
and Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the
Heart owe their positive initial reception by mainstream 1940s and 1950s
readers to the fact that they are written in the traditional bildungsroman form. Though readers may not have been able to
identify with the protagonists’ experiences as Asian immigrants, readers could
(and in fact did) identify with the basic storyline of an immigrant and his
seemingly successful acculturation into American society.
Asian American writers and critics
continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s to consume and produce texts that
conformed to the traditional realist narrative such as the autobiography and
the bildungsroman for two very
specific reasons, according to Wong—not only were these forms well received by
mainstream readers, but they also provided writers a platform from which to
contest what many of them perceived as “misrepresentations” of Asian Americans
in literature and popular culture (129).
Wong is referring here to what rhetorical theorist and critic Carolyn
Miller calls “genre as social action”; that is, the use of genre conventions as
a way of eliciting or arguing for her readers to take a certain action. (I discuss this at length in chapters 1 and 2
in my examinations of Kang and Bulosan and their rhetorical decisions to write
autobiographies in order to reach a wider audience.) While this form was useful for challenging
misperceptions or misrepresentations of Asian Americans or the Asian American
community, its status as the “genre of choice,” so to speak, meant that texts
that did not fit the conventions of the bildungsroman
or the autobiography were not given much critical attention.
The masculinist project of Asian
American cultural nationalism that emerged in the 1960s, and which evolved out
of the work of the male editors of Aiiieeeee!
began to face criticism and opposition in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably
from critics actively involved in the feminist movement. Charges against the editors of Aiiieeeee! included their lack of
consideration or open-mindedness about differences in class, gender, or
sexuality. However, it was not only the
ever-increasing rift between feminists and Asian American cultural nationalists
that signaled a major shift in the Asian American literary community, but other
factors played a role as well. With the
passage of the 1965 immigration laws, a large number of Asian immigrants from
countries other than Japan, China, and the Philippines came to the United
States.18 With the changing
demographics of the Asian American community came the need to acknowledge the
deficiencies in the cultural nationalist movement’s homogeneous model of Asian
American identity. It was no longer
possible to talk about “the” Asian American experience without conceding that
Asian Americans had widely diverse histories, backgrounds, and
experiences.
Furthermore, such divergent experiences meant that the
community could no longer band together to fight oppositional politics. Another factor that played a role in the
major shift that occurred around the time Dictée
was published were the burgeoning social movements around certain issues such
as gay rights and the environment. “With
the advent of [these] movements,” Wong writes, “came the dispersal of political
allegiances which called into question the effectiveness of an oppositional
strategy founded on the basis of racial identification alone. Asian American identity politics and the nationalist
form it took began to flounder in this welter of difference” (132). Dictée
was published just as these changes were beginning to take place, and the fact
that it received little attention indicates that it did not resonate with the
Asian American literary community’s political agenda at the time. Readers were not prepared to take on the
challenge that such a text presented, and so the text quickly went out of
print.
Along with the various social
movements of the 1980s came an increased awareness of and interest in
postmodernism and the politics of difference.
Feminists and postmodernists alike were arguing against any notion of a
fixed or unified identity and instead saw identity as multiple, fragmented, and
fluid. Given the current interest in
many academic fields to subvert hegemonic forces, it was not surprising that
contemporary critics found in Dictée
a text that resisted multiple forms of domination. These contemporary critics, especially those
interested in postmodernism and postcolonial theory, laud Dictée for addressing the interstices of Asian American
subjectivity through its multiple locations, fragmentations, and
contradictions. Kandice Chuh, for
example, argues that in its “deliberate disruption” of any sense of linearity
or wholeness of national identity, Dictée
theorizes “transnationalist time.”19
Lisa Lowe examines the use of the metaphor of dictation as a way of
critiquing cultural and linguistic domination.
Lowe argues that in her refusal to be “faithful to the original,” the
speaking subject of Dictée refuses
“the demand for uniform subjectivity” (“Unfaithful” 43). Other critics have drawn on the text’s
thematics of dictation and translation as a means for analyzing the processes
and difficulties of identification and representation for the colonized female
subject.20 In her essay, “The
‘Liberatory Voice’ of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,” Laura Hyun Yi Kang focuses on the notions of “silence,
language and action” and the “ideological assumptions, the grammatical rules,
and often limiting prescriptions embedded in these terms” (75) as they are
played out in Dictée. Kang is particularly interested in Cha’s
process of “coming into an authorial voice” (77) (as represented by the
speaking subjects of the text) and the implications of this process as regards
her (multiple) positions as a colonized female immigrant subject.
Shelley Sunn Wong’s “Unnaming the
Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée,”
comes closest to a rhetorical analysis than any other essay in Writing Self, Writing Nation. In the first two pages, Wong underscores the
importance of understanding Dictée’s
reception history because, she insists, it helps us to see the shifts that have
taken place within the Asian American community and the field of Asian American
Studies, and it helps us to determine the potential value of a work not only
for its thematic content or form but for its “social function” at any given
point in history (104). In order to
determine a text’s “social function,” one must have some understanding of the
audience to which the text is addressed or, as I discuss in this next section,
the audience that is invoked or constructed by the author.
Audience
Cha’s background in film and film
theory clearly influenced her later writings and performance art, as we see in
her continuing interest in and interrogation of the relationship between
spectator and spectacle, or the reader and his or her relationship to the
text. In a January 17, 2002 article in
UC Irvine’s Online World News
advertising the retrospective exhibition, “The Dream of the Audience,” Cha’s
contemporary artist and friend, Yong Soon Min, made the following statement
regarding the significance of the title of the exhibition: “The concept of the
audience had such an important relationship in the making of any of [Cha’s]
work, whether book, art or video … The performances were often characterized by
audience members as ‘dreamlike.’ And she was involved in the film world and its
dealings with dreams.”21
Cha’s insistence on the importance of the reciprocal or dialogic
relationship between writer/reader, speaker/hearer, spectator/object is made
clear in the following passage from her handmade book “Audience Distant
Relative”: you are the audience you are my distant audience i address you as i
would a distant relative seen only heard only through someone else’s
description
neither you nor i are visible to each other i can
only assume that you can hear me i can only hope that you hear me22
In the following analysis, I show how Cha engages her
audience and invites their participation in the construction of the text and in
the potential (re)construction of their ideologies about literacy. The genius of the text lies not only in its
innovative structure or success at interrogating multiple forms of domination
but also in its ability to produce both textual and readerly agency.
Cha engages in a technique similar
to the one described by Walter Ong in “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a
Fiction” in which Hemingway casts his readers into the role of a “close
companion of the writer” through his use of definite articles and the
demonstrative pronoun “that.”23
While Cha may appear to be distancing her non-Koreanspeaking readers by
presenting them first with an obscure photograph of Korean calligraphy, she
immediately thereafter draws in her French-speaking and/or Englishspeaking
readers through her use of the pronouns “elle” and “she.” The English version of the passage follows:
“She had come from a far period tonight at dinner comma
the families would ask
comma open quotation marks How was the first day interrogation mark close quotation marks …” (1). Cha’s readers take this cue that they ought
to know who “she” is, who “the families” are, and to what the “first day”
refers. Her Korean-speaking audience is
also confronted with personal pronouns.
As Shelley Sunn Wong explains, the inscription on the frontispiece
translates as “Mother/I miss you/I am hungry/I want to go home” (107). By not providing any contextual information
for this image/text, or in Grice’s terms, by violating the maxim of quantity,24
Cha asks that her readers question this lack of context at the same time that
she develops a connection with her readers by suggesting that they “share the
author’s familiarity with the subject matter” (Ong 13). In other words, her readers are cast into the
roles of audience members who are already familiar with the subjects “Mother,”
“I,” and “She.” Since no explanation is
given, we must assume as readers that there is a reason for this lack of
explanation, and that it is not because Cha is ignorant or intends to ignore or
completely alienate her audience (if this were the case, her text would likely
not have been published).25
Thus Cha creates a potential set of readers who must interrogate these
“voids” not only for what they might suggest thematically but also for what
they suggest rhetorically. That is, her
readers must grapple with their own reading process and their (in)ability to
translate or make sense of these “voids” and other complexities of the
text.
When Walter Ong asserted in 1975
that “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” he meant that because a
writer’s audience is never present when the writing is actually taking place,26
the writer must fictionalize the audience or assign the audience to a
particular role while the audience must likewise “fictionalize itself” or take
on the role in which the author has cast him or her. Critics Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford have
argued that Ong’s theory oversimplifies the relationship between a writer and
his or her audience. They argue that the
writer must always take into consideration the fact that readers are coming to
the text with very different experiences, values, beliefs, and expectations and
that these will invariably impact their readings of the text. Ede and Lunsford further argue that audiences
(or audience roles) may be invoked or addressed and that in any given rhetorical
act or situation there are a host of potential roles audience members may play
(165-66). My method of examining
audience in this introduction and in the chapters that follow draws from Ong
and Ede and Lunsford—that is, I see audiences as both existing extratextually
and as being in some way constructed by the author. My conception of the audience—and Cha’s, it
seems—also resonates with both Burke and Bakhtin who seek to break down
hierarchies and instead emphasize the cooperative effort that takes place
between writer and reader. I am
referring here to Burke’s view of persuasion as a process of identification
and/or consubstantiality (“one in being”) and Bakhtin’s view of language as
fluid and diverse, containing multiple world views and voices, and intersecting
with other languages in unique and complex ways.
Incongruous
Perspectives
Cha further engages her readers by
asking them to question her use of different media—what Bakhtin calls
“heteroglossia,” or the heterogeneity of languages. By combining media and removing them from the
contexts in which they are usually considered, Cha prohibits her text from
being read from a limited perspective (i.e., within the boundaries of, say,
autobiographical writing). Instead, she
forces readers to grapple with their own “terministic screens.” According to Burke, we use different terms,
depending on our experiences and how we identify ourselves, to name and make
sense of our world. These terms function
as filters or screens, shaping our perspectives yet also limiting our views, or
“blinding us” by constraining us to see through just one lens. Different terminologies direct attention
differently and “shap[e] the range of observations implicit in the given terminology”
(On Symbols 121). For example, one could argue that
Stephen-Paul Martin’s exegesis of Dictée
as a “feminine” text was a consequence of his reading literature through the
terministic screen of feminism.
Likewise, a student of history might only focus on Cha’s rendering of
Korean history, while a Classics student might only focus on the function of
mythology in Dictée. Cha shows us how meaning is found in the
in-between spaces, when we break down our terministic screens and see things
from, as it were, the other side. As she
writes in the section titled “Elitere/Lyric Poetry,”
Sustain a view.
Upon itself. Recurring upon
itself without the knowledge of its absent view.
The other side. Must have.
Must be.
Must have been a side. Aside from
What has one seen
This view what has one viewed
Finally. View.
This view. What is it finally …
(125-26)
Cha acknowledges that we see the world through a
certain lens and urges us to adopt other views so that we may perhaps see with
greater clarity.
By taking speakers such as
“Diseuse” (French word for “speaker” or
“storyteller”), and discourses, such as the language
of confession/Catholicism, and using them in contexts other than those with
which they are generally associated, Cha destabilizes their authoritative
positions, arguing for a new perspective through which to view them. For example, Cha introduces us to the
character “Diseuse” within the first few pages of the text, and yet, as
discussed earlier, by beginning her introduction with, “She mimicks the
speaking. That might resemble speech”
(3), she establishes the character (or speaking subject) as one with whom the
reader is already familiar. However, at
least for readers familiar with the term “Diseuse,” this speaking subject does
not take on the role traditionally assigned to her. Rather than acting as storyteller, Diseuse
“mimicks the speaking.... She allows others.
In place of her. Admits others to
make full. Make swarm. All barren cavities to make swollen. The others each occupying her ... ”
(3-4). Diseuse is not figured (or
written) here as an authorial speaking subject, the one who tells “the story,”
but rather as one among many who share in the production or enunciation of this
story. Diseuse is like Cha’s readers
who, in the act of reading, must also “mimic the speaking” in order to
hear/read the words so unfamiliarly phrased on the page. I know for myself that in order to process
some of the more convoluted and awkwardly phrased sections of the text, I had
to sound out the words and even then my mouth became tongue-tied. As Diseuse struggles with speech (“Inside is
the pain of speech the pain to say.
Larger still. Greater than is the
pain not to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak” [3]),
so too do her readers struggle to read and process the text.
In
effect, Cha is creating what Burke calls “perspectives by incongruity”—that is,
“taking a word usually applied to
one setting and transferring its use to another setting”
(Permanence 90). As Joseph Gusfield
writes,
Perspective by incongruity is more
than style in Burke. It is an
exhortation to see the limited nature of any one cognitive framework. The terminologies in use are terministic screens
that shield us from the multiplicity of possibilities.... A new taxonomy, a new
vocabulary produces an additional angle from which to see reality. (26)
In other words, Burke aims to break down notions of fixed meaning and
authorial perspective by arguing that people see things through different
lenses, and that an individual’s perspective also shifts and changes depending
on the situation or groups of people with whom the individual is
identifying.
We see from the example above how a
perspective by incongruity can be persuasive by forcing readers to see things
from a different angle and, as well, how it can lead to what Burke’s calls
“identification” between the reader and the speaking subject. “Identification,” a key term in Burke’s
theory of rhetoric, is a dialectical process in which the speaker draws on
shared interests in order to “establish rapport between himself and his
audience” (On Symbols 191). Insofar as speaker and audience remain
different from one another yet identify with each other based on these shared
interests, the two are consubstantial, “both joined and separate, at once a
distinct substance and consubstantial with another” (On Symbols 180). Readers
become consubstantial with Cha’s speaking subjects—that is, they share the
substance of words, of the text, and it is through this shared substance that
readers are cast into the roles of audience members who must negotiate the
process of a fragmented literacy.
Implicatures,
Intentions, and Utterances
While speech act theory has most
often been used to analyze verbal utterances not in the realm of literature, contemporary scholars (from the
fields of literature, linguistics and semantics) have come to agree that the
study of what people are doing when they perform various speech acts is just as
important and revealing in literature as it is in other types of verbal
exchanges. As Sue Lanser contends,
The separation of discourse from its performance is
not merely artificial but impossible; it is tantamount to erasing or distorting
the very meaning of the utterance. The
study of text-acts requires us to examine not only formal structures, but the
performance situation in which these structures are realized. (75-76)
Just as rhetoric does, speech act theory relies in
large part upon the context of the utterance.
An illocutionary act, for example, will take on different meanings
depending on the context in which it is uttered. As J.L. Austin explains, the proposition, “I
will bring my dictionary tomorrow,” can be uttered and/or perceived as a
prediction, an assertion, a promise or a threat.27 Though one of Cha’s goals appears to be to
produce new meanings or to subvert traditional conceptions of the ways in which
we read, write, and critique literature, history and subjectivity through
decontextualization, the utterances of her speaking subjects are still
context-bound. In other words, choosing
to say something in French as opposed to English or Japanese is contextualizing
it within the framework of that language and the colonial history that that
language represents.
Cha acknowledges that words and
even certain languages or accents are infused with ideologies and she uses them
precisely to dismantle or deconstruct those ideologies. As Bakhtin argues, due to the “stratifying
forces of language”—that is, the differing world views that give meaning to
language—there is no such thing as a “neutral” word. Each word carries with it some of the context
or contexts in which it has “lived its socially charged life.” “All words and forms,” he claims, “are
populated by intentions” (293). In the
act of taking words and languages out of the contexts in which they are usually
seen or heard, Cha makes these languages their own. For the colonized subject, this act is both
liberating and subversive. Moreover, by
involving the reader in the production of her text Cha ensures that her readers
will continue this process of reading as a “decolonization” of language.
The genius of Cha’s text is that
whether or not her readers understand the text, she is successful in that she
places the reader into the role of a person with a compromised literacy, so
readers who have never felt or understood what it means to be an immigrant or
colonized subject might have a better idea after reading/struggling with her
text. This is not to say that Cha
assumes her readers are ignorant; the very fact that it is so complex suggests
that she relies on her readers’ ability to understand that she has constructed
the text in a particular way in order to persuade her readers to question their
own cultural and linguistic literacies as well as their own epistemologies and
understandings of themselves in relation to their culture and society.
One of the ways Cha’s text effects
this kind of reading is through implication.
In other words, Cha’s text asks that we read the gaps and obscurities as
intentional, for what they mean to imply or suggest. I argue that reading the speech acts of/in
Cha’s text using Grice’s concepts of “implicature” and the Cooperative
Principle illuminates Cha’s strategy of persuading her readers of their roles
in the production of the text. Grice’s
basic argument is that the meaning of a word (or symbol) is to be found in what
the speaker means or implies by making the utterance in a given context or
situation. We call this “reading between
the lines” or “acknowledging, naming, and studying the ‘gaps’ in discourse—the
unspoken assumptions and messages upon which meaning depends” (Lanser 77). The hearer makes conversational implicatures
based on how “cooperative” the speaker is being; that is, to what degree the
speaker is “mak[ing] [his/her] conversational contribution such as is required
at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the
talk exchange in which [he/she] [is] engaged” (Grice 26) and to what degree the
speaker is fulfilling Grice’s maxims of conversation:
Maxims
of Quantity
1. Make
your contribution as informative as required (for the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do
not make your contribution more informative than is required.
Maxims
of Quality
1. Do
not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do
not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Maxim of Relation
1. Be relevant.
Maxims
of Manner
1. Avoid
obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid
ambiguity.
3. Be
brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
4. Be
orderly. (26-27)
Although Grice’s maxims reflect principles in everyday
conversation, they can also be applied to the study of dialogue or speech acts
in literature. For example, in Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary
Discourse, Mary Louise Pratt examines how the
Cooperative Principle “works in narrative utterances,
what special cooperation is required for fictional utterances, and how we
handle and interpret deviance in display texts” (153).
It is this “deviance” or “flouting”
of the maxims with which I am most concerned as
Cha’s text is largely built upon violations of Grice’s
maxims.28 According to Grice,
when a speaker or writer flouts a maxim, he is “blatantly fail[ing] to fulfill
it”: On the assumption that the speaker
is able to fulfill the maxim and to do so without violating another maxim
(because of a clash), is not opting out, and is not, in view of the blatancy of
his performance, trying to mislead, the hearer is faced with a minor problem:
How can his saying what he did say be reconciled with the supposition that he
is observing the overall Cooperative Principle?
This situation is one that characteristically gives rise to a
conversational implicature; and when a conversational implicature is generated
in this way, I shall say that a maxim is being exploited. (30)
If, for example, a student asks a teacher if the
homework is due the following day and the teacher replies with a forecast of
the weather for the following day, that teacher might be said to be violating
the maxim of relation, or the teacher might have meant one of two things:
either she was implicating that the homework likely would not be due the
following day due to an impending snow storm or that she was tired of answering
that same question a dozen times.
Because there would be no reason to believe the teacher would violate
the maxim of relation—unless she were mentally unstable or trying to be
funny—the students would have to deduce, based on the context in which the
exchange took place, what the implication of the utterance was. To put it another way, when confronted with
an utterance, readers or listeners cooperate in such a way as to make the
utterance fulfill the maxim.
Although Grice identifies four
different types of intentional violation, only
flouting does not put the Cooperative Principle in danger (Pratt, Towards a Speech Act 160). Pratt explains that in the case of flouting,
the speaker is relying on the hearer, or reader, to successfully “read between
the lines” to get at the hidden or deeper meaning behind the utterance. Pratt also underscores the fact that in a
work of literature, the fictional speaker may perform any of these violations,
but in all cases, the fictional speaker’s “failures” are considered to be the
author’s intentional violation in the form of flouting (198). Readers must always assume this and read the
text for the possible implicatures that the author is making in having his/her
fictional subject fail to fulfill the Cooperative Principle and maxims.
In the context of Dictée, one could argue that Cha’s speaking subject violates the
maxim of quantity, in that she does not always provide enough information for
the reader to grasp the context of the situation, and that she violates the
maxim of manner, in that her words are often obscure and ambiguous. The speaking subject thus fails to fully
engage its readers and Cha implies that this is precisely what she wants her
readers to feel, experience, and question.
Pratt writes that in this way literary texts can be used to challenge our views of the
world as well as to corroborate them, to threaten our interpretive faculties as
well as to validate them, to frustrate our expectations as well as to fulfill
them, to shake our faith in the representative power of language as well as to
affirm it. In the literary speech
situation, in other words, rulebreaking can be the point of the utterance. (211)
Using speech act theory in an
analysis of Dictée compels us to see
more clearly the design behind Cha’s work and the particular attention and
respect she pays to her audience by creating a text that, on the surface, may
seem to alienate, but in fact welcomes readers with varying degrees of
literacy. Grice’s theory of implicature
further informs my reading of Dictée
by encouraging us to consider the intended meaning and effects behind the
speaking subjects’ speech acts as well as the macro-speech act of the text
itself. In its demand to be read and
reread in a multitude of contexts, and in its construction as a collection of
voices and images taken out of context, the text argues for readerly agency and
challenges the structures of power that are bound up in all acts of reading and
writing.
Reading
Readerly Agency
I argue throughout this
dissertation that reading certain texts as literacy narratives enables us to
see how writers engage their readers such that they too become involved in the
construction of the text. While each of
the texts that I examine can be read as performances or spectacles, with
readers serving as performers or spectators as they read, negotiate, and
decipher the texts, Dictée best
illustrates how this strategy operates.
For example, when the speaking/writing subject of “Clio/History” asks
that her listeners/readers “Ecrivez en francais” (“Write in French”) and
“Traduire en francais” (“Translate into French”) (8), she invokes her readers’
acts of literacy, demanding that they become participants in the writing and
speaking of the text. Readers who are
not fluent in both languages will struggle with what to do with these passages,
and wonder how to make sense of a language they do not know. Either way, readers are placed in a position
in which they may become complicit in the production of the text, and as such
are forced to grapple with their own writing and reading practices.
Furthermore, we see in the
“Erato/Love Poetry” section a woman who, like Cha’s readers, acts as both
spectator and spectacle. In this
section, a woman buys a ticket to a movie in which she is the performer. Readers are faced with text that reads like
the directions for the production of a film: “Extreme Close Up shot of her
face. Medium Long shot of two out of the
five white columns from the street. She
enters from the left side, and camera begins to pan on movement as she enters
between the two columns, the camera stop at the door and she enters” (96). Cha constructs a text here that thematizes
the act of doubling (in the figure of the woman who functions as both spectator
and spectacle) (Cooley 125), and simultaneously enacts a form of doubling on
the part of her readers. In the process
of reading about this woman who watches herself perform in the film, Cha’s
readers become the objects or performers to be read. Cha directly addresses her readers a few
pages later, asking them to become a part of this visual and symbolic
performance: “You are shown the house in which she lives, from the outside. Then you, as a viewer and guest, enter the
house. It is you who are entering to see
her” (98). Through these acts of
doubling, Cha invites her readers to participate in the performance of the text
at the same time that she asks them to question their participation and to read
themselves reading the text. Moreover,
by merging her reader’s identity with the woman’s identity in the film/text
(“You are she, she speaks to you, you speak her, she cannot speak” [106]), Cha
disrupts any notion of wholeness or stable identity and further asks that her
readers question what it means to be a reading and/or speaking subject. As Cha makes clear through this
interrogation, her (constructed) readers’ subject positions are as ambivalent
and unstable as the speaking subjects of her text.
Other critics have addressed the
role of the reader in not only the consumption but also the (re)production of
the text. Laura Hyun Yi Kang, for
example, points to the book as a “process
of mutually active collaboration” (“The ‘Liberatory Voice’” 78). She writes that the shifting speaking subject
demands “a flexibility on the part of the reader” (78) and encourages readers
to examine their own “subjective positionings in relation to the text”
(94). Nicole Cooley and Juliana Spahr
similarly argue for the ways in which the text calls for a “decolonizing
practice of reading” (Spahr) by “forc[ing] the reader into a position of
participation in the text” (Cooley 137).
Cooley examines the role of the reader from a postmodern perspective,
providing textual examples of how Cha “forces” this participation while Spahr
argues that “[b]y destabilizing reading practices that seek to conquer or
master, a reader-centered work like Dictée
calls attention to—rather than elides—all that is least assimilable about a
reader’s connection to a work, making [that which is least assimilable] an
integral part of what must be ‘read’” (24).29 I argue what each of these scholars
implicitly suggests in their readings—that critics need to be more attentive to
the other factors involved in all acts of reading, speaking and writing, that
is, in all acts of literacy. This
approach requires critics to examine the relationships between and among the
author, text, and context in which the literacy act takes place, thereby destabilizing
any notions of authoritative discourse and demonstrating the fluid nature of
texts, audiences and reading practices.
Mimicry,
Ambivalence, Hybridization
The authors that I examine use
literacy and rhetoric as a way of both participating in and interrogating dominant narratives that continue to marginalize
and exclude them. I argue that reading
their texts as literacy narratives enables us to see more clearly how they
serve to disrupt notions of fixed identity and of culture as a “homogenizing,
unifying force” (Bhabha 37), and instead make claims for what Lisa Lowe
describes as a cultural politics of “heterogeneity,” “hybridity,” and
“multiplicity.”30
Cha’s speaking subjects speak the
“borderland Discourse”31—they occupy the space of the
“in-between.” Bhabha describes this
“space of splitting” as a “doubling, dissembling image of being in at least two
places at once that makes it impossible for the devalued, insatiable évolué to accept the colonizer’s
invitation to identity” (44). In
multiple and varying ways, the speaking subjects’ literacy practices illustrate
their (as well as Cha’s) resistance to complying not only with the grammatical
and syntactical rules and regulations of the colonizer’s language but also with
the colonizer’s “invitation to identity.”
Furthermore, Cha’s speaking subjects’ abilities, or inabilities, to
speak and/or write fluently in English, French and Japanese serve as a powerful
critique of colonial and imperial linguistic domination. The fragmented nature of the colonized
subject is further emphasized by her speaking subjects’ movement from one
language to another with, at times, apparent fluidity and, at other times,
great difficulty. Additionally, the
so-called “bastardization” of the English language in Dictée illustrates or mimics the challenges and problems that arise
when one is faced with learning a second language. Cha provides an example of Pidgin English as
a way of demonstrating to her readers the effect of the imposition of a foreign
language on one’s native tongue: “Being broken. Speaking broken. Saying broken. Talk broken.
Say broken. Broken speech. Pidgin tongue. Broken word.
Before speak. As being said. As spoken.
To be said. To say.
Then speak”
(161). Readers are thus forced to engage
in a reading practice in order that they may be influenced by the experience of
grappling with a fragmented literacy.
My use of the terms “in-between”
and “ambivalent” to describe the identities of authors and the spaces in which
they construct their narratives of literacy comes from Bhabha’s speculation
that the colonial encounter produces ambivalent subjects as the colonizer and
colonized struggle to negotiate difference.32 For Bhabha, the liminal space is the site in
which cultures and subjects come together and interact (and often conflict),
much like Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone” where “cultures meet, clash, and
grapple with each other” (“Arts” 34).
Bhabha writes,
It is in the emergence of the interstices—the overlap
and displacement of domains of difference—that the intersubjective and
collective experiences of nationness,
community interest, or cultural value are negotiated. How are subjects formed ‘in-between,’ or in
excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference (usually intoned as
race/class/gender, etc.)? (2)
In other words, Bhabha argues that it is in the
in-between spaces, or the contact between colonizer and colonized, that
subjects, nations, culture (including languages/dialects) and communities are
formed and defined. He also
acknowledges, like Benedict Anderson, that this is an ongoing process and that
such definitions and formations are indeterminate and unstable. Finally, Bhabha maintains that cultural
differences are performed, not just reflected, in these liminal spaces: “Terms
of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced
performatively…. The social articulation of difference, from the minority
perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize
cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation”
(2). For the colonized/minority subject,
occupying this position can be empowering because it makes available a space in
which that very ambivalence may be critiqued or disrupted. In other words, it is this in-between or
ambivalent space of identity that makes possible other articulations of
identity. As Gloria Anzaldúa writes,
“Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets
write and artists create” (73).
Rhetorical analysis of Asian American literacy narratives illuminates
this place of “psychic unrest” in which hybrid identities are formed and
articulated and hybrid culture emerges as the location and expression of
difference—the dimension that Bhabha describes as the “third space”: It is that Third Space, though
unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of
enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no
primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated,
translated, rehistoricized and read anew.
(37) Asian American literacy
narratives, I contend, occupy this liminal “third space” as the writers
challenge and reappropriate America’s constructions of them through their
multiple and various literacy acts.
Through their appropriations of the
languages of Catholicism, patriarchy, and Japanese imperialism, Cha’s speaking
subjects mimic colonial authority and thus disrupt or undermine this
authority. By focusing on these acts of
literacy as rhetorical, that is, intended to move the audience to action, we
see how Cha does not “desire to emerge as ‘authentic’ through mimicry,” which
Bhabha claims is “the final irony of partial representation”(88); rather, she
critiques colonial relations by constructing literacy acts that are blatantly
inauthentic. For example, in the first
chapter we listen to/read the narrator’s confession of her sins, and though she
mimics the language of Catholicism, she tells us directly that she is “making
up the sins” (17). This repetition of
the catechism is an act of mimicry—the narrator’s words are “almost the same,
but not quite” as that of an “authentic confessional,” her “thought as visible
as word as act” (Dictée 17):
Q. WHO MADE THEE?
A. God made me.
To conspire in God’s Tongue. Q. WHERE IS GOD?
A. God is everywhere.
Accomplice in His Texts, the fabrication in His Own
Image, the pleasure the desire of giving Image to the word in the mind of the
confessor.
Q. GOD WHO HAS MADE YOU IN HIS OWN
LIKENESS.
A. God who has made me in His own
likeness. In His Own Image in His
Own Resemblance, in His Own Copy,
In His Own Counterfeit
Presentment, in His Duplicate, in His Own
Reproduction, in His Cast, in His Carbon, His Image and His Mirror. Pleasure in the image pleasure in the copy
pleasure in the projection of likeness pleasure in the repetition …
(17)
Bhabha writes that mimicry “repeats rather than re-presents,”
and that it is through such repetitions that the unified colonial subject
breaks down and emerges as a “partial presence.” The speaking subject informs her readers that
hers is a “repetition” and mocks the very language that dictates her as a
colonial subject. By creating a text
that is unabashedly not
representative nor a faithful reproduction of any of the languages or
discourses it invokes, Cha acknowledges the rhetorical dimensions of
mimicry. Her appropriation of colonial
or dominant languages is successful in that it delegitimizes the power of those
languages by “disclosing” their ambivalence (Bhabha 88).
Bhabha’s investigation focuses on
the colonialist desire to create “mimic men” as a way of maintaining control
and dominance, and the way in which these mimic men disrupt colonialist
authority by discursively turning it on its head through the act of doubling,
or mimicking. He describes acts of
mimicry as representations that appropriate the Other: “colonial mimicry is the
desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as
a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite. Which is to say, that the discourse of
mimicry is constructed around an ambivalence;
in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its
excess, its difference” (86). Mimic men,
Bhabha argues, as “authorized versions of otherness,” and “part-objects of a
metonymy of colonial desire,” end up emerging, in and through discursive
processes, as “‘inappropriate’ colonial subjects” who disrupt or “shatter”
colonialist identity and authority by “producing a partial vision of the
colonizer’s presence” (88). While Bhabha
suggests that these writers, in trying to maintain a sense of power, instead
inadvertently subvert their power or sense of control through the construction
of these mimic men, I suggest that Cha is fully aware of the power of mimicry
and uses it strategically to deconstruct forces of domination.
Throughout Cha’s text we also see
examples of what Bakhtin and Bhabha both refer to as hybridization. According to Bakhtin, hybridization is a mixture of two social languages within the
limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance,
between two different
linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another
by an epoch, by social differentiation or by some other factor. (358)
Bakhtin identifies this kind of hybridization as it
occurs in the novel as an intentional or deliberate hybridization that has as
its goal to illuminate a language through the use of another (361). The use of hybrid languages is thus
rhetorical in that it allows writers (and speakers) to comment on or critique,
either directly or indirectly, ideological functions of other language
use. The catechism passage above serves
as an example of deliberate hybridization as the languages of Catholicism and
colonialism are intertwined to create a parodic response to the catechism that,
like colonialism, interpellates the speaker as just another “copy” or subject
of an almighty being. Viewing the above
quotation as an example of hybridization illuminates Cha’s strategy of
argumentation—by interweaving the patriarchal discourses of French Catholicism
and colonialism, she asks that her readers see and consider the inextricable
link between the project of Christianity in Korea and the project of empire.
In “Calliope/Epic Poetry,” the
chapter in which the speaking subject, in this case Cha, narrates her mother’s
story through direct address (“Mother, you are eighteen years old. You were born in Yong Jung, Manchuria and
this is where you now live…” [45]), Cha not only incorporates her mother’s
voice, but she also acknowledges that her language is hybridized—it is a
mixture of her own language as well as the language that her mother has been
forbidden to speak:
You write. You
write you speak voices hidden masked you plant words to the moon you send word
through the wind. Through the passing of
seasons. By sky and by water the words
are given birth given discretion.
From one mouth to another, from one
reading to the next the words are realized in their full meaning. The wind.
The dawn or dusk the clay earth and traveling birds south bound birds
are mouth pieces wear the ghost veil for the seed of message. Correspondence. To scatter the words. (48) Though Cha is ostensibly addressing her
mother (since the “you” in the rest of the chapter clearly refers to her), she
creates ambiguity by suggesting that she could also be referring to herself
and/or to her readers. In this passage,
Cha suggests that hybridization can be a powerful tool for those who are
oppressed because it allows other (perhaps silenced or “masked”) voices to be
heard. This hybridized style is even
more evident in the other passages in which Cha exposes colonialism’s hegemonic
forces by recounting to her mother what the Japanese government required of its
Korean subjects: Still, you speak the tongue the mandatory language like the
others. It is not your own. Even if it is not you know you must. You are Bi-lingual. You are Tri-lingual. The tongue that is forbidden is your own
mother tongue.… To utter each word is a privilege you risk by death. Not only for you but for all. All of you who are one, who by law tongue
tied forbidden of tongue … (46)
In this retelling, Cha voices the history that has
been silenced for so long. She is
telling us “another epic another
history. From the missing
narrative. From the multitude of
narratives. Missing. From the chronicles. For another telling for other recitations”
(81). In the second half of this
chapter, the same speaking subject exposes the contradiction of America’s
rhetoric of equality and inclusion.
Referring to her treatment upon her return to the U.S. from Korea, she
states,
One day you raise the right hand and you are
American. They give you American Pass
port. The United States of America. Somewhere someone has taken my identity and
replaced it with their photograph. The
other one. Their signature their
seals. Their own image….
You return and you are not one of
them, they treat you with indifference.
All the time you understand what they are saying. But the papers give you away. Every ten feet. They ask you identity. They comment upon your inability or ability
to speak. Whether you are telling the
truth or not about your nationality.
They say you look other than you say.
As if you didn’t know who you were.
(56-57)
By using a hybridized style of language, Cha is able
to critique the languages and practices of imperial nations like Japan and the
United States through the voices of her speaking subjects. Though the political authority of dominant
languages remains, hybridization has the potential to strip these hegemonic
languages of some of their social and cultural power thereby allowing other
counterhegemonic articulations to be voiced and heard.
And yet Cha does not use
hybridization as indirect discourse, as a means of concealing one’s speech, but
rather she uses it to illustrate how the colonized subject is dictated by
multiple linguistic consciousnesses and world views. As she writes in the section “Clio/History,”
“The response [to colonization/victimization] is precoded to perform
predictably however passively possible” (33).
Bakhtin informs us that, on average, more than half of all of the words
each human being utters on a daily basis are in fact someone else’s words
(339). Cha’s text suggests that for the
colonized subject, all of the words he or she utters are hybrid
constructions. This is not to say that
the colonizer’s language has retained its power but, on the contrary, that
hybridity “reverses the effects of colonialist disavowal, so that other ‘denied’
knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its
authority—its rules of recognition” (Bhabha 114). Like mimicry, hybridity destabilizes
colonialist power in that it effects only a “partial presence” of colonial
identity.
The multiple and various
literacy/speech acts in Dictée as
well as the literacy/speech act of the text itself function in interconnecting
ways: they persuade the audience(s) of the conflicting, contradictory,
unstable, and fragmented nature of Korean American/immigrant subjectivity while
they also persuade the reader to become an active participant in the
construction of the text. Readers are
thus not only engaging in (and being challenged by) their own literacy practices,
but they are forced to continue their engagement with Cha’s
practice/methodology/critique of ambivalence and indeterminacy by resituating
the text in different contexts.
Rhetorical critic Michael McGee writes that texts are simultaneously
structures of fragments, finished texts, and fragments themselves to be
accounted for in subsequent discourse, either (a) the audience/reader/critic’s
explanation of their power and meaning, or (b) the audience/reader/critic’s
rationalization for having taken their cue as an excuse for action. (279)
McGee’s words resonate with Bakhtin’s idea of
hybridization, reinforcing my argument that Dictée
is powerfully effective in its ability to move audiences to action and to
maintain its status as a nonrepresentative, heteroglossic text that refuses
categorization and consistently deconstructs systems of domination.
As I hope to have shown though my reading of Dictée, by looking at texts through the lens of a rhetorical
theorist or critic, and by using literacy as an analytic, we can see more
clearly how an author might affect or move her audience to action by forcing
them to become participants in the construction of the text and thus
encouraging them to reevaluate their own acts and conceptualizations of
literacy. As well, this reading seeks to
illuminate what it means to be an ambivalent speaker and/or subject and the
possibilities for change and justice that mimicry has the potential to
enact.
By forcing her readers into the
roles of those with the compromised literacies, Cha constructs her readers as
objects to be read. If mimicry produces
a “gaze of otherness,” a “process by which the look of surveillance returns as
the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed
and ‘partial’ representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence”
(Bhabha 89), then it becomes evident how Cha’s appropriation of mimicry has the
rhetorical effect of “turn[ing] the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye
of power” (112). In other words, in the
process of reading the text, the reader becomes the discriminated subject who
falters with language, who “swallows with last efforts last wills against the
pain that wishes it to speak” (Dictée
3). Occupying the analogous position of
the “colonized,” the reader is at the same time both observer and object to be
observed. However, unlike Bhabha’s
colonizer who becomes the object to be read by others, Cha’s reader becomes the
object to be read by him/herself. Cha’s
mimicry is not something that is meant to be concealed; on the contrary, this
discourse is revealed on nearly every page of the text. What a rhetorical analysis helps to reveal
are the potential effects that this discourse has on its audiences and
encourages us as readers to carefully and critically consider the roles in
which we are cast and how we respond to those roles in our acts of
reading.
Dissertation
Overview
The goal of this chapter has been
to introduce my dissertation’s arguments and method of analysis and to do so
primarily by way of example. Theresa
Cha’s Dictée, to my mind, best
illustrates how the critical literacy acts of the author, speaking subjects,
readers, and text can be read as articulations of cultural difference that,
through their very articulations, demonstrate cultural hybridity, break down
hierarchies, and provide alternative sites for contesting and negotiating Asian
American subjectivity. By situating
readers in such a way that they are compelled to consider their own engagements
with literacy and how discourses of literacy and citizenship function to
reproduce dominant ideologies, Dictée
advances a theoretical model for reading literacy narratives. In the chapters that follow, I aim to show
how my methodology for reading Dictée
encourages a kind of reading practice that directs attention to literacy as an
analytic and the ways in which literacy narratives may function to transform
readers’ ideologies.
Part I, “Narratives of Literacy and
Immigration,” examines the ways in which two early Asian immigrant male writers
simultaneously critique the myth of American democratic inclusion while arguing
for their own and their fictional alter egos’ legitimacies as Americans. Chapter 1 analyzes Younghill Kang’s East Goes West (1937) and chapter 2
examines Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in
the Heart (1946). My reading thus
helps to illustrate how the same text can rhetorically function as both
assimilationist and subversive. I also
look at the roles that gender and race play both in America’s construction of
Kang and Bulosan as Other and in the authors’ responses to these
constructions. I argue that these
authors gain legitimacy through the literacy act of cultural criticism that
their books perform, they help to empower those who were/are similarly
marginalized and oppressed, and they provide readers and critics with an
alternative conceptualization of what it means to be a “literate citizen” of
the United States.
Part II, “Hyperliteracy, Hybridity
and Disguise,” continues the exploration of literacy and Asian American masculinity
but shifts the focus from early immigrant autobiographies to a contemporary
play and novel written, respectively, by secondgeneration writers Frank Chin
and Chang-rae Lee. Chapter 3’s
discussion, anchored by Frank Chin’s The
Chickencoop Chinaman, elaborates on the previous section’s account of the
historical feminization and sexualization of Asian American men and explains
how the gendered discourse of Asian American cultural nationalism developed, in
part, as a response to these constructions.
As a product of the 1960s and 1970s cultural nationalist movement,
Chin’s Chickencoop was written and
performed in a social, cultural, and political climate that differed radically
from that of the early immigrant narratives.33 Because it was performed live and in the
theatre, the play adds another dimension to my study as audience members are
literally faced with the physicality of race—they both see and hear the Asian
body on stage and are thus engaged with the characters in a manner more
immediate and palpable than they would be through other mediums.
Written more than two decades after
Chickencoop premiered, Chang-rae
Lee’s Native Speaker (1995)—the text
that I examine in chapter 4— appeals to an audience that is perhaps more
accustomed to multiculturalist discourses and ideologies than Chin’s 1970s
audiences, but that is also facing newfound anxieties over the increase in the
immigrant population in the U.S. My
analysis in these chapters thus calls attention to the changing perspectives
and status of Asian Americans and theorizes how those changes might have
impacted the authors’ choice of genre.
Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how utilizing literacy as an analytic, in
the particular contexts in which these works were written and received, helps
to illuminate the ways in which Chickencoop
and Native Speaker challenge or
reify cultural and gendered assumptions about literacy while also demonstrating
how their narrator-protagonists’ ambivalent status shapes their acts of
hyperliteracy.34
Hyperliteracy here represents the “in-between” space of identity for
both Tam and Henry—it is the space in which they have been forced to occupy as
marginalized subjects but it is also the space in which they may subvert that
very positioning.
The relationships among
citizenship, literacy, legitimacy and Asian Americanness that I explore in each
chapter are complicated further when we shift our focus to the context of
Hawai`i. Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging—the text that anchors the
conclusion’s discussion—and the controversy generated by her work demonstrate
the need to be consistently aware and critical of the U.S. as empire and, in
the Hawaiian context, of the “competing nationalisms” between indigenous
Hawaiians and “locals” that are produced as a result. Both the text and the controversy, as I
explain below, call attention to continuing debates about what it means to
identify or be classified as “Asian American,” what constitutes “Asian
American” literature, and whose voices/literacies are being privileged in such
conversations. Reading Blu’s Hanging and the ensuing
controversy through the lenses of rhetorical theory and postcolonial studies
encourages such a critique as it asks us to consider the various audiences and
historical conditions/contexts of Yamanaka’s work. Attending to literacy contributes to this
critique as Yamanaka, like Cha, juxtaposes dominant languages with subordinated
ones in order to interrogate the project of imperialism. Specifically, Yamanaka challenges the
discourse of U.S. citizenship and the dominant ideological construct of
literacy that relies upon such a concept as “standard” English. Pidgin functions in Yamanaka’s work as a
“borderland Discourse” that is used by both the author and her
characters to make arguments about literacy, American citizenship versus
“local” identity, and the ambivalent construction of Asian American
subjectivity. The conclusion thus
revisits some of the arguments and ideas expressed in this introduction and, by
shifting the focus to Hawai`i, prompts us toward further examination of
literacy in the context of U.S. imperialism.
Part I: Narratives
of Literacy and Immigration Chapter 1: Younghill Kang’s East Goes West
Introduction
The majority of Asian immigrants
who came to the United States during the great wave of immigration from 1849 to
1924 arrived as laborers for the building and maintenance of plantations,
railroads, mines and fields. The
migration of Asians included people from China, Japan and Korea, as well as the
Philippines and India. Though the
majority were laborers, there were also a fair number of students, merchants,
farmers, government workers and domestic servants (Takaki 53).35 These immigrants ranged from illiterate,
unskilled laborers to highly skilled and educated workers. Though much neglected, written accounts of
their experiences as immigrants, whether in English or their native languages,
do exist and they offer valuable insight into the history of Asian immigration.36 In her foundational work, Asian American Literature: An Introduction
to the Writings and Their Social Context (1982), Elaine Kim writes that
most early accounts of Asian immigration were written by the much smaller
population of students, scholars, and diplomats who were exempted from the exclusion
laws because of their elite status
(24).37
She describes these writers as “ambassadors of goodwill” whose writing
is “characterized by efforts to bridge the gap between East and West and plead
for tolerance by making usually highly euphemistic observations about the West
on the one hand while explaining Asia in idealized terms on the other”
(24). According to Kim, these early
immigrant works from the late 1800s to the middle of the twentieth century
sometimes addressed Western misconceptions of Asians and made pleas for racial
tolerance, but more often they made apologies for their own country and/or
countrymen and women and praised America for its democratic ideals. Any criticism of Americans or American society
was muted so as not to seem impolite (29-31).
Given the relatively recent
influence of feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer
studies, diaspora studies, transnationalism and the like on literary criticism,
it is not surprising that critics today view these early immigrant works in a
very different light. For example, while
traditionally an immigrant text like America
Is in the Heart has been read as an example of the bildungsroman form,
Lisa Lowe argues that it should be read as a text that
resists the “unified aesthetic” or “canonical function” (44), and instead draws
attention to the ways in which the text critiques that very function by
exposing its manifold contradictions.
Patricia Chu theorizes, as do others, that some of these early immigrant
narratives were constructed as bildungsroman
precisely because the form was familiar to their audiences and thus provided
the authors an avenue through which to launch their critiques and reach their
readers most effectively. Oscar
Campomanes argues that because of the unique colonial and neo-colonial
relationship that Filipinos and Filipino Americans have with the U.S., America
is not “the promised land,” but rather a place of exile. He argues that Filipino writing in the U.S.
should be considered a “literature of exile and emergence,” as opposed to a
“literature of immigration and settlement” (“Filipinos” 51). Though he is referring specifically to
Filipino American literature, Campomanes’ argument speaks to concerns expressed
by and about other immigrant groups that are in the U.S. precisely because of
U.S. imperialism, such as Hmong, Lao, Mien, and Vietnamese refugees who fled
Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam during the Vietnam War. In a similar vein, ChungHei Yun argues that Kang’s
autobiographical immigrant narrative, East
Goes West, is not a novel about assimilation but rather a novel that
details “the life of the displaced in the chiaroscuro of hope and despair,
dream and disillusionment, the ideal and the real, life balanced between the
weight of the past and that of the present” (94). Contemporary critics thus look beyond the
reductive reading that Elaine Kim offers and instead challenge us to consider
alternative readings of these works that allow for a more critical perspective
on the widely divergent and complex histories and relationships that various
Asian American groups have with the U.S.
The following two chapters examine
early postcolonial, male immigrant writers whose works were well received but
at the same time performed a subversive function through which the authors
gained legitimacy as American writers. I
focus my attention in these chapters on the autobiographical novels of
Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan. While
other critics have already examined the role of the naïve narrator-protagonist
in both novels to illuminate the subversive aspects of the texts, I extend that
analysis by focusing on the ways in which Kang and Bulosan use specific
rhetorical strategies to make arguments for a reconceptualization of literacy
and citizenship. I read these texts as
literacy narratives because they foreground the issue of English language acquisition
as it relates to U.S. citizenship and “American” identity. Studying the rhetorical features that enable
this foregrounding illuminates contradictions in the texts and serves to
legitimize both Kang and Bulosan as agents of cultural criticism as we look at
the ways in which they influence their readers and how their readers respond to
their texts.
I argue here and throughout this
project that rhetorical analysis gives us insight into how texts can be
effective in starkly different, and often oppositional, ways since the
rhetorical situation is contingent upon contexts and identities that are always
shifting and unstable. This
effectiveness holds particularly true for racialized Others such as Kang and
Bulosan whose works can be read as both assimilationist as well as condemning
of America. As subjects marked by race,
these authors and their narrators speak and write from a liminal position
whereby, through their very articulations of cultural difference, they gain
agency for themselves as producers and critics of American culture. In Masking
Selves, Making Subjects, Traise Yamamoto writes, “Agency for the self
written about is not an a priori
condition; rather, the ‘I’ self-reflexively confers that agency through the
autobiographical act” (113). I would
extend this claim by arguing that in writing about other marginalized peoples
in the U.S., Kang and Bulosan also gain agency and legitimacy for themselves
and they confer legitimacy on those who were/are similarly marginalized and
oppressed.
In addition to examining the role
that race plays in Kang’s and Bulosan’s literacy practices and in dominant
culture’s ideology of literacy, I will look at the role that gender plays in
shaping articulations of literacy.
Historical studies of Asians in America are incomplete without an
acknowledgment of how the racial formation of Asian Americans has been tied to
gender. For example, under the Page Law
of 1875 and later immigration laws, the wives of Chinese laborers who came to
the United States were forbidden entry and those male immigrants who were
unmarried were forbidden to marry white women, effectively eliminating any
possibility for Chinese immigrants to start their own families. Furthermore, under the 1922 Cable Act, female
U.S. citizens who married “aliens ineligible to citizenship” were forced to
relinquish their citizenship (Chan 105-06).
Due to a number of factors including the shortage of washerwomen of any
ethnic origin in California in the mid-1800s as well as the fact that other
immigrant men were jealous of the Chinese for offering such cheap and effective
labor, Chinese men were forced into “feminized” forms of work such as cooking,
waiting tables, washing clothes, and working as house servants.38 As David Eng comments, “Collectively, these
low-wage, feminized jobs work to underscore the numerous ways in which gender
is mapped as the social axis through which the legibility of a racialized Asian
American male identity is constituted, determined, rendered coherent, and
stabilized” (17).
As well as being denied paternity
and forced to do “women’s work,” Asian American men were further feminized by
mainstream America’s construction of Asians as weak and submissive and
culturally non-productive. King-kok
Cheung attributes this “feminization” to “cultural and political factors.” She explains that the stereotypes of Asians
as passive and submissive result from Asian cultures that teach people to
respect authority and to “exercise verbal restraint.” She argues that this cultural difference is
“deepened by racist politics, insofar as Asians are granted limited acceptance
as long as they refrain from ‘making waves’ in American society.” In terms of cultural production, she explains
that before the cultural nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, Asian
Americans had contributed little as far as music and literature were concerned,
and especially as compared to African Americans, to such an extent that they
stood out as an “absence” in American culture.
She writes, “Where were the Asian jazz and blues, Langston Hughes and
James Baldwin, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X? Because culture and political visibility has
been a male prerogative traditionally, such absence casts yet another shadow on
Asian American manhood” (“Of Men and Men” 175).
Acknowledging the intersections of
race and gender in the construction of Asian American masculinity helps to
illuminate how and why certain rhetorical strategies are used to articulate
Asian American male subjectivity. For
Younghill Kang, the process of discursively arguing for his legitimacy as an
American is deeply tied to the ways in which America has constructed him as
“queer” and “alien.” One way he responds
to this construction is by identifying or aligning himself with other American
(and other Western) male writers.
Through strategies of identification, Kang creates rhetorical alliances
with these male author figures to suggest to readers that he is like them and
hence as “American” or as “Western” as they are. Moreover, both Kang’s and Bulosan’s fictional
alter egos’ relationships with white women, which I discuss at greater length
below, are further suggestive of their protagonists’ immigrant, and hence
illegitimate, status, as it is only because of white women that they are able
to produce their narratives of literacy.
My analysis of the relationship
between literacy and legitimacy (as citizens of the U.S.) functions on two
levels: on one level there is the narrator-protagonist’s literacy which I argue
does not grant him legitimacy (as represented in the text)— this is precisely
the critique constructed and argued by the author; on another level there is
the author’s literacy which, through the act of writing, grants him legitimacy
and, if not legal citizenship, then at least cultural citizenship as we see how
he influences his readers through rhetoric.
Younghill
Kang and His Literacy Narrative
Born in the northern Korean
province of Hamkyung in 1903, Younghill Kang immigrated to the United States in
1921, just three years before the Immigration Exclusion Act of 1924 and eleven
years after Korea was occupied by Japan.
Kang’s arrival in the U.S. was a direct result of Japan’s annexation of
Korea in 1910. Rather than choosing
“death” or witnessing the death of his country under Japanese rule, Kang seeks
refuge in the U.S. In the opening pages
of the novel he writes, “I felt I was looking on death, the death of an ancient
planet, a spiritual planet that had been my father’s home…. In loathing of
death, I hurtled forward … out toward a foreign body…. Here I wandered on soil
as strange as Mars, seeking roots, roots for an exile’s soul” (4-5). Kang’s arrival in the U.S. is marked by
ambivalence—he comes not because of a fantasy that he has of America but
because it is an alternative to death.
As a student and later professor of
English literature and composition, Kang was well equipped with knowledge of
American literature and the skills of a writer.39 His first novel, The Grass Roof (1931), is an autobiographical account of his childhood
and early adult life in northern Korea, Seoul, and Japan, ending just before
his departure for the West. East Goes West (1937) continues the
story, begun in The Grass Roof, of
narrator Chungpa Han’s (Kang’s fictional alter ego) quest to find meaning and
purpose in life. This autobiographical
novel picks up the narrative just as Han arrives in New York at the age of
eighteen. Han explains early in the
narrative how the Japanese conquest of Korea during his childhood left him—“the
individualist, demanding life and more life”— without hope for a future in his
country:
Korea, a small, provincial, old-fashioned Confucian
nation, hopelessly trapped by a larger, expanding one, was called to get off
the earth. Death summoned. I could have renounced the scholar’s dream
forever … and written my vengeance against Japan in martyr’s blood.... Or I
could take away my slip cut from the roots, and try to engraft my scholar
inherited kingdom upon the world’s thought.
(8-9)
Instead of choosing to stay in Japanese-occupied
Korea, where “death summoned,” Kang seeks refuge in the U.S. with the hopes of
making his literary contribution to the world.
Like several of Cha’s speaking
subjects in Dictée, Kang is both a
postcolonial and Asian immigrant subject and as such, he arrives in the U.S. as
one who already has been linguistically and politically colonized. While the U.S. played a role in Japan’s
annexation of Korea, Korea’s liberation from Japan has been conceived of in
dominant U.S. and Korean narratives as a “gift of the allied forces, especially
of the U.S.A.” (Choi
80). Only
recently have critics begun to examine what Chungmoo Choi has called a
“colonization of consciousness,” by which she means the enforcement of American
culture and ideologies on the postcolonized people of South Korea (79). Constructed in the popular imagination as
South Korea’s “liberator-benefactor” (Choi 83), the U.S. is, in Kang’s
pre-immigrant eyes, a democratic nation full of hope and opportunity.
Armed with an “Eastern scholarship
in one hand,” and a “Western [education] in the other” (9), Han sets out to
find his spiritual home in America. He
tells us, “The beginning of my new existence must be founded here” (5). Ironically, in his efforts to “Westernize,”
Han befriends two fellow Koreans: George Jum, a former Korean ambassador to
Washington, D.C., who is a hopeless romantic and who now makes his living as a
cook; and To Wan Kim (from here on referred to simply as “Kim”), the rootless
and exiled artist and scholar. Although
praised by Han for being
“Americanized,” both George and Kim represent the grim
reality of what it means to be an exile in America. In George, Han sees a Korean who has become
“Americanized” in his dress and talk. He
tells Han, “I like to speak English. I
myself know how to employ the idiom” (35).
George is culturally literate in ways that Han is not, and to Han he
represents “the real America at last” (37).
At the novel’s end, however, we learn that George has settled in Hawai`i
with a Korean American woman, his hopes of becoming a successful actor in
Hollywood dashed. He tells Han in a
post-script to his letter, “For the rest, I have not failed. I have only not succeeded” (367).
Kim’s “failure” and ultimate demise
is felt more poignantly than George’s, perhaps because Han saw in Kim an image
of what he too might become; likewise, Kim saw in Han his self of many years
ago: Han muses, “As I looked at him, so he looked at me. Perhaps he saw in me his green and hopeful
self of long ago” (87). At first, Han
identifies with Kim’s background as a poet and scholar, but he soon realizes
that what he must learn from Kim is not ancient Eastern scholarship but rather
“the complexities of Western civilization” (155) on which Kim appears to be an
expert. He tells Kim that it is through
an American education that he will be able to “master American civilization,
American culture” (160). Kim has become
less idealistic and hopeful about such goals as he responds, “You think it is
worth mastering?” (160).
Through Kim, readers get their
first glimpse in the novel of a truly tragic man who has fought long and hard
for acceptance by both the Western intellectual elite and the parents of his
white American beloved, Helen. After
months of not hearing from Helen (her parents sent her off on a cruise in order
to separate the interracial couple), Kim soliloquizes in front of a mirror in
his hallway:
What becomes of the dreams dreamt,
the hopes hoped, unrealized?
Dreams are fools’ night fancies. The product of the idler’s imagination. For no one has entered the cloud castle
through the rainbow gates of dreams. All
are words, written on the fading memory book, where it sticks on the eyes’
visionary image, the mirror that lies.
Everything, everything in this West, is said to be ‘hope so.’” (265)
Left penniless on a student passport with no home in
Korea to return to and no Helen in America with whom to share his life, Kim
commits suicide.
Although they are both Korean
exiles living in America, Kim in many ways serves as a foil to Han’s more
optimistic view of the future. The
construction of Kim as a foil to Han can be viewed as a rhetorical strategy in
that Han, in contrast to Kim, is represented, at least on the surface, as an
“Oriental” who succeeds in finding a place for himself in America. Viewing this construction from a rhetorical
perspective gives us insight into the function of Kim’s character and the
effect his character has on readers. As
I will elaborate in more detail below, in order for Kang’s voice to be heard he
had to tread carefully so as not to alienate or offend his 1930s and 1940s audience. To that end, Kang created a naïve fictional
alter ego to tell his story in an acceptable voice while utilizing a collection
of ancillary characters to voice his criticisms of American society. Kim is one such character who, by comparison,
makes Han seem more likely to succeed because Han retains his hope in the
American dream. As contemporaneous
reviews indicate, readers wanted to hear stories of “successful” immigration
and assimilation as a way of congratulating themselves for welcoming these “strangers
from a different shore.”40 In
her 1937 New Yorker review, for
example, Lady Hosie praised Kang for his “humor and charm” and described East Goes West as a “successful search
for the formula that was to make [Younghill Kang] an ‘Oriental Yankee’”
(74).
While Kim does not strongly denounce
American society and culture, his fate and disillusionment serve as criticisms
in themselves and they portend Han’s own failure to ever be legitimized as an
American citizen. For example, through
Kim, Kang offers a critique of the literacy myth as Kim realizes that his
search for acceptance among
Western intellectuals is
futile. Kim exclaims to Han,
You and I came to the West to find
a new beauty, a new life, a new religion.
But is there any? Alas! We have
come at the wrong time. It is too late. Too late to be saved by Dante’s Beatrice, too
late to love like Shakespeare in the sonnets, too late to be with Shelley a
Plato-republican, too late even to be a Browning individualist or a Tennysonian
sentimentalist.
…tell me, what now is to be our fate?
being [sic] unable to go back to that previous existence, being unable to label
ourselves in this new world
… becoming lost within another lost
world? (166)
Kim’s search for acceptance proves to be futile, for
despite the solidarity he feels with these (male) Western writers, as
demonstrated by his cultural literacy, his race prevents him from ever gaining
legitimacy as a member of this literary group.
Though he may identify with them through a rhetoric of belonging, the
group that they represent (the “Western intellectual elite”) does not consider
him a viable member of their collective identity. Unlike Han, who remains optimistic, Kim
becomes disillusioned and withdrawn, retreating to a life of isolation and
loneliness. As Han explains, “[Kim] was
perfectly willing to be a caged animal looking out on the world through the
steel bars of his own isolation” (355).
Although Kim has lost all hope in finding a place for himself in
America, he remains slightly optimistic for Han, urging him to read and analyze
everything written on the “Orient” from both a Western and Eastern point of
view as a way of bridging the two worlds.
He tells Han, “As a transplanted scholar, this is the only road I could
point to, for your happy surviving” (257).
Through his experiences in trying
to carve out a life for himself in America, Han receives his true “American
education.” Such an education, he
discovers, includes learning how to deal with racism and how to survive in the
U.S. as an exile. At certain moments in the
text, Kang allows Han to be mildly critical.
While Han may be a naïve narrator, he is aware that America is not a
utopia:
George wrote, congratulating me on having so good a
job. He said he was glad I had the guts
to go into big business, and he, too, wished he could get out of housework and
place himself with a firm like mine where a man could climb. I wondered if George was right and I was
wrong. Well, this must be the lesson I
must learn, of American life. This is American life, I said stubbornly. All day long the moving multitudes of
humanity, with busy legs, constantly darting false smiles to cover their
depressed facial expression, the worn-out machine bodies turning round in the
aisles of unmoving glass and china sets, slowly figuring with shaking
hands—haste and moving too many things made them so.... But where were all the
enchantment and romance, the glorious vision, which I had seen in my dreams of
America as a boy? (294-95)
Han’s education and his acquired social literacy thus
become his means of survival rather than acceptance into the economy, culture
and society as constructed by mainstream white America. Like George and Kim, he is fully literate in
“American ways” and American society, but because of his race he will always
remain an outsider. At a small college
in Canada, for example, Han is considered “queer and alien” (104) by his
classmates: “For me there was always special favor, special kindliness, special
protection ... the white-man’s-burden attitude toward dark colonies. Ralph’s kindness ... Leslie’s brutal cruelty
... I weighed them in my mind, and it seemed to me better to miss the kindness
and not to have the cruelty” (118). The
cruelty continues, however, along with exploitation at the hands of Mr.
Lively—the Universal Education
salesman—his customers, various employers, and Bonheure, a religious leader
cheating his parishioners out of money.
Gradually, Han learns that he must accept his fate as an “Oriental.”
Han’s awareness of his liminal
status as Other is perhaps most evident in the conversation he has with his
good friend, Senator Kirby. Kirby tells
Han, “Now you must definitely make up your mind to be American. Don’t say, ‘I’m a Korean’ when you’re asked. Say ‘I’m
an American’.... I tell you, sir, you belong here. You should be one of us”
(352). Han realizes that the senator
does not understand Han’s status in the U.S. as an Asian immigrant and replies,
“But an Oriental has a hard time in America.
He is not welcomed much” (352).
Senator Kirby remains adamant in his belief that Han can find a place
for himself here. “There shouldn’t be
any buts about it! Believe in America
with all your heart. Even if it’s
sometimes hard, believe in her” (352).
Han simply replies, “But legally I am denied” (353).41
Like Kim, Han is just another
“‘adopted child’ of the Western literary
establishment” (E. Kim, Asian
American 38). Han establishes
himself throughout the novel as a Western scholar and skilled poet; however, we
learn towards the end of the novel that although he is employed as a writer,
his work is limited to writing about “Oriental news” (353). That Han gains legitimacy as a writer only
when he writes about things “Oriental” further attests to dominant culture’s systematic
racialization and construction of Asian Americans as foreign, exotic, and
untranslatable. Like Han, Kang’s success
as a writer is conditional—he is praised when he is viewed as the “native
informant,” “translating” Korea and Korean Americanness for his audience, yet
censured when he speaks critically of Americans. Critics, as well as Kang’s own publisher, saw
the novel as nothing more than the story of an Oriental in the West suggesting
that Kang, too, would always be “‘an adopted child’ of the Western literary
establishment.”
Furthermore, while by novel’s end
Han has established himself as a writer and editorial worker for the Encyclopedia Britannica, his ultimate
success seems to hinge upon his relationship with Trip. Like Allos, the narrator-protagonist and
fictional alter ego of Bulosan’s narrative, Han’s entry into America and its
literary establishment becomes possible through the figure of a white
woman. When Han first meets Trip at her
apartment in New York, he implores her to help him write his book. She asks, “You’re interested in writing—in
English?” to which he replies, “Oh, yes.... A best seller. I don’t know English well yet. But I have all the ideas” (310). Several years later, upon hearing the news of
Kim’s death, Han returns to New York in desperate search of Trip to save him
from the same fate that befell Kim. Han
narrates,
I had found Trip.
Oh, I was safe! I was not to be
the prisoner condemned without a hearing.
I had a reprieve. This time, I
swore, I would be, oh, so clever, Trip should never escape me again like that.…
I would make her translate Oriental poems, I would get her interested in
that. Or I would pose as
‘material.’ I would get her mind working
with me. And that was a good book, she
must see we had to write. (361)
Trip is thus constructed as the
figure through whom Han gains legitimacy as an “Oriental
Yankee.” I
reference this oxymoron to point out the very contradiction in the fact that
Han’s work cannot be legitimated without Trip’s assistance and that this “work”
is structured around Han’s positioning of himself as an “Oriental” object. That Han’s work can only be legitimized
through Trip and that the novel leaves Han’s relationship with Trip ambiguous
is suggestive of Kang’s critique that Han will never, in fact, be perceived by
dominant culture as a fully legitimate participant in American cultural
production or as a fully legitimate romantic partner for Trip.
Rachel Lee’s analysis of Allos’
relationship with white women, which I discuss at greater length in the
following chapter, is applicable here as well.
She maintains that all of the white women whom Allos hails as “the America I had wanted to find” (America 235) are depicted as nonsexual
and hence they retain their official status as American citizens (32). Lee is referring here to the
anti-miscegenation and naturalization laws of the early twentieth century that
in some states not only forbade sexual relations or marriage among Asians and
whites, but that in fact stripped female U.S. citizens of their citizenship if
they married an Asian immigrant. Leaving
Han’s relationship with Trip ambiguous and not having them marry enables Trip
to maintain her citizenship status and allows for the more subversive critique
that Han gains legitimacy as a writer only through his (nonsexual) association
and collaboration with Trip.
As with the white women in America Is in the Heart, Trip represents
Han’s idealized view of America and becomes the conduit through which he
establishes himself as an “American” writer.
It is particularly significant that in both East Goes West and America Is
in the Heart the white women Han and Allos are most drawn to are themselves
readers and writers and are thus presumed to have access to the American
literary establishment to which both Han and Allos so desperately want to
belong. By contrast, as Patricia Chu,
Elaine Kim, Rachel Lee and others have noted, Asian women in the men’s texts
often serve to represent the Asian homeland or to support the men in their
quest for (or crisis of) identity.42
In East Goes West, Trip
herself is a poet, and it is for this reason that Han is first drawn to
her. As Chu notes, Han seems much less
interested in Trip’s white female body than he is in her mind (35). She writes, “For Han, Trip’s appeal as a writing woman places her in a long line
of literary heroines whose merits are linked to the presumption that a literary
life signifies both domestic virtues and a complex interior life” (33). Han equates winning Trip’s affection with
securing a place for himself in America as a writer. Trip is such an important figure to Han
because, to his mind, she is capable of helping him “father a literary
offspring” or, at the very least, she could use him as material or text to
study and to write about. In other
words, Trip helps to alleviate Han’s fear that he will go unnoticed as a
scholar and writer, and she is also the kind of reader that Han both seeks and
needs—one who will “read, translate, and value the ‘oriental poems’ that
comprise his subjectivity” (Chu 35).
Han/Kang’s act of literacy is thus deeply tied to his (Korean immigrant
male) subjectivity. In fact, Han/Kang’s
critical act of literacy is the textual embodiment of his subjectivity. Without an audience or an outlet for his
literary aspirations, Han/Kang is doomed, like Kim, to a life that is simply
not worth living.
Critical
Reception
American reviews of Kang’s debut
novel, The Grass Roof, illustrate the
widespread misperception that ethnic writing is representative of the larger
ethnic group and that the ethnic writer’s job is to serve as cultural insider
or “native informant” for a particular ethnic community. From these reviews, we gain a clearer picture
of the “preestablished rhetorical situation” 43 in which the novel
was produced and consumed as well as Kang’s insight into his audience’s
preconceptions of him as a racialized writer.
For example, Isidor Schneider, writing in the New Republic (1931), asserted that, “as almost the only book to
introduce us to a virtually unknown people, it has a high extrinsic importance”
(qtd. in K. Lee 69); Thomas Wolfe suggested that the main value of The
Grass Roof lay in its success in satisfying the American people’s
curiosity about “a faroff world” (qtd. in K. Lee 69); and Lady Hosie, in her
1931 review, “A Voice from Korea,” wrote,
Koreans have the reputation of being a gentlemanly,
easy-going race, and Mr. Kang’s story confirms this. His delightful family pictures bear the stamp
of truth. His sidelights make a lover of
the East smile in tender recollection, and explain scenes only half understood
before, such as the chronological groupings of the family even in play.... Mr.
Kang is on sure ground when he gives us Korea and Koreans. His book is a real contribution to literature
and to our understanding of his countrymen and women. (707)
In fact, Kang’s perspective was in
no way representative of Koreans at that time.
As
Elaine Kim points out, the The Grass Roof is not a book that describes Korea and Koreans but
rather it is a book that explains why Kang left Japanese-occupied Korea
(34).
Critics generally responded
favorably to Kang’s descriptions of Korea in The
Grass Roof
and his American experiences that affirmed (and confirmed) the myth of the
American Dream in East Goes West. For example, in her October 17, 1937 review
of the later novel for the New York Times,
Katherine Woods writes that although narrator/protagonist Chungpa Han “saw and
heard and lived through much … he was coming to know the best of this country,
too. And he loved it. He put his own roots into it” (11). According to Woods, Han was “successfully
Americanized,” a “poor boy who made good,” who ultimately found in America “his
home” (11). Ralph Thompson, in his 1937 New York Times review, identified Han as
“the foreign intellectual” who “wanted above all” to “learn to know the true
contemporary America,” and who finally succeeded in making a place for himself
here (L++17). And finally, critics
viewed East Goes West as a model
“success story” for minorities to emulate in dealing with American racism (E.
Kim, Asian American 34).
While
critics were quick to praise Kang’s novels for their “realistic” portrayals of
Korea and Koreans and their positive representations
of America, they were not so fond of his criticisms. Lady Hosie, for example, argues that Kang
does not “give a fair account of American missionaries” in The Grass Roof, and that he should be grateful to those American
missionaries “who first made the world aware of Japan’s former policy in Korea,
now happily reversed” (“A Voice” 707).
Even more critical was Maxwell Geismar’s 1937 review published in the Nation.
Geismar argues that East Goes West
is “less impressive” than The Grass Roof
because it is not a novel of praise but rather a novel of protest. He writes,
Younghill Kang has survived a harsh apprenticeship, he
has learned, with some fine comic flourishes, to sell himself to this Western
society, but he has not yet learned to give his affections to it … [he] has
lost, for the moment at least, the distinguishing trait of his earlier period,
a friendship at once discerning and indulgent for the land and the life around
him. (482)
It is not surprising that Geismar did not look kindly
upon Kang’s satirical portrait of America.
Kang was lauded as long as he appeared to be struggling for acceptance,
but as soon as he becomes ironic or even angry, he is deemed unworthy of
praise.
Though it is not surprising that a
leftist journal such as the Nation
would publish an article about a text that was critical of America, what is
remarkable is that Geismar was alone in recognizing the novel as a critique
rather than a tribute. As critics Kyhan
Lee and Sunyoung Lee note, East Goes West
has largely been misread and misunderstood since the time of its publication.44 Both critics cite Katherine Woods’ New York Times review in which Woods
states,
[Kang’s] story attracts and holds the attention as if
it were a novel.... But of course, East
Goes West is not a novel. It is the
candid record of ‘the making of an Oriental Yankee’ as its subtitle states; and
its author has been so successfully Americanized as to become Assistant
Professor of Comparative Literature in New York University and a member of the
staff of the Department of Far Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum. (11)
Woods so mistakenly conflates Kang’s “success” at
realizing the American dream with Han’s presumed success at Americanization
that she is completely oblivious to the underlying critique that Geismar
perspicaciously observed. This
conflation is perhaps most evident in those reviews which read events from
Kang’s life into the novel where, in fact, they do not exist. As Sunyoung Lee notes, “the Springfield Sunday Union & Republican
blithely reports that ‘[East Goes West]
concludes with [Kang’s] winning of an American wife and achieving the first
rung of an intellectual career’—although it remains unclear whether or not the
book’s hero, Chungpa Han, ever does win over Trip, his elusive idealization of
American womanhood (100)” (378-79). Lee
is particularly concerned with this misreading because she believes it
“indicates a presumption of artlessness in Kang’s work” and “underestimates”
Kang as a writer (379-380). She cites a
1937 review from the Times Literary
Supplement that states, “[Kang’s] autobiography is of great length, and yet
it is told in an artless way that makes it rather fascinating” (805). Lee’s argument is persuasive: “Kang the
writer is replaced by Chungpa Han the character, and in the process, Kang
becomes an early victim of the still-prevalent belief that the only
contribution any writer of color could possibly have to make is the story of
his or her own life” (379). Kang’s
editor, Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s, who also edited Thomas Wolfe, Ernest
Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others, agreed with Kang’s
contemporary reviewers. In a letter to
Kang explaining his suggestions for revision, Perkins wrote, “The principle I
went on was that in the first place this was the story of a man, and in the
second, of an Easterner in the West” (qtd. in S. Lee 380). He urged Kang to say more about Trip,
particularly to show that he in fact married her, because that was “one of the
principle points of the book” (qtd. in S. Lee 380)—that an Easterner could
become a Westerner through his marriage to an “American” woman. Perkins’
urging of Kang to conclude the novel in this way points to a not uncommon
tendency or strategy to fit a story into an already existing story grammar so
that readers’ expectations will be satisfactorily met. In his book, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution,
Howard Gardner briefly summarizes Frederic Bartlett’s research that determined
that audience members’ recollection of stories are greatly impacted by their
stereotypes about the characters in the story.
He cites the example of a group of listeners who, after hearing an
Indian folk tale, were unable to recall the story with accuracy and instead
“would regularly supply their own causal links, drop difficult-to-assimilate
information, and revise the plot until it had come to resemble that of a
standard Western tale” (115). Gardner’s
summary is applicable here because Perkins’ urging of Kang to show that he
married Trip in the novel is suggestive of the kind of stereotypical reading
that occurred with the research group in Bartlett’s study. Perkins was aware of readers’ expectations
about how stories of “successful” assimilation should unfold and wanted Kang to
fulfill those expectations, presumably for marketing purposes. As the contemporaneous reviews indicate,
readers and critics alike interpreted the novel in ways that confirmed their
own stereotypical views of Asians and idealistic notions of America.
Two
Opposing Rhetorical Situations
Though Asians had been immigrating
to the United States since the early 1800s, their presence a century later was
still a source of tension for Euro-Americans.
Because the majority of Asian immigrants at that time came to the United
States to provide cheap labor, Euro-Americans felt threatened by this new group
of workers, or “yellow peril” as they came to be known,45
and consequently adopted a hostile attitude towards them. From the moment Asians first set foot on
American soil, they have faced prejudice, economic discrimination, physical
violence, anti-miscegenation and anti-naturalization laws, exclusion and
incarceration (Chan 45).
That nearly all Asians were barred
entry by the Immigration Act of 1924 attests to the anti-Asian sentiment
prevalent at the time. Sucheng Chan
explains that the laws to exclude Asians were enacted not only as a result of
racism and nativism, but because Euro-Americans needed “scapegoats” for their
financial problems (53). In addition to
the various movements to rid America of these groups was the biologistic and
racist view that Asians, along with other nonwhites, were inherently
inferior. Thus, while Asian immigrants
faced many of the same challenges that every other immigrant group faced such
as starting out with limited finances and material goods, their struggle was
exacerbated by the laws that excluded them solely on the basis of race.
Given the status of Asians in
America during the latter part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth,
it is not surprising that Younghill Kang crafted a novel that was, on the
surface, palatable to the American appetite for “ethnic autobiography,” but
that also contained a subtext that was highly critical of America’s attitude
towards minorities. Contemporary
scholars such as Sunyoung Lee and Elaine Kim are critical of those who read East Goes West as an Asian American
success story. Instead, we see in their
reviews a reversal of the earlier readings such that Han is figured as an
exile, a permanent wanderer in a world that refuses to acknowledge his legitimacy
as an American citizen.
While many essays on East Goes West make some mention of
Han’s desire to enter and be accepted into American life through literature, no
one has critically examined the relationship between literacy and citizenship
that operates throughout the text. In
fact, contemporary critics, with the exception of Kyhan Lee, have all but
overlooked Kang’s English literacy as an issue for his readers and reviewers in
the 1930s and 40s. In addition to
identifying Kang as a “native informant” or “cultural translator” of Korea and Koreans,
early reviews of The Grass Roof also
note Kang’s non-standard use of English, thereby attributing his degree of
literacy to a condition of his race or “foreignness.” Isidor Schneider states, “Kang is so natural
a writer that his occasional misuse of English words sometimes gives them a
fresh meaning” (187), while Lady Hosie comments, “It is a tremendous
achievement that he should have written this lengthy book in lucid English; and
so excellently that a few unconscious jerks and jars of very modern American
slang only add a naivety to the candor of his tale” (qtd. in Trudeau 193). Finally, in his essay, “Younghill Kang’s
Unwritten Third Act” (1973), James Wade begins his “random observations,
summaries, and judgments” about Kang’s two major works, after having read them
again after fifteen years, by mentioning “as a preliminary note” that “[Kang’s]
English is by no means so perfect as memory suggested … it does not escape
mistakes, awkwardness, and foreignisms” (59).
Wade assumes that Kang’s mistakes were left unedited in order to
“enhance the exotic appeal of the writer”; however, he argues that the errors
were so minor that they seemed “glaring” and therefore ineffectual for the
purposes of making Kang seem “exotic” (59).
Wade’s and other early critics’
emphasis on Kang’s “misuse” of English juxtaposed with their claims that he has
become “successfully Americanized” points to an important contradiction in the
construction of Asian Americans by the dominant culture. For his contemporary readers and critics,
Kang’s/Han’s “success” is measured by the degree to which he embraces and
assimilates into American culture. For
Kang, this acceptance is largely due to the fact that he “won” an American
wife, fathered two children of legal U.S. citizenship status, and later became
a Professor at New York University. For
Han, it remains ambiguous whether or not he and Trip became romantically
involved, and yet Han is considered “successful” because he achieves his dream
of becoming a writer in the United States.
While these readers and critics viewed Kang/Han as “successfully
assimilating,” their emphasis on Kang’s “misuse” of English suggests the
opposite. Just as his race marks him as
“foreign,” so too does his questionable literacy in English.
Furthermore, as with the anonymous
reviewer who described East Goes West
as “artless,” these reviews, by highlighting Kang’s “misuse” of English,
suggest that his first novel was not very “literary,” was substandard in some
way, or was intentionally created with errors of speech solely for marketing
purposes. Such reviews indicate that
Kang was not taken very seriously as a writer at the time his first novel was
published. In his Guggenheim Foundation
fellowship application, submitted in 1931, Kang articulates his intentions for
his second novel, East Goes West. While The
Grass Roof “treated of the
Orient,” East Goes West (originally titled “Death of an Exile”) was going
to treat of Orientals in America, being
the reflection through the hero’s eyes of this mechanical age, of American
civilization, and of the literary and cultural époques he experiences here over
a period of ten years; also a history of his spiritual evolutions and
revolutions while love-sick, breadsick, butter-sick, education-sick, he is lost
and obliterated in the stone-andsteel jungles of New York City … (65). (qtd. in S. Lee 380)
Clearly Younghill Kang had in mind to write more than
just the story of “the making of an Oriental Yankee.” As is evident in his statement above and in
the original title of his book, “Death of an Exile,” his novel offers a
critique of American modernity, as well as philosophical insight into the mind
of an exiled poet.46 However,
as Sunyoung Lee notes, this reading becomes possible only when East Goes West is viewed as a novel
rather than autobiography. By separating
the author from his narrator-protagonist, Kang is given greater liberties to
write a critique (S. Lee 383).
To expand on Lee’s suggestion that
we read this text as a novel rather than an autobiography, I argue that reading
the text as a narrative of literacy reveals both the ways in which Kang
critiques dominant culture’s use of language and literacy in its construction
of him as Other and how he responds to these constructions through his critical
acts of literacy.
Kang’s
Rhetorical Strategies
Readers and critics at the time of
publication read East Goes West as an
assimilationist narrative precisely because they viewed the character of
Chungpa Han as the naïve narrator Kang constructed him to be. Kang’s indictment of America could not come
through his own character if he wished to be heard at all; rather, Kang
cleverly couched his critique in the voices of other characters such as Mr.
Lovejoy, Mr. and Mrs.
Lively, Farmer Higgins, To Wan Kim, Mr. and Mrs.
Schmitt, Laurenzo, Wagstaff, Senzar, and Elder Bonheure. Through Mr. and Mrs. Lively, for example,
Kang communicates to his audience the idea that racial tolerance is
qualified. After the Livelys have been
introduced to Han’s friend George—“a boy who smokes, drinks, swears” (149),
they become anxious about the influence he may have on Han. Mrs. Lively overhears George talking about
his experience with a woman, and she immediately assumes that Han is
participating in similar activities. The
Livelys’ anxiety about Han’s relationships with women, specifically white women,
becomes evident when Mr. Lively cautions Han, “My dear boy, see here, I love
you just as much as if you were my own boy.
But you are getting wrong ideas.
I don’t want to see you marry an American girl. Neither would I want to see Elsie marrying an
Oriental. And all decent people are like
that. It is not as the Lord intended”
(150). Han is accepted and loved by the
Livelys but only insofar as he does not become romantically involved with their
daughter, or with any white woman.
Han’s response is telling. He says nothing to the Livelys but narrates,
“I was very solemn and silent and unable to open my mouth to say anything”
(150). By utilizing indirect discourse
here, Kang avoids revealing Han’s true feelings about what the Livelys have
said. Readers are made to feel
sympathetic towards Han not because of how he is treated by the Livelys (though
this would be the rhetorical effect today) but because he does not voice his
complaints. Aware of his readers’
expectations, prejudices and stereotypes, Kang knew that Han’s silence, here
and elsewhere in the book, was essential for the novel to be received favorably
by his 1930s and 1940s audiences.
One of Kang’s strategies is to
distance himself from his narrator-protagonist and other characters through
what Bakhtin calls “heteroglossia.” According
to Bakhtin, all national languages are stratified by a number of social groups,
each of which has a language of its own reflecting the group’s speech diversity
and unique world view (27072). Each
utterance carries its own value and association depending on the speaker and
context of the utterance and thus every utterance is in constant motion in its
“socially charged life” (293). Language
is thus always “ideologically saturated” (271), “alive and developing” (272),
and “populated by intentions” (293).
One way for authors to
“incorporate” or “organize” heteroglossia in the novel is through a narrator
with a completely different view of the world and value system from the
author’s own. By creating such a
narrator, the author achieves the distance necessary to shed light on the
situation or “object of representation” in the novel; in this case, distancing
himself from Han allows Kang to create a narrator whose “belief system” is more
in accordance with the audience than the author’s would be. Choosing the autobiographical form was indeed
a strategic move on Kang’s part. Playing
off the assumption that Han was an accurate representation of himself enabled
Kang to appeal to his readers’ sensibilities.
Had he written a completely non-autobiographical novel, voicing his
critiques through the mouths of fictional characters, critics might have been
more observant of the subversive nature of the text, instead labeling it a
novel of protest and therefore lessening the text’s appeal. Written and marketed as an autobiography,
however, the narrative positions Kang, via his alter ego Chungpa Han, as the
“successfully Americanized” (i.e., assimilated) “Oriental” in the West.
Kang further denounces American
racism through the voices of Laurenzo and Wagstaff, two educated black men
whose professional lives are limited to the service industry because of their
race. Laurenzo, a cook, says to Han, “Do
you see me? I’se a college man. I’se been to Williams College, and to
Washington, and then I come up here to go to Harvard.... Here I am chockfull of
education.... But a niggerman’s only good to cook and wait, that’s all” (262),
while Wagstaff, an elevator man, explains, “What room is there in America for
an educated Negro? There is not much
else but the ‘yessuh’ job. And either
way, I shall hardly be assured of a decent living way” (273). Han muses, “Through Wagstaff I was having my
first introduction to a crystallized caste system, comparable only to India,
here in the greatest democratic country of the world” (273). While it is Han who utters this reflective
statement, Laurenzo and Wagstaff are the ones who articulate the reality. As Sunyoung Lee notes, while the book’s
“harshest critiques” of American racism come from the mouths of other
characters, “Han narrates from a seemingly inoffensive fly-on-the-wall
perspective” (390). Adopting the role of
“naïve Oriental” while criticizing America through the voices of other
characters was a survival tactic, enabling Kang to satisfy his ambitions for
the book while also sharing his thoughts about American society. By distancing himself from these characters
and letting them articulate their own concerns and criticisms, readers continue
to find Han an agreeable and even sympathetic character for whom such
observations appear to be just that— observations rather than indictments.
In his construction of a narrator
who speaks from a “fly-on-the-wall perspective” Kang creates a novel full of
what Bakhtin identifies as “nondirect speaking” in which the narrator’s speech
or language “is always another’s speech
(as regards the real or potential direct discourse of the author)” and hence a
“refraction of authorial intentions” (313; emphasis original). According to Bakhtin, when authors wish to
express points of view that differ from those of the narrator they often create
a “second story” that “tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells
us about the narrator himself.” He
writes, “If one fails to sense this second level, the intentions and accents of
the author himself, then one has failed to understand the work” (313-14). Bakhtin’s final statement here, that “one has
failed to understand” a work if one does not make the distinction between
characters’ voices and the voice of the author refracted through his or her
characters, points precisely to the early reviewers’ conflation of the author
with his narrator-protagonist.
Instead, Han’s and Kang’s voices
are in “dialogic tension”—that is, they interact with one another along
multiple axes in order that the author “might remain as it were neutral with
regard to language, a third party in a quarrel between two people (although he
might be a biased third party)”
(Bakhtin 314). Such “dialogic tension”
also occurs between author and characters and between narrator and characters
because characters, too, have their own autonomous “belief systems”; thus, each
character’s speech “may also refract authorial intentions and consequently may
to a certain degree constitute a second language for the author” (Bakhtin 315).
An understanding of how
heteroglossia is incorporated into the novel
is critical to an understanding of how Kang’s and his characters’ literacy
acts influence or affect his audiences.
As I have discussed above, Kang used the categorization of his book as an
autobiography in order to get the desired reaction from both his publisher and
audience, and to enhance the text’s marketability. Readers and critics did not read beyond the
surface level until the novel appeared again nearly sixty years later.47 By the 1990s, readers and critics were more
interested in the subversive aspects of the text and began praising it not for
what it affirmed about American society but for what it revealed in its subtext
about the limits and contradictions of American democracy.
In her essay appearing in the 1997
Kaya edition of East Goes West, for
example, Sunyoung Lee offers an insightful reading of what she calls Han’s
“pragmatic survivalism” (386) and Kang’s “carefully constructed conceit”
(389). Her argument focuses on the
dinner party at Miss Churchill’s (an elderly Quaker woman who entertains young
people from foreign countries) in which a conflict arises between Senzar, an
“Indo-Oxford product” studying engineering in the U.S., and Han. Senzar begins excoriating Han for his
American education. He tells him,
“Anybody who goes to an American university isn’t educated.... You think you’re
educated. You don’t know how to talk
English!” (297). Han says that Senzar
was “unconsciously parodying the Englishfelt superiority of the English
university man” (297). The other guests
looked on and listened in amusement until Senzar included them in his diatribe:
“‘Then, Americans are not sound,’ Senzar kept on, and the Americans and English
began to get very uncomfortable” (297). He continued, “Englishmen are hypocrites.
Englishmen despise all others but themselves.
They are the most conceited and boastful race” (298). When an Englishman protests, Senzar lashes
out against the colonial system and exclaims, “Soon we will drive you English
out” (299). Han manages to deflect
attention away from the other guests by interrupting Senzar to explain what the
Japanese did in Korea. “You Hindus are
better off under the English than we are under the Japanese” (299), he tells
him. After the argument dies down, Han
is “almost decorated for merit by the exhausted Westerners” (299) for
intervening in the evening’s “social catastrophe.” Senzar is never invited back to Miss
Churchill’s while Han became a regular guest.
Lee notes that it is ironic that
Senzar’s statements are so similar to Han’s.
She cites an example of Han’s criticism of colonization in which he
says, “For me there was always special favor, special kindliness … the
white-man’s burden attitude toward the dark colonies” (118). Like Senzar, Han is also critical of the
“disjointed, assembly-line instruction” that characterizes Western education,
and both, Lee notes, “are aware of their own exiled status in the West” (388).
However, while Senzar is
comfortable voicing his critiques in public, Han is keenly aware of the dangers
of doing so. Han proves himself to be
culturally literate in this scene, knowledgeable about social etiquette and
aware of the social implications of disturbing Miss Churchill’s dinner
party. Han’s “performance” is
“opportunistic”—as the “hero” of the evening, Han ingratiates himself with the
Westerners and is invited back to Miss Churchill’s every Wednesday, giving him
“access to free food and the social connections that eventually lead him to his
beloved Trip” (S. Lee 389). Han’s
“pragmatic survivalism” as demonstrated in this scene is not unlike Kang’s
strategy of voicing critiques through the characters other than his
narrator. It is, as Lee notes, “a
carefully constructed conceit, with Younghill Kang as its master architect and
principal beneficiary” (389).
Han’s “performance” at Miss
Churchill’s secures a place for himself in this social circle in much the same
way that Kang’s “performance” or critical act of literacy (the act of writing
his novel) secures a place for himself in the “Western literary
establishment.” Unlike the other
characters in the book that openly criticize Western society, Han knows that in
order to survive as an exile in America, he must act with decorum and
poise. Similarly, Kang must tread
carefully in order not to offend or alienate his audience.
Han further demonstrates his
acquisition of both social and cultural literacy during his weekly visits to
Miss Churchill’s. He not only engages
Miss Churchill and her friend in conversation about the “latest books, plays,
politics, [and] current events” (300), but also makes references and analogies
to Western literature in his descriptions of his evening talks with Laura, a
“Western girl of [Han’s] own age” (300) who is another guest of Miss
Churchill’s. For example, Han imagines
the college campus where Laura studied as being “just like the world of
Tennyson’s Princess,” the “poetic
landscape beyond the campus … like nature in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound,” and the students (her peers) “[l]ike the
sexless beings of Hudson’s Crystal Age”
(301). In drawing these comparisons, Han
strengthens his ethos by proving to his audience that he is a scholar of
Western literature and hence more like
his readers than unlike them. “Such recitation,” writes David Palumbo-Liu,
“serves as a marker of cultural capital, a sign of belonging to and identifying
with universal culture” (Asian/American
126). By demonstrating his knowledge of
Western literature Kang/Han establishes an identification between the reader
and narrator-protagonist. By identifying
with his readers based on their mutual knowledge or awareness of these titles
of Western literature, Han/Kang makes a claim for himself as a literate and
hence legitimate American. Han even inserts
a comment about English grammar here to prove his degree of literacy. In describing one of his conversations with
Laura about her friends, he says, “Each name brought a nostalgic light to
Laura’s eyes, and when she continued with ‘she,’ I might have thought she
didn’t know her English grammar, just like Miyamori sometimes …” (301).
Perhaps even more persuasive,
however, is Han’s recollection and description of Senator Kirby. Here again Han/Kang uses his knowledge of
American history and culture to prove to his readers that he is just as
American as they. He writes,
I
have always remembered Senator Kirby as a sort of historic American.
That is, he reminds me of The American written by Henry James. Not the American of the seething new age
where all is changing, but the American along more classic lines. He was wealthy, and most of his life had been
spent in making money.... He was very fond of machinery, and at the slightest
excuse would get into his khaki overalls and tinker around with that big
car.... In his devotion to Wilson he had some of that missionary ideal of the
classic American.... He was the product forever of American Jeffersonianism and
American Puritanism blended, of American faith and
American idealism, of all the Marlowesque stages of
American industry … (351-52)
Ironically, it is right after this description that we
hear the dialogue between the senator and Han in which the senator urges Han to
“be American.” Han has just shown himself to be deeply
knowledgeable about American society, quite possibly more so than his audience,
and yet because of his race he is deemed unworthy of citizenship.
This passage is also an example of
how Kang not only demonstrates his knowledge of other American male figures
(including Senator Kirby, “the American” in James novel, Henry James himself,
Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and Philip Marlowe) but rhetorically
constructs an affiliation with them to persuade his audiences that he has more
in common with these specifically American masculine figures than his readers
might otherwise believe. Though he
explains to Senator Kirby that, legally, he is ineligible for citizenship, the
subtext in the passage above is that he is in fact citizenshipworthy because of
this (albeit discursively constructed) bond.
Like his alter ego, Younghill Kang
certainly knew more about American history and politics than some of his
readers. However, despite numerous
recommendations from publishers, university presidents, best-selling writers,
philosophers, and politicians, Kang was never granted U.S. citizenship but
instead remained officially classified as a “resident alien” of the United
States. In fact, as with many Koreans at
the time, Kang belonged to no country.
When asked about his nationality in the 1931 Guggenheim Foundation
fellowship application, he wrote, “In practice an American and permanently
located here, but debarred by the United States Government from naturalization
as an Oriental. I am not a citizen
elsewhere, since the Korean government was dissolved [by Japan] in 1910” (qtd.
in S. Lee 376).
While Kang never legally became an
U.S. citizen, he fought hard in his writing to prove his worthiness as an
American. In a 1941 article published in
Common Ground, Kang expressed his
appreciation for the United States and joy over being an “American” husband and
father, thus relying on his marriage to an American woman to help legitimize
him. In the same article, he strategically
positions himself as a political exile who believes in the future of America
and in American democracy because, he says, “it teaches civil harmony.” He writes, “It is clear why I chose America. Not only because the country of my birth
became the victim of a state preaching racial greed and oppression. But actually because liberty for growth is
the one true religion for me. As an
Asian immigrant I have escaped oppression in Asia … I feel that America is my
country.” By embracing democracy and
liberty as one who was victimized by Japanese colonialism, Kang makes a claim
for himself, if not as a legal citizen, then at least as a citizen of what he
calls the “spiritual” America (62).
Kang also makes a claim for himself
as citizenship-worthy through a demonstration of his own literacy. While he does not gain legal citizenship as a
result of the publication of his books or petitions to the government, Kang
gains legitimacy through the (literacy) act of cultural criticism that his book
performs. Literacy in this sense is much
more than the ability to construct a novel; in Paulo Freire’s
conceptualization, Kang’s literacy act is the dialogue or conversation that he
is having with the larger culture (Young 11).
This act is rhetorical in that it serves as an attempt to effect change
or to influence his readers to take action.
Freire’s work is especially useful
in reconceptualizing literacy as it relates to dominance and oppression. In viewing literacy as dialogue or
interaction rather than an instrument of oppression, literacy becomes the means
for cultural practice and cultural work (Young 12). Such a conception of literacy also suggests
that it is fluid, like language and culture, and not held to any standard or
system of authority. If language is
stratified, so too is literacy. As
Morris Young writes, “as part of the move toward making literacy an important
element in self-determination, it must be understood in terms of being produced
by culture (or better, cultures)” (12).
This understanding involves the recognition of how knowledge is produced
and how one can participate in this knowledge-production and construction of
culture. Literacy, then, allows for an
understanding of the self in relation to the larger community and culture
(13). Thus in the act of writing his
literacy narrative, Kang not only produces a text but he also engages in a
dialogue with American culture, thereby participating in the construction of
culture and the nation and claiming a space for himself as a legitimate
participant in this process.
Chapter 2: Carlos Bulosan’s
America Is in the Heart
Introduction
Like Kang, Carlos Bulosan made
claims for his legitimacy as an American through writing despite the laws that
prohibited him from gaining legal citizenship.48 In fact, Bulosan credited Kang in America Is in the Heart for giving him
the encouragement and confidence to become an American writer: “I returned to
the writers of my time for strength. And
I found Younghill Kang.... [I]t was his indomitable courage that rekindled in
me a fire of hope” (265).
Born on November 2, 1911 in Binalonan,
Pangasinan, Carlos Bulosan grew up in a Philippines that had been subject to
U.S. colonization since 1898 when the U.S.
defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War. After nearly a half-century of Philippine
resistance and three years of subjugation by the Japanese military, the
Philippines gained its independence in 1946.
The legacy of U.S. colonization, beginning with the Philippine-American
War of 1898-1902, and its resulting class system of absenteelandlordism is
addressed, albeit implicitly, in Part I of America
Is in the Heart. To escape the
oppression and poverty at home, tens of thousands of pinoys, or migrant workers, were essentially forced into permanent
exile when they were recruited to work on Hawaiian plantations, at Alaskan
canneries, and in American West Coast agribusinesses. As civilian rule superceded military rule in
the Philippines in the first decade of the twentieth century, American teachers
were brought to the colony to educate the “natives” in Western civilization
under a policy of “benevolent assimilation” (Chan 17). The colonial education that Bulosan/Allos
received under this policy instilled in him illusions of America as a
democratic nation where an individual could achieve success through hard work
and perseverance.
However, reality set in almost
immediately as Allos either witnessed or became victim to racial
discrimination, violence and exploitation.
Within days of arriving in Seattle from the Philippines, Allos’
companions are robbed of all their money, he receives news of his friend’s
brother’s death in the Philippines, and he is bought and sold by his fellow
countrymen for five dollars to work at an Alaskan fish cannery (America 99-101). “It was the beginning of my life in America,”
he writes, “the beginning of a long flight that carried me down the years,
fighting desperately to find peace in some corner of life” (101).
Like Kang and his fellow Korean
exiles, Filipinos in America had no government to support them. As Carey McWilliams writes, “Their status was
ambiguous. They were ‘wards’ or ‘nationals’ who could not be deported because
they had not entered as immigrants, nor could they be excluded. Yet they were
not eligible for citizenship.… In brief, they were neither fish nor fowl” (x). As non-citizens, they were prohibited from
owning land and from working in the government, and as “Orientals” they were
subject to anti-miscegenation laws and exploitation at the hands of Chinese,
Japanese, Mexican, and even (in fact especially) other Filipino immigrants.
Bulosan, along with thousands of
other Filipino American “nationals,” immigrated in 1930 during the Great
Depression.49 In the two
decades leading up to the
Great Depression the population of Filipinos in
California had increased from five to over 30,000 (Takaki 315).50 After laboring in restaurants and farms for a
few years, he became involved in union organizing as a result of his friendship
with Chris Mensalvas of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied
Workers of America (UCAPAWA). In 1934,
he became the editor of The New Tide,
through which he met and befriended writers such as Richard Wright, William
Saroyan, William Carlos Williams, Louis Adamic, and Carey McWilliams (San Juan,
On Becoming 6). Shortly thereafter, in 1936, Bulosan was
confined to a Los Angeles hospital for tuberculosis. His confinement sparked a voracious appetite
for literature and it was here that he began writing about the working-class
struggles in America as well as the U.S. colonization of the Philippines.
First
Wave Reception History
When Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart was published in 1946, it was acclaimed as
a narrative of success and assimilation.
Look magazine, for instance,
included America Is in the Heart in its list of the “Fifty Best Books” of 1946. Other reviews suggest that the book was
valued primarily for its portrayal of “the Filipino American sensibility.” For example, an anonymous reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor wrote that
“after his appealing and beautifully written account of life on Luzon,
[Bulosan] certainly persuades his reader that he is a sincere and truthful
witness of the terrible events he portrays” (qtd. in Trudeau 1). This reviewer makes no distinction between
Allos the narrator and Bulosan the author, calling Bulosan “an appealing little
waif who would arouse the compassion of any good-hearted American” (qtd. in
Trudeau 1).
William Lynch’s March 9, 1946 review, “Loyalty in
Spite of All,” appeared in the Saturday
Review of Literature, praising the book for its candid portrait of racist
America and for its insight into the mind of one of America’s working-class
immigrants:
To the vast and still growing stack of tracts on
intercultural relations “America Is in the Heart” is a valuable addition ... it
is a promise from one who by his unusual background in American letters should
bring to us something lacking today in our literature. There is unquestionably a new vigor in the
Orient. We need Carlos Bulosan to
translate it for us and to help us assimilate the attitudes and persons it
sends to our shores. (8)
While most reviews praised
Allos/Bulosan for his assimilability and courage in the face of racism,
violence, and utter despair, one review took a more critical approach. “The Darker Brothers,” a combined review of My Africa by Mbonu Ojike and America Is in the Heart by Bulosan
appeared in the March 25, 1946 edition of the New Republic. In this
review, Max Gissen writes,
These two books are part of the growing literature of
protest coming from dark-skinned peoples all over the earth.... What he tells
of those early years [in America Is in
the Heart] will be a shock to any number of people who have always imagined
a land of little, happy, brown brothers being helped towards independence by
handsome Americans like Paul McNutt and Douglas MacArthur. (420-421)
Gissen’s critical outlook towards the U.S. (which is
not surprising appearing as it did in the leftist publication the New Republic) foreshadows what today’s
critics argue—that the book is primarily a critique of America rather than an
immigrant success story. I will return to a discussion of this
critique shortly, but first I want to problematize the emphasis that many other
reviewers placed on the text as social document. If America
Is in the Heart only provides insight into the lives of Filipinos in the
Philippines and the U.S., as several of these reviews suggest, then Bulosan’s
function as an author is limited (as with Kang) to that of cultural translator
or native informant. To quote Lynch
again, “We need Carlos Bulosan to translate it for us and to help us assimilate
the attitudes and persons it sends to our shores” (8). Contemporary critics Morris Young and Marilyn
Alquizola also find this troubling.
Constructing Bulosan as “translator,” Young argues, only serves to
reinforce the idea that his text is “foreign” and thus unreadable without a
“translator,” while Alquizola writes, “Implicit [in Lynch’s review] was the
notion that Filipinos, like other working-class immigrants, should be, first
and foremost, assimilable in order to facilitate co-optation of their lives and
their labor” (204). Instead of focusing
on the critique offered by Bulosan, these reviews suggest that Bulosan’s text
merely teaches or informs his readers of Filipino life in the Philippines and
America. Given that the novel was
published shortly after World War II, in a climate of heightened racism against
“Orientals,” this response is perhaps to be expected. Mainstream white America would not have been
accepting or even tolerant of any text by an Asian immigrant or an Asian
American that did not in some way espouse the American Dream. While such a construction is clearly
problematic in perpetuating the perception of
Asian Americans and Asian
immigrants as foreign, Young asserts that Bulosan’s status as
“translator” can serve a more
transgressive function if we view Allos, the narrator, as
“cultural translator” of America as
well (66). Despite his undying faith in
America,
Bulosan describes his brutal and horrific experiences
as a Filipino migrant worker in the U.S., thereby “translating” Filipino life
in the U.S. for his American readers. As
I will discuss at greater length below, contemporary critics prefer to read
Bulosan as conducting an implicit critique or translation of America rather
than constructing a narrative of hopeful assimilation.
Second
Wave Reception History
The early 1970s marks the beginning
of the Asian American literary movement as writers and scholars began
revisiting texts that had gone out of print, such as America Is in the Heart, and acknowledging new voices in Asian
American literature and cultural criticism.
As a result of the growing interest in Asian American studies, America Is in the Heart was re-published
by the University of Washington Press in 1973.
As the more recent critical responses to Asian American literary texts
suggest, critics and scholars began looking for the more subversive readings of
texts as a way of challenging and interrogating dominant power structures.
When it was republished in 1973,
the text faced a very different audience.
Rather than reinforcing their beliefs in American democracy, the text
was now seen as offering readers a subversive view of the American system. Appearing at a time of great crisis for the
United States both domestically (the Civil Rights movement) and internationally
(the war in Vietnam), the text fueled readers’ anger and criticism towards
American policies. For example, in his
1995 essay, “In Search of Filipino Writing,” E. San Juan explains that after
his success in 1944 with The Laughter of
My Father, Bulosan was forgotten until 1973 when the University of
Washington Press, convinced that America
Is in the Heart would sell as a result of the activism of Filipino American
groups protesting the “USMarcos dictatorship” (227), reissued the novel. Regardless of Bulosan’s intent, readers and
critics found his work to be polemical and interpreted it in a way that confirmed
their own beliefs about the contradictions of American democracy.
Alquizola, for example, argues
that Bulosan’s text can be read as ironic and subversive when it is viewed as
fiction rather than autobiography. In
making this distinction, she writes, we can read Bulosan, the author, as “aware
of [the] glaring contradictions between American ideals and racist American
reality” and Allos as “express[ing] undying hope in an immigrant’s American
dream, the fulfillment of which is precluded by racism” (199). As Young notes, while reading the figure of
Allos as a fictive character separate from the identity of Bulosan the author
allows us to recognize greater artistic range and more subversive critiques in
his writing, it also challenges the still widespread belief that every form of
writing by a nonwhite American is autobiographical or confessional (66).51
Elaine Kim, one of the foundational
scholars in the field of Asian American literary studies, has contributed to
this misconception. She contends that
early Asian immigrant writing was largely autobiographical due to the authors’
awareness of “common misconceptions” among Westerners about Asia and Asians and
their desire to befriend their readers by writing about Asian traditions (Asian American 25). She identifies such writers as “ambassadors
of goodwill” who desire and seek “American acceptance” (57) and she includes
both Younghill Kang and Carlos Bulosan in this category. Her reading of America Is in the Heart as an assimilationist narrative is limiting
because it fails to consider the potential arguments about gender, sexuality,
class, race, citizenship, nation, and identity that are offered by the
text. E. San Juan is especially critical
of such readings, claiming that, “What all these reappropriations of Bulosan
signify is the power and limits of the hegemonic consensus and its apparatuses
to sustain its assimilative but ultimately apartheidlike project to absorb the
Asian ‘Other’ into the fold of the unitary hierarchical racial order” (“In Search”
219). Such readings of Bulosan’s work
elide the effects of the U.S. colonization of the Philippines and the resulting
recruitment of laborers first to Hawai`i and then to the “mainland,” and reduce
Bulosan to an “Asian goodwill ambassador” who simply promotes pluralism while
seeking American acceptance.
Carlos
Bulosan’s Rhetorical Strategies
As contemporary critics have
suggested, reading the fictional autobiography as a subversive narrative
illuminates the contradictions between the myth of American democratic
inclusion and the reality of exclusion.
While an assimilationist reading of the literacy narrative would
consider the ways in which the narrator seeks and gains entry into America
through American literature and by becoming “literate” in the English language,
a subversive reading considers the ways in which the narrator’s dreams of
becoming a part of America are never realized, and it considers the author’s
implicit or explicit critique of the “literacy myth,” that is, that one can
gain entry into the social, cultural, and political spheres of America through
the acquisition of “standard” English or the dominant discourse. I aim to illustrate in my analysis both how
Bulosan critiques the “literacy myth” and also how my reading enables us to see
how Bulosan’s text can function rhetorically as assimilationist and condemnatory.
For example, Bulosan’s construction
of Allos can be viewed as a rhetorical strategy if we view him as a composite
character rather than strictly as an autobiographical figure.52 By drawing on several different (fictional
and real) life experiences, Bulosan creates a character—a rhetorical persona,
if you will—with whom many pinoys and
others oppressed by the social, political, and economic systems of America can
identify. By creating a composite
character with whom other marginalized people in America can identify, Bulosan
“establish[es] rapport between himself and his audience” (Burke, On Symbols 191). He and his audience are also consubstantial
in that they remain distinct beings yet they are joined by their ideas,
attitudes, and perhaps even actions (181).
The act of writing is thus performative and persuasional for Bulosan—
through writing he not only (re)constructs his rhetorical identity but he also
establishes his legitimacy as a Filipino writer in America.
While there are numerous textual
examples of Bulosan’s use of identification, one of the more powerful instances
is Macario’s (Allos’ brother) “We Are America!” peroration that appears at the
very end of Part II. At a gathering of a
small group of Filipinos working together on a literary magazine, Allos and his
brother begin to talk about the social struggles of Filipinos in California. In an impassioned speech, Macario tells them,
It is but fair to say that America
is not a land of one race or one class of men.
We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known oppression
and defeat, from the first Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last
Filipino pea pickers. America is not
bound by geographical latitudes. America
is not merely a land or an institution.
America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the
eyes of men that are building a new world.
America is a prophecy of a new society of men: of a system that knows no
sorrow or strife or suffering. America
is a warning to those who would try to falsify the ideals of freemen.
America is also the nameless
foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the black
body dangling on a tree. America is the
illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual
opportunities is closed to him. We are
all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that
illiterate immigrant and that lynched black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last
Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate—We are America! (189)
In this speech, Macario persuades the group that they
are all fighting for a similar cause—to bring justice to their fellow immigrant
“brothers” and to make their voices heard through their publication. By identifying with others who have fought
for democracy, Macario encourages them to feel justified in their pursuit for equality.
In addition, by using the pronoun
“we,” and by referencing the plights of both
Native Americans and blacks, Macario/Bulosan appeals
to the identities of (male) Americans who share this common history. In effect, Bulosan makes the argument that he
and, by extension, his characters are indeed just as American as his
readers. Furthermore, Macario/Bulosan
uses a rhetoric of patriotism to appeal to both the intratextual and
extratexual audiences’ identities. Earlier
in this speech, for example, Macario alludes to the democratic ideal of the
self-made man and America as a land of opportunity: “In this we are the same;
we must also fight for an America where a man should be given unconditional
opportunities to cultivate his potentialities and to restore him to his
rightful dignity” (188-89). Macario’s
exclusion of women in this national community also resonates with the founding
documents of the United States that were written by and for men and which
represent specifically American masculine ideals. Macario’s (male) audience as well as Bulosan’s
(male) audience is thus consubstantial with Macario/Bulosan—they are joined in
ideology yet they remain separate, individual beings.
In his “We Are America!” speech,
Macario is performing what J.L. Austin calls a perlocutionary act; that is, in making
this speech he is producing “certain consequential effects upon the feelings,
thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons”
(101). Macario’s speech has the effect
of encouraging his “fellow countrymen” (the other characters in the novel) as
well as other immigrant/marginalized readers (both his early and his more
contemporary audiences) to continue fighting for their cause and reinforcing
their beliefs in American democracy. On
another level, the speech functions as Bulosan’s perlocutionary act to evoke
sympathy, or pathos, and perhaps even guilt from his more mainstream
readers. For his 1940s audiences, this
would have been particularly effective considering that the situation he and
his characters faced was an ongoing problem in the real world at that
time. Contemporary readers might also
feel sympathy and pathos for the characters but they would unlikely feel guilt
as the situation is so far removed from their lives.
Dramatizing
Communities
Identifying Macario’s speech as a
rhetorical vision enables us to see how Bulosan uses fantasy themes to persuade
characters and readers of their social reality and to move both characters and
readers to act. In the early 1970s under
the work of Robert Bales (1950; 1970), Ernest Bormann developed fantasy theme
analysis—a corresponding analytical tool to symbolic convergence theory. Bales’ work concentrated on the dynamics and
rhetorics of small group interaction.
Among his findings, Bales identified that during moments of stress or
anxiety some people in small group interactions would begin telling stories (or
“dramatizing”) as a way of releasing tension.
Through his research, Bormann claims, Bales provides an explanation for
the use of dramatizing scenes, which he labeled “fantasy,” to create “social
reality” for groups of people. He thus
provides the critic a method for examining “messages for insights into the
group’s culture, motivation, emotional style, and cohesion” (396). As dramas or fantasies “chain[ed] out through
the group,” Bales noted that members became “animated” and
“boisterous” as they communicated, indicating that
they were participating in the drama (397).
The content of a fantasy chain, Bormann explains, “consists of
characters, real or fictitious, playing out a dramatic situation in a setting
removed in time and space from the here-and-now transactions of the
group.” “Thus,” he continues, “a
recollection of something that happened to the group in the past or a dream of what the group might
do in the future could be considered
a fantasy theme” (397). In certain
events, particularly tragic ones, where an individual feels “lost or hopeless,”
the individual might dream a fantasy to help provide that person a “sense of meaning
and significance” (400). Allos could be
seen as one such individual who dreams the fantasy of a democratic America as a
survival tactic or “coping mechanism” (400).
As I will demonstrate below, this fantasy theme resonates throughout the
novel, shedding light on the rhetorical situation that Bulosan constructed
within the novel as well as the rhetorical dimensions of the novel’s production
and consumption.
Bormann argues that these moments in
which group members or individuals feel that they have been “transported” to a
“new realm of reality,” as Bales describes it, happen “not only in individual
reactions to works of art, or in a small group’s chaining out a fantasy theme,
but also in larger groups hearing a public speech.” Bulosan’s two sets of readers/reviewers thus
might be regarded as participants in two distinct dramatizations as they made
sense of the work in a way that resonated with their own preconceived views and
attitudes. In this way Bormann’s
research focuses on how small group dramatizations work their way into the mass
media and public discourse to create a “symbolic reality” or “rhetorical
vision” for the larger community (398).
An analysis of the rhetorical visions of a particular community gives
critics insight into what the community’s values and attitudes are and how the
community constructs reality or makes sense out of what is happening around
it.
Bormann uses the Puritan missionaries
in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as an example to illustrate his theory that
fantasy themes are used as a way for people to make sense of their
situations. Due to their arduous and
“backbreaking” lifestyle, he argues, the Puritans had to embrace an “internal
fantasy life of mighty grandeur and complexity.” “They participated,” he continues, “in a
rhetorical vision that saw the migration to the new world as a holy exodus of
God’s chosen people” (402). This vision,
he contends, gave them a sense of importance and purpose both as individuals
and as a group and helped them to justify their social and political actions.
Bormann’s use of the Puritan
missionaries to illustrate his point is especially significant in light of this
discussion of Macario’s “We Are America” speech. As Sacvan Bercovitch details so eloquently in
The Rights of Assent, the myths of
America and the
“rhetoric of consensus” originated with the Puritans
of New England. It was with the Puritans
that the idea of America as “prophecy” began, and Macario alludes to this myth
as a way of encouraging his brothers and friends to rally together to claim
what is rightfully theirs. The symbols
that Macario uses are so embedded in American history and culture that his
speech could have come from the mouths of Puritans if not for the references to
Manhattan and Filipino pea pickers.
According to Bercovitch, the Puritans “bequeathed” to the culture their
vision of America as a nation in progress using a “rhetoric of mission so broad
in its implications, and so specifically American in its application, that it
could facilitate the transitions from Puritan to Yankee, and from errand to
manifest destiny and the dream” (35). By
using the language or rhetoric of the Puritan missionaries and founding
fathers, Macario and Bulosan become participants in the same rhetorical vision,
thus claiming a space for themselves in the narrative of the nation.
An analysis of fantasy themes or
rhetorical visions provides insight into, among other things, the members’
motives for group interaction. When
examining the function of fantasy themes in fiction, another element becomes
especially relevant—that is, the author’s role in creating characters who
participate in the given rhetorical vision(s).
In the case of Macario’s speech (and in fact throughout the novel), we
see the fantasy of America as a land of opportunity as well as the fantasy,
among migrant workers, of an America that believes in and practices equality
and freedom for all. Like the Puritans,
Allos and his fellow pinoys
participate in this rhetorical vision because it gives them hope for a better
future and helps them to cope with the violence and discrimination that they
face on a daily basis. Allos’ individual
fantasy theme that certain white women represent “the America that [he] had
wanted to find” further supports his motive for maintaining hope in the
American dream and working for social justice.
By examining the fantasy themes of
the characters in the novel we gain insight into the culture of the community
of immigrant migrant workers and their motives for seeking justice and
equality. We also see how fantasy themes
can function for marginalized peoples as a way of uniting the community in the
fight for social and political rights.
When we consider the role of Bulosan the author as the creator of these
characters and rhetorical visions, we gain even greater insight into the
politics and subversive functions of the novel.
Allos’ and his brothers’ creation of fantasy themes as survival tactics
or “coping mechanisms” is telling—had America lived up to its promises, such
fantasies or visions would be unnecessary.53
Bulosan’s use of fantasy themes in
his novel serves a dual purpose: the themes function rhetorically on his
audience through a process of identification—readers identify with Allos’
plight, anger, or social consciousness (or the symbols used in the rhetorical
vision) and are moved to action, thus joining the fantasy theme; and they help
to legitimize the author as critics examine the ways in which he moves his
readers to action through rhetoric. As
E. San Juan states, “In effect, writing becomes for the Filipino diaspora the
transitional agency of self-recovery. It
facilitates a mediation between the negated past of colonial dependency and a
fantasied, even utopian, ‘America’ where people of color exercise their right
of self-determination and socialist justice prevails” (“In Search” 216-17). Bulosan’s knowledge of the fantasy themes
with which his audience would most identify gives him authority and legitimates
him as an American, even though legally he is still deemed “illegitimate.” Furthermore, his demonstration of his
cultural literacy serves a rhetorical purpose by arguing for a more inclusive
conceptualization of American citizenship.
That most critics and readers
responded favorably to America Is in the
Heart when it was first published attests to the effectiveness of Bulosan’s
rhetoric. Aware of the high morale and
pride among Americans at the end of World War II and sensitive to the negative
attitude towards “Orientals,” Bulosan knew that a novel, which on the surface
level affirmed the American dream, would be well received (Alquizola 202). Bulosan’s status fluctuated depending on
America’s political agenda. As an
American national, and because Filipinos were allied with the U.S. during World
War II, Bulosan was treated kindly by his audience. Compared with Japanese Americans, who were
“guilty by reason of race,” Filipinos were considered less of a threat to the
American public at this time.54
The war “marked the turning point” in America’s acceptance of Bulosan as
a writer. He published two volumes of
poetry in 1942 and in the same year was included in Who’s Who in America (Evangelista 14).
Bulosan’s rhetoric is effective for
the time in which the novel was published because he relies so heavily on
pathetic appeals yet does not exceed the audience’s limitations. Because he remains faithful to America
despite his hardships, readers sympathize with Allos. Bulosan heightens the effect by building up
the audience’s expectation that Allos will become educated (and hence,
“successful”), only to leave that dream unfulfilled.
Reading
America Is in the Heart as a
Narrative of Literacy
Reading America Is in the Heart as a literacy narrative illuminates
contradictions and helps to legitimize Bulosan as a participant in cultural
criticism as we examine the ways in which he controls his readers and how they
respond to the text. Like James Phelan,
I believe that reading is a recursive process and that rhetoric gives us the
tools to examine the multiple layers and relationships between a text, an
author, and a context. Given the social,
political, and cultural conditions in the 1970s, it is not surprising that
readers responded as they did—such a response attests to the rhetorical power
of the text to inspire or move readers to take social and political action.
In the opening chapters of the
book, Bulosan reveals how valuable literacy and education are to Allos and his
family. They hope and believe that
education will lead to freedom from working in the fields and the financial
means to pay off loans from the moneylender.
Education is established early in the novel as “something that belonged
exclusively to the rulers and to some fortunate natives affluent enough to go
to Europe” (14). Thus, when the “free
and compulsory” American colonial education system is introduced in the
Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, every family makes a host of
sacrifices in order to send their sons to school. However, the cost of schooling proves to be
so great that Allos’ family eventually loses all of their land and Allos and his
brothers, one by one, are forced to go to America seeking work and, hopefully,
a better life. In the Philippines, Allos
is imbued with American ideology through the newly instituted free education
system. Filipino youths who were being
educated under this system in the Philippines read about the “home of the free
and the brave,” saw pictures of Washington and Lincoln in their textbooks, and
were familiar with the Declaration of Independence (Takaki 57). Allos holds on to this ideology when he
emigrates, only to find that America is even more oppressive than his
homeland. Thus Bulosan, from the very
opening of the novel, begins his critique of educational institutions, the
promises they hold, and the expectations they inevitably fail to meet.
For Allos, reading and
writing—skills which he acquired in the Philippines under American colonial
rule and later honed in the United States—open up “a whole new world” (70) for
him when he arrives in America. Literacy
in English gives him the language and power to understand his situation and to
reveal to others the violence that has been inflicted on him and his people in
America. He writes,
In later years I remembered this opportunity when I
read that the American Negro writer, Richard Wright, had not been allowed to
borrow books from his local library because of his color. I was beginning to understand what was going
on around me, and the darkness that had covered my present life was lifting. (71)
While Allos does have access to books, he does not have
access to a formal education in the U.S. and therefore educates himself through
books that he acquires from friends. The
promise of American education that Allos and his family dream about in the
Philippines turns out to be just that—a pipe dream.
Like Chungpa Han, Allos establishes
a rhetorical relationship with his audience through a process of identification
and through his critical acts of literacy.
By identifying with other (male) American writers who were themselves
critical of America, such as Richard Wright, Hart Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack
London, Mark Twain, and William Saroyan (America
246), Allos persuades his early and contemporary audiences of his
consubstantiality with them. This in
turn persuades his audiences that he is like them and thus as legitimate as
they, and it strengthens his ethos by demonstrating to his audiences that he is
well-read (i.e., culturally literate) and thus authorized to speak about these
American writers. Both strategies work
towards persuading his readers of his literacy and hence his legitimacy as an
American writer. Because most early
readers did not interpret the text as a condemnation or critique of America,
his identification, specifically with other writers who did criticize America,
was likely not as effective as it has been since the text’s second
printing.
While Allos’ engagement and
identification with other American authors is crucial to his “project” of
claiming an American identity, his own acts of writing are even more essential
and in fact liberating. Upon
recollecting his first conscious attempt to write a letter, Allos notes,
Then it came to me, like a revelation, that I could
actually write understandable English. I
was seized with happiness. I wrote
slowly and boldly, drinking the wine when I stopped, laughing silently and
crying. When the long letter was
finished, a letter which was actually a story of my life, I jumped to my feet
and shouted through my tears:
They can’t silence me any more!
I’ll tell the world what they have done to me!” (180)
For Allos, writing serves not only
as a means of articulating an identity but also as a vehicle for protest. The ability to communicate to the world the
injustice he and his fellow countrymen face in America gives Allos a sense of
power and self-worth, so much so that he accepts the literacy myth and believes
that writing has put him on a path towards equality. Words and knowledge are artillery for him,
“weapon[s]” with which to
“fight the world” (224). The metaphor of war to describe Allos’
literacy act is particularly apt as his physical debilitation—a result of
tuberculosis—prevented him from any form of physical protest. Now that he has access to the language of
protest, Allos can speak for those who have been rendered speechless and who
have been victimized physically, psychologically, and linguistically by both
American and colonial institutions. By
using the language of war, Bulosan achieves the rhetorical effect of persuading
his readers of the violent nature of silencing.
While literacy in English does not grant Allos the status of “American,”
it gives him the language of protest to reveal the literacy myth and the
contradictions between American democratic ideology and America’s racist
reality.
As with Kang, it is through his writings
and publications that Bulosan hopes to gain, if not legal citizenship, then at
least cultural citizenship. The
authority he assumes as insider to the mysterious and enigmatic America perhaps
best illustrates his claim to cultural citizenship. While he is recovering from tuberculosis at a
Los Angeles hospital, he befriends a young American boy who does not know how
to write because, like Allos, he came from a poor family and worked most of his
life. The boy, John Custer, asks
Allos if he would write a letter to
his mother in Arkansas. Allos recalls,
The words came effortlessly. I was no longer writing about this lonely
sick boy, but about myself and my friends in America. I told her about the lean, lonely and
miserable years. I mentioned places and
names. I was not writing to an unknown
mother any more. I was writing to my own
mother plowing in the muddy fields of Mangusmana: it was the one letter I
should have written before. I was
telling her about America. Actually, I
was writing to all the unhappy mothers whose sons left and did not return. (247)
Moments later Allos adopts the persona of one who
truly “knows America” when he tells the boy, “Rediscover America . . . it’s
only in giving the best we have that we can become a part of America”
(248). Rachel Lee’s analysis provides
further insight into this “symbolic” moment for Allos. She argues that the maternal figure in this
passage serves as a means for Allos to “conceive of a fraternal community
across racial lines (e.g., writing to a mother in Arkansas is writing to his
own mother—hence the white boy in the hospital and Carlos are symbolic
brothers)” (36). The interconnections
among gender, race and literacy, which I discuss at further length below, are
highlighted in this scene, as writing a letter to his own mother in the
Philippines would prove futile because his parents were unable to read or
write. As we see in Kang’s autobiography
and here throughout Bulosan’s text, it is a white woman—though a passive participant
in this case—who helps Allos gain legitimacy as a cultural critic of
America. Moreover, the inverse of Lee’s
statement holds true—if John Custer is Allos’ “symbolic brother,” then
Custer’s mother becomes Allos’ “symbolic mother” and
Allos is identified with a “legitimate” (white) American woman.
Allos is privileged in the above
scene as “knowing America” and being “more American” than the young boy
precisely because of his literacy. As
the boy tells Allos in a letter years later, “Learning to read and write is
knowing America, my country” (248). The
reality, however, is that no degree of literacy will make Allos “more American”
than his young white friend. They may identify
with one another because they both grew up poor and are recovering together in
a hospital, but John Custer’s race gives him a freedom and privilege that Allos
will never know. The boy’s Americanness
is juxtaposed against Allos’ and his Filipino friends’ non-citizen status when
Macario comes to the hospital to tell Allos that he couldn’t get a visa
(248). An assimilationist reading of
this literacy narrative would elide the racialized subtext and allow for a
positive critique of this scene, viewing Allos as privileged in his acquisition
and use of literacy.
Reading and writing for Carlos are
what Burke terms “symbolic actions.” For
Burke, language is symbolic action,
in that language and action always and necessarily go hand in hand in order for
humans to define and create reality. As
Joseph Gusfield writes, “For Burke … language must be understood by what it does,
by how it affects the situation, the audience, to which it is addressed. Words are not empty folders, hanging in the
air. They move audiences to responses
and move the speakers to define and redefine their contexts” (11). So even while Allos is bed-ridden and ill, he
is still in fact performing social actions through his acts of reading and
writing.
In a pivotal scene towards the end
of the novel, Allos’ acquisition of literacy is emblematized in the publication
of his first book of poetry:
When the bound copies of my first
book of poems, Letter From
America,
arrived, I felt like shouting to the world.
How long ago had it
been that I had drunk a bottle of wine because I had
discovered that I could write English?
The book was a rush job and the
binding was simple, but it was something that had grown out of my heart. I knew that I would not write the same way
again. I had put certain things of
myself in it: the days of pain and anguish, of starvation and fear, my hopes,
desires, aspirations. All of myself in
this little volume of poems—and I would never be like that self again. (320)
Allos marvels at his long and painful process of
acquiring literacy. With the publication
of his book, Allos feels legitimated, knowing that his words, his life, will be
shared with others. The literacy Allos
acquires, however, is far more than the ability to read and write in English;
literacy also means being able to use these skills in the appropriate contexts
in order to bring about social justice and change.
While the publication of his book is
personally fulfilling for Allos, his hopes for any material benefits or
political change are thwarted by the subsequent destruction of the volume. In a move that is both subversive and
heartbreaking, Bulosan critiques the idea that literacy is a means for social,
cultural and economic advancement. After
Allos receives his book in the mail, he immediately seeks a companion with whom
to share his happiness. He finds his
brother Amado drinking beer with two girls when one of the girls, mistaking his
book for a bottle of whiskey, grabs at it and begins laughing, “‘Haha!’ …
‘Poetry!’” She then proceeds to tear out
the pages, destroying the volume in Allos’ face. Amado, furious with the girl, beats her with
his fists and she cries to Allos,
“‘I just felt bad. If you stay on in this lousy street you’ll be
ruined. See what happened
to me? I wanted
to be an actress. I came from a nice
family, a nice family in Baltimore…’” (321).
Allos does not identify the girls’ nationalities but instead quotes one
of them as saying she comes “from a nice family” in Baltimore, suggesting that
they are in fact white and privileged.
Young’s critique of this passage is
illuminating and insightful. He reads
the girl’s anxiety about Allos’ “success” as indicative of “the expectation
that her race and class standing will be enough to succeed.” He goes on to critique Amado’s reaction as
“problematic” in that it “reproduces the oppression that has employed literacy
in the creation of gender and race hierarchies.” In other words, by beating up the girl, Amado
elevates Allos and his literacy above her and her (presumed) inability to
succeed. The privileged status of
literacy is thus reinforced by Amado’s violent reaction towards the girl
(75).
Gender,
Sexuality and Literacy
The above scene is in many ways
representative of the complex relationships among gender, race, and literacy
that operate throughout the text. Much
critical work has already examined the role of white women in America Is in the Heart.55 While critics note that it is primarily white
women who introduce Allos to the world of literature, the implications of this
racialized and gendered relationship as it relates to the discourse of literacy
has not yet been discussed or analyzed.
In her analysis of America Is in the Heart, Rachel Lee
examines the blatant exclusion of women in this “imagined” national
community. She argues that although the
novel “exposes” the myth of American democracy by highlighting the United
States’ practices of exclusion and persecution of its racialized minorities, it
“perpetuates a similar (gender-based) exclusion in its imagining of an
alternate community.” She goes on to
argue that the “masculinist bias” in the novel is not only apparent in the gendered
language but also, and even more so, in the novel’s construction of male
enterprise as work and in the erasure or omission of working women from
Bulosan’s fictional world of laboring Americans. In his seemingly all-inclusive, all-embracing
“We Are America!” proclamation, Bulosan’s “us” is limited to “the first Adams”
through “the last Filipino.” Lee
identifies the masculine declension here in the word “Filipino” as highly
indicative of Bulosan’s masculinist bias.
Laboring women, she writes, “are specifically not included in the “We”
of working men who can claim national legitimacy” (34).
I reference Lee here because she
identifies a notable contradiction in Bulosan’s construction of America and
Americanness that has important implications for my examination of literacy and
its relationship to citizenship and race.
The contradiction is that the America that Allos imagines and seeks is
an America of brothers, or working men, while working women (excepting Allos’
own mother and friend Marian) pose a threat to this brotherhood as they are
often the cause of dissension among men.
Only desexualized (i.e., “proper”) white women are part of the America
that Allos seeks, and they are privileged as such solely because they function
as vehicles through which the narrator believes he can form these brotherly
bonds and become a part of America.56
Similarly, these women are
privileged because they have access to literature and therefore they have
access, at least symbolically, to the world to which Allos so desperately wants
to belong. By providing Allos with the
literature of other male American writers who similarly struggled with race and
class politics, these women further contribute to Allos’ sense of identification
with his “author-brothers” and hence his identification as a legitimate
American. However, they also function,
like Trip in East Goes West, to
undermine this very legitimacy as it is only through his friendships with
desexualized white women that he gains legitimacy. For instance, in the Philippines, he meets
the “American” librarian Miss Strandon who not only teaches him about Abraham
Lincoln but also is the first person to introduce him to the world of American
literature. Later in the novel and through
his brother Macario, he meets Dora
Travers who urges him to “write
more poems” because she thinks he will be a “good
American
poet” (224; emphasis original). Of Alice
Odell, the woman who writes to Allos because she likes his poems and because
she wants his advice on her own manuscript, Allos writes, “She was directing my
education … and I read everything she sent me” (232). Alice’s sister, Eileen, also assists in
Allos’ education. After Alice leaves
California, Eileen begins to visit Allos in the hospital, bringing him books
and “little bundles of roast meat, celery, tomatoes, and apples” (234). When she leaves his bedside, Allos becomes
“restless,” and starts writing to her every day. He narrates, “I began to cultivate a taste
for words … writing fumbling, vehement letters to Eileen was actually my course
in English…. [Eileen] was undeniably the America
I had wanted to find…. This America was human, good, and real” (235; emphasis
original). By introducing Allos to
literature, by functioning as the conduit through which he develops a fraternal
bond with other American male writers, and by claiming his Americanness for
him, as Dora Travers does, these women simultaneously confer legitimacy on
Allos and expose his reliance on them for that legitimacy. These women have the power to confer
legitimacy upon him and to strip it from him, as the scene in the bar above so
pointedly illustrates.
Like Kang, Bulosan feels a
desperate need to, as Chu might say, author himself into being, for it is this
very authorship, or what I am calling Bulosan’s critical act of literacy, that
argues most persuasively for his legitimacy as a participant in the “American
literary establishment.” Furthermore, as
I discussed earlier in this chapter, Bulosan aligns himself with other American
male writers as a way of both arguing for his legitimacy as an American and as
a way of challenging America’s construction of him as
“foreign” and undesirable. Though her focus is on Chinese male
immigrants, Jennifer Ting’s investigation of bachelor societies and the construction
of Asian American sexuality illuminate my reading of Bulosan’s rhetoric. Ting examines the ways in which the bachelor
society trope has constructed, and reduced, Asian American male sexuality to
two types: “conjugal” and “non-conjugal” heterosexuality. Focusing on two historical studies of Chinese
immigrants in America, Ting notes that despite the absence of Chinese women in
the United States, both accounts construct male Chinese immigrant sexuality as
exclusively heterosexual in nature (“Bachelor Society” 277). Ting makes it clear that she is not arguing
over how accurate or inaccurate these accounts are, but rather she insists that
heterosexuality is “determined by more than object choice…[it] is to say that
not all heterosexualities will be equally privileged by heterosexism, precisely
because sexualities are implicated in power relations and cultural logics”
(277-78). She demonstrates how the
writers of these historiographies were themselves influenced by a rhetoric of
heteronormativity, such that the kind of heterosexuality that they saw as
operating in the bachelor society “is working, at the level of representation,
to develop, secure, and reproduce certain cultural logics (such as those
underpinning the racial and class meanings of Asians and Asian Americans or
ideas of U.S. national identity)” (278).
I introduce Ting’s argument here
because it illuminates Bulosan’s construction of his fictional alter ego’s
sexuality and how it relates to his narrative of literacy and legitimacy. Though he is constructed as a member of a
1930s Filipino bachelor society, some of who are depicted as sexually
promiscuous, Allos is constructed as sexually naïve and unthreatening to the
women he encounters and befriends. I
have already noted that his platonic relationships with white women are both
necessary (because of the antimiscegenation laws) and strategic, in that the
women are thus able to retain their official status as national citizens and
are therefore viable avenues through which Allos seeks legitimacy. What I have not yet suggested is that both
the laws that forbade interracial couplings and Bulosan’s construction of a
Filipino bachelor society replete with references to heterosexual encounters
serve to “develop, secure, and reproduce” the logic of heteronormativity. “‘Normal’ heterosexuality,” Ting writes, “is
not only a marker of assimilation achieved, it is itself a means to
assimilation” (“Bachelor Society” 278).
Although critics have been
attentive to gender issues in America Is
in the Heart, particularly the role of women and the social, cultural, and
historical significance of the Filipino bachelor society, few have examined the
text from a queer perspective.57
My aim here is not necessarily to advocate a queer reading of the text,
but rather to argue that by shifting the focus from, say, class, race or
ethnicity to sexuality we see how sexuality is related to race and racial
formation and is therefore another useful construct through which to analyze
rhetorics of literacy and legitimacy.
For example, while it is arguable whether Allos is in fact heterosexual,
homosexual, or asexual, the fact that reviewers and critics of America respond to the depiction of
Allos’ relationships with white women and overlook entirely other possible
readings of his sexual desire points to a heterosexual assumption. As Ting writes, heteronormativity does far
more than characterize ‘normal’ sexuality as ‘opposite sex’ object choice. It obscures the range of social practices
categorized as sexual and makes its norms seem to affect the sexual realm of
life alone…. The heterosexual assumption enables [the] implicit argument that
race is the factor that determines the social and psychic acceptability of
physical attraction and romantic love.
(“The Power of Sexuality” 75)
The heterosexual assumption is beneficial to Bulosan
in allowing him/Allos to be perceived as more “normal” and hence more
“American,” or at least more assimilable, than one whose heterosexual
orientation was in question. I argue
that Allos’ sexuality is constructed as ambivalent because of the
anti-miscegenation laws and America’s construction of many Asian men as queer
and Filipinos in particular as oversexed and threatening to white men.58
As I illustrate in the passages
that follow, we learn during the course of the novel that Allos loses his
virginity shortly after his arrival in the U.S., that he adores and in fact
“yearns” for white women, and that he becomes anxious in sexually charged
situations. For example, though he does
not name it as such, Allos describes in vivid detail the moment at which he
loses his virginity:
I was backing to the door when
Benigno and two other men grabbed me. I
struggled desperately…. I trembled violently, because what I saw was a naked
Mexican woman waiting to receive me. The
men pinned me down on the cot, face upward, while Benigno hurriedly fumbled for
my belt…. Then, as though from far away, I felt the tempestuous flow of blood
in my veins.
It was like spring in an unknown
land. There were roses everywhere,
opening to a kind sun. I heard the
sudden beating of waves upon rocks, the gentle fall of rain among palm
leaves. Was this eternity? Was this the source of creation?…. I entered
my tent, trembling with a nameless shame.
(159-60)
A compulsory heterosexual reading of this passage
views Allos’ initiation into the world of sex as “non-conjugal
heterosexuality;” this form of heterosexuality serves to reinforce readers’
preconceptions of heteronormativity and thus further persuades them of Allos’
potential for assimilation. However,
this passage can also be read as illustrative of Allos’ sexual ambivalence or
anxiety (he was fearful and “trembling” when he saw the Mexican prostitute) and
even, as de Jesús suggests, as a scene depicting Allos’ “‘rape’ at the hands of
those who would ‘make him a man,’ an ‘emasculation’ through the validation of
heterosex” (103). de Jesús reads this
scene as suggestive of the other men’s homosexual desire for Allos, “a desire,”
she writes, “which must be sublimated through heteronormativity—through the
prostitute’s body” (103). Kandice Chuh
likewise notes that because the “eroticized violence” is enacted by other
Filipino men, this passage can be read as a critique of heteronormative
masculinity. As a novel that disrupts
heterosexuality as a “natural, inherently romantic phenomenon,” Chuh argues, America demands that we critically
inquire into the ways in which power is used to resist
dominant and “discriminatory systems” (Imagine Otherwise 41). While I agree that the novel challenges
heteronormative assumptions, I also see how it may reinforce readers’ views of
heterosexuality. Despite Bulosan’s
construction of a homosocial Filipino community, and regardless of how one interprets
the above scene, Bulosan makes explicit Allos’ fear and anxiety (and awe) about
the sexual act, depicting him as at once heterosexual, innocent and sexually
unthreatening.
Allos’ adoration of
white women comes across throughout the novel, but a particular “yearning” for
Eileen argues most persuasively for his heterosexual desire: I created for
myself an illusion of understanding with Eileen, and in consequence, I yearned
for her and the world she represented.
The grass in the hospital yard spoke of her, and when it rained, the
water rushed down the eaves calling her name.
I told her these things in poems, and my mind became afire: could I get
well for Eileen? Could I walk with her
in the street without being ashamed of my race?
Could I see her always without fear?
(234)
This passage simultaneously speaks to Allos’
heterosexuality, the laws that forbid interracial couplings, and Allos’ view
that white women, however unattainable, represent the America he had wanted to
find.
We also see in both passages how
articulations of sexual identity and desire are related to Allos’ acts of
literacy and legitimacy as each description is followed by the use of
poetic/literary devices such as simile, metaphor and personification. The use of these devices alongside implicit
arguments about race and Allos’ heterosexuality and naïveté is a strategic move
by Bulosan to further establish Allos’ self-identity as a member of the
American literary world. In his romantic
musings, Allos articulates a specifically masculine subjectivity and at the
same time argues for his legitimacy as a participant in literary
production.
Because literacy is not just about
“reading the word” but also about “reading the world” (Freire and Macedo), it
seems appropriate to examine Allos’ readings, negotiations, and articulations
of his sexual world since it is a part of the culture and society to which he
wishes to gain access. We can read
Allos’ articulations of heteronormativity as a response to America’s
construction of Filipino men as hypersexual and therefore threatening to white
“American” masculinity. That it is also
possible to read Allos’ sexuality as ambivalent suggests that Bulosan himself
may have been grappling with his own male (hetero/homo) sexual subjectivity and
the discursive construction or articulation of that subjectivity as it relates
to his racialized identity.
Conclusion
Campomanes and Gernes write that
“[f]or Bulosan, the act of writing is, paradoxically, an act of violence for
which ‘English is the best weapon,’ and an act of synthesis: ‘I sat at the bare
table in the kitchen and began piecing together the mosaic of our lives in
America. Full of loneliness and love, I
began to write’ (67; 289)” (23). While
Bulosan’s book, America Is in the Heart,
remains intact, the destruction of the narrator’s volume of poetry functions
symbolically as the shattering of this “mosaic” of Filipino lives in America
into fragments, or “remnants” as Allos describes them (322). “And yet,” Young writes, “the remnants
represent a fragmented life that holds much personal and social meaning” (75). Through this symbolic act, Bulosan critiques
the American dream and the belief that Allos’ critical act of literacy will
make him
“legitimate.”
Bulosan’s “piecing together” the
remnants into a so-called “collective biography” is an act of defiance and a
tribute to his literacy. Traise Yamamoto
writes that, “For subjects marked by race, or by gender and race, fragmentation
is very often the condition in which they already find themselves by simple
virtue of being situated in a culture that does not grant them subjecthood, or
grants them only contingent subjectivity” (75).
She goes on to say that marginalized people “need to move from already
feeling fragmented to an embodied sense of coherence and agency” (77). While his book is arguably fragmented or, as
Wong calls it, “unmappable,” a “senseless jumble of brutalities” (Reading 134), I argue, like Young, that
piecing together the collective experiences of Filipinos does, indeed, give
Bulosan agency as he becomes, through the process of writing and critiquing
America, a participant in the construction of American culture.
Like Kang, Bulosan was never
granted U.S. citizenship, but his rhetoric and criticisms are testaments to his
understanding of the politics of race and class in America. Bulosan makes his intentions clear: “What
really compelled me to write was to try and understand this country [the United
States], to find a place in it not only for myself but my people” (qtd. in San
Juan, On Becoming 8). While he critiques the literacy myth through
his naïve narrator-protagonist/alter ego Allos, he simultaneously argues for
his own legitimacy as a functionally and culturally literate “American.” Like Kang, Bulosan gains legitimacy through
the (literacy) act of cultural criticism that his book performs and makes
available to readers and critics an alternative conceptualization of what it
means to be a “literate citizen” of the United States.
My aim in Part I has been to
examine the role of literacy as an analytic of citizenship and identity in the
autobiographical works of two early immigrant writers. In Part II, I continue this examination with
a slightly different critical focus and with more attention to genre as
rhetoric. Though I build upon ideas
expressed in the current and previous chapters, the next two chapters examine
contemporary texts and engage more specifically the ways in which Asian
American masculinity, sexuality and class shape articulations of literacy and
citizenship.
Part II: Hyperliteracy,
Hybridity and Disguise
Chapter 3: Frank Chin’s The
Chickencoop Chinaman
I was unable to disguise
myself. Standing there in a polyester
print shirt my mother had sewn together to save money, discount store
bellbottom blue jeans, and sneakers that were a knockoff of the popular brands,
with straight black hair cut at home though not with a bowl, thick glasses, and
buck teeth, I was repeatedly recognized as one of many …
As I became older, I was given many
masks to wear. I could be a laborer
laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be
pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a
bomb … a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming “Banzai” on my
way to my death … a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an
ancient secret … a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in
an unforgettable photo … an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed
capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking
cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the
slogan “but wait—there’s more” as the commercial segued to show another free
gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad
driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected…an illegal
alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler’s ship, defying death only to
crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop …
I remain not only a stranger in a
familiar land but also a sojourner through my own life.
–Frank Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and
White
Through his catalogue of the
various “masks” he could wear as an Asian American, Frank Wu argues
persuasively in the opening pages of his nonfictional work for the concept of
race as a social construct and, specifically, for America’s construction of
Asians as non-citizens.59 His
list, which is roughly five times longer than what I have included here,
identifies many of the stereotypes associated with different Asian (male)
ethnic groups.60 Wu critiques
the homogenization of Asian Americans in the popular imagination by indicating
that he is “given” them to wear and that he, as a Chinese American, could
actually wear any one of them without question.
In his opening chapter, he cites numerous recent examples of the way in
which race in the U.S. is equated with citizenship. He recalls that, during the 1998 Winter
Olympics, MS-NBC posted a headline on their website announcing Tara Lipinsky’s
victory over Michelle Kwan in the quest for the gold medal for women’s figure
skating. The website stated that
“American beats out Kwan,” implying that Kwan was specifically not American. Wu notes that such a heading would never have
been used to announce, say, the victory of Tonya Harding over Nancy Kerrigan,
or the victory of Kwan over Lipinsky. A
more recent example occurred in May 2001 when U.S. Representative David Wu
arrived at the U.S. Department of Energy prepared to give a speech for Asian
American Heritage Month only to be refused entry because the guards didn’t
believe he was American. According to
Frank Wu, the guards “even rejected his congressional identification as
possibly fake”
(22).
In Part II, I analyze both
racialized and gendered cultural representations of Asian American men, such as
those described by Frank Wu, and conceptualize how these representations, in
turn, impact the ways in which two contemporary male writers, Frank Chin and
Chang-rae Lee, position themselves and their characters rhetorically as they
construct fictional narratives of literacy.
As contemporary texts published in 1981 and 1995, respectively, Chin’s The Chickencoop Chinaman61
and Lee’s Native Speaker were written
with very different audiences in mind.
My analysis sheds light on both the changing perspectives and status of
Asian Americans and also adds the dimension of class as a construct through
which to analyze the rhetorical function of Native
Speaker. Moreover, by shifting my
focus to different genres—a play and a work of fiction—I also show how genre
choices can be rhetorical and how certain strategies can be effective across
genres.
I argue here, as I do elsewhere,
that the characters’ and authors’ status as ambivalent can be seen in the
literacy practices that they use to persuade their respective audiences. Although Tam and Henry, the protagonists of
Chin’s and Lee’s texts, are English-speaking and American-born, their audiences
within the texts question the protagonists’ citizenship status as well as their
literacy practices solely on the basis of their race. In addition to dealing with America’s
racialization of Asian Americans as foreign and illiterate, Tam and Henry
further struggle with America’s construction of them as passive, obedient, and
effeminate. This chapter and the
following chapter thus examine the ways in which The Chickencoop Chinaman and Native
Speaker challenge or reify cultural and gendered assumptions about literacy
while also demonstrating how their narrator-protagonists’ ambivalent status
shapes what I am identifying as their acts of hyperliteracy. Tam is hyperliterate because he feels
emasculated and culturally invisible while Henry is hyperliterate because
dominant culture has constructed him as foreign and hence an “illegitimate”
speaker of English. Viewing Tam’s
sometimes incoherent “babble” and Henry’s impeccable English as evidence of
their hyperliteracy focuses our attention on the way in which they have been
constructed as Other and the effects that their literacy practices have on
their audiences. Hyperliteracy here
represents the inbetween space of identity for both Tam and Henry—it is, as I
state in the introduction, both the space in which they have been forced to
occupy as marginalized subjects as well as the space in which they may subvert
that very positioning. In other words,
their acts of hyperliteracy are performances of identity that mark and contest
their indeterminacy as minority subjects.
My aim in the previous two chapters
was to show how the author-protagonists of Kang’s and Bulosan’s texts both
reinforce their claims of Americanness while simultaneously critiquing
“America” through their participation (via their literacy acts) in American
cultural production. I argued that the
use of the autobiographical form to make these claims and to mount their
critiques was strategic given the attitudes towards Korean and Filipino (male)
immigrants in the 1930s and 1940s.
Pairing these two literacy narratives together in one section enabled me
to compare and contrast the different types of rhetorical strategies each
author used during roughly the same time period, thus illuminating concerns
about U.S. citizenship particular to this demographic of Asian immigrants. In this section, I continue my investigation
of literacy and Asian American male subjectivity by looking at two very
different and differing types of literacy narratives, both of which, I argue,
evolve out of rhetorical situations that construct (some) Asian American men as
passive, obedient, asexual or homosexual, and unassimilable.62 Though Kang and Bulosan also work against
certain stereotypes in their novels, their main concern is with their
citizenship status and subjectivity as American writers. By contrast, Chin and Lee are writing in the
post-1965 immigration reform era as legalized U.S. citizens and thus are
responding to different situations than Kang and Bulosan. Specifically, The Chickencoop Chinaman responds, in dramatic form, to cultural
constructions of Asian American men as foreign, effeminate, “queer,” and
speakers of accented English, while Native
Speaker responds in novelistic form to the continued liminal status of
Asian Americans (as a result of the conflation of “Asian” with “Asian
American”) as well as the tensions caused by recent immigration policies.
Hybrid
Subjects
Unlike the authors and
narrator-protagonists of East Goes West
and America Is in the Heart, Frank
Chin and Tam Lum and Chang-rae Lee and Henry Park either learned English as
their first language or began speaking it at a very young age.63 Consequently, they are not faced with the
same issues related to functional literacy or the acquisition of English as are
the authors and protagonists of the immigrant literacy narratives discussed in
Part I. These narratives do not focus on
Tam’s and Henry’s acquisition of English, but instead on their struggles with language,
culture, class, and identity as Asian American males. Moreover, Tam and Henry are United States
citizens by birth, unlike Han and Allos who were never even allowed to
naturalize, but still they are racialized subjects and thus denied equality. In other words, despite their legal citizenship
status, Tam and Henry are racialized as non-citizens.
Lisa Lowe argues that the United
States is haunted by a national memory of its wars in Asia and that this memory
has in turn constructed Asians as a threat to the national body such that all Asians,
whether American-born or not, are viewed as immigrants or “foreigners-within”
(5). Leti Volpp extends the immigrant
analogy to elaborate on the multiple notions of citizenship. In her essay, “‘Obnoxious to Their Very
Nature’: Asian Americans and Constitutional Citizenship,” Volpp writes that the
racialization of Asian Americans is
constituted through the implication that Asians and Asian Americans are
indistinguishable, creating the presumption that Asian Americans enter the
republic with a continuing allegiance to their country of origin, rendering
them subject to corruption and disloyalty, and foreclosing their ability to
function as subjects. (65-66)
While she is referring here to the 1996 campaign
finance scandal involving John Huang and Charlie Yah-lin Trie and the 1999
indictment of Wen Ho Lee,64 her statement continues to hold true for
presumptions about literacy and language ability. Media representations have bolstered the
already widespread belief that Asian Americans are foreign and unable to speak
English without an accent. There are
numerous examples, but one in particular stands out. On April 4, 1995, U.S. Senator Alfonse
D’Amato, on the Don Imus radio talk show, mocked Judge Lance Ito, who was
presiding over the O.J.
Simpson trial, using an exaggerated Asian accent. Needless to say, people were outraged by this
racist verbal attack and further insulted by what they felt was Senator
D’Amato’s “inadequate” apology. Two days
after the show and as a result of the heightened criticism of his “apology,”
D’Amato issued a full, formal apology to the Senate. D’Amato’s belief that his mockery was
humorous and inoffensive points to how deeply embedded these stereotypes and
misrepresentations are in American culture.
Volpp’s statement that “One’s
Asianness seems to be the difference one must suppress in order to be a full
citizen” (67) applies particularly well to characters such as Tam Lum and Henry
Park who try to disguise or mask their “Asianness” through speech. Though Tam and Henry are both fully literate
in English, they recognize how closely tied their literacy practices are to
their identities as Asian Americans. Tam
shifts between different accents and styles of speaking in order to show his
audience that he has no language of his own—that, as a minority subject, he
occupies a liminal space both culturally and linguistically—while Henry lives
in fear of betraying himself through his voice.
In starkly different ways, both texts use specific gendered and classed
literacies that are marked by ambivalence through acts of hyperliteracy. Tam’s and Henry’s speech acts therefore
persuade readers not that they are “master” speakers or rhetoricians but that
America has made them into linguistic frauds.
While the protagonists of these two
texts have very different language styles—
Tam uses disruptive and often incoherent discourse
while Henry speaks and writes “perfectly,” as his wife Lelia tells him the
first time they meet—both are depicted as linguistic frauds. Though they are literate in the basic sense
that they can read and write in English, their subject positionings as
racialized Others cause them to be hyperliterate.
The underlying critique of these texts is not that
Chin and Lee are arguing for their protagonists’ literacies and hence
legitimacies but that the American democratic ideals in which their
protagonists were raised to believe are in fact unattainable for them as Asian
Americans.
Henry’s and Tam’s hyperliteracy is
thus one effect that the ideology of literacy has on the minority subject. We know that the formal requirements for
citizenship include being able to speak English and a demonstrated knowledge of
the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. political system, and U.S. history; informal
requirements, such as those learned in school and other social settings,
include knowledge of U.S. culture (food, television, film, music, art, sports,
etc.), what Hirsch has famously termed “cultural literacy.”65 As with the paradox of United States
citizenship—that despite one’s formal entitlement to this citizenship, one’s
race largely determines the extent to which that person is accepted as
legitimately “American”—the paradox of literacy is that one may be functionally
and culturally literate and yet still, because of race or accent, be deemed
“foreign.”
While for Kang and Bulosan the act
of writing their fictional autobiographies is in itself a rhetorical tactic
designed to demonstrate and argue for their literacies, Chin and Lee seem to
have other objectives—by creating characters who are hyperliterate, they are
responding to the ways in which American culture has constructed them and their
characters as Other and, in doing so, they critique that very
construction. Their characters’ acts of
hyperliteracy function as rhetorical strategies in that, through their
characters’ articulations of cultural difference, readers are forced to reckon
with what Bhabha calls “hybrid national narratives” (167), narratives that,
like the hybrid subject, disrupt histories, cultures, time, meaning and
identity. And yet, through their own
acts of writing these critiques, Chin and Lee, like Kang and Bulosan,
participate in cultural production and hence argue for their own legitimacies
as Americans.
Asian
American Masculinity
In the previous two chapters, I
discussed briefly how the racialization of Asian American men is tied to gender
and explained how the immigration and naturalization laws of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries effectively forced Asian American men into bachelor
communities and jobs that traditionally were considered “women’s work.” Continuing that discussion, I examine here
how the stereotypes and legacies that originated with the first wave of Asian
immigrants have infiltrated forms of contemporary American popular culture such
as the media, film industry, and literature.
As Eng writes, “Popular stereotypes connecting past and present Asian
American male laborers to [“feminized”] professions are succinct and compelling
illustrations of the ways in which economically driven modes of feminization
cling to bodies not only sexually but also racially” (17). One recent example is Abercrombie and Fitch’s
racist representation of Chinese laundrymen on one of their t-shirts. The shirt depicts two Asian caricatures with
slanted eyes wearing rice-paddy hats and the words “Wong Brothers Laundry
Service—Two Wongs Can Make It White.”66 The stereotypical representation on
Abercrombie and Fitch’s t-shirt harks back to the days of Charlie Chan, a
1920s-30s Hollywood character known for his pseudo-Confucius sayings, fractured
English, and dainty disposition. The
fact that the t-shirts depicted caricatures of Asian
Americans and ridiculed accented English illustrates that
Asian Americans continue to be marginalized by the dominant culture not only
for their race but also for their presumed accented speech, a marker of their
“foreignness.”
Equally popular about a decade before
Charlie Chan was Arthur Sarsfield Ward’s Dr. Fu Manchu, the embodiment of the
“yellow peril.”67 Rohmer describes
his character in The Insidious Dr. Fu
Manchu:
Imagine a person tall, lean and feline, high
shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare, and a face like Satan, a close shaven
skull and long magnetic eyes of true cat green.
Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire eastern race,
accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources … of a wealthy
government.... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr.
Fu Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.
(qtd. in R. Lee, Orientals 113-14)
Robert Lee discusses how Dr. Fu Manchu’s struggles
with his “Anglo-Saxon nemesis,” Nayland Smith, served as a “masculine tonic”
for the anxieties produced around the struggle between Christendom and the
“Orient” for racial survival. According
to Lee, Fu Manchu’s “power to incite the fevered imagination lies in his
ambiguous sexuality, which combines a masochistic vulnerability marked as
feminine and a sadistic aggressiveness marked as masculine” (116). His sexual ambiguity is reflected in his ambiguous
racial and cultural background: “[Fu Manchu’s] Chinese racial identification is
decentered by the fact that much is made of his scientific Western education
and his sophistication” (Lee 116). Fu
Manchu is thus the quintessential “alien,” one who poses a threat by his
continuing presence and foreign allegiance(s).68 In Chickencoop,
Tam acknowledges these cultural representations and responds to them with his
heavily gendered and ethnicized literacy practices. Whether intentional or not, Tam’s
hyperliteracy serves to critique America’s construction of him as a racialized,
homosexual, hybrid Other.69
Frank
Chin and The Chickencoop Chinaman
Frank Chin is a playwright,
essayist, and short-fictionalist, yet he is perhaps best known among Asian
American cultural critics for his polemical views on what constitutes an
“authentic” Asian American identity or “sensibility.” Chin distinguishes between “real” Asian
American writers who are “American born and raised, who got their China and
Japan from the radio, off the silver screen, from television, out of comic
books, from the pushers of white American culture” (Aiiieeeee! xi-xii) and “Americanized” Asians who “set out to become
American, in the white sense of the word, and succeeded in becoming ‘Chinese
American’ in the stereotypical sense of the good, loyal, obedient, passive,
law-abiding, cultured sense of the word.... Becoming white supremacist was part
of their consciously and voluntarily becoming ‘American’” (xv). Along with his co-editors Jeffrey Paul Chan,
Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, Frank Chin argues in his prefatory and
introductory remarks to Aiiieeeee! An
Anthology of
Asian American Writers and The Big
Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature,
that because Asian Americans have been excluded from participation in American
culture, they have been forced to identify with Asian cultures even if they
were born and raised in America. These
American-born, English-speaking Asian Americans, Chin claims, have internalized
the stereotypes or Orientalist views of Asia and of Asians created by
mainstream white America. This
internalization, he argues, has developed into self-contempt. Chin accuses those writers who portray themselves
and other Asian Americans in stereotypical and racist ways as “faking” Asian
culture.
Moreover,
Chin argues that Asian American men have been emasculated by
American cultural representations of them as foreign,
subservient, and effeminate. As Patricia
Chu explains, Chin’s definition of “racist love” can be seen as a “forerunner
of the current ‘model minority’ paradigm.”
She writes, “Before the term model
minority came into vogue, Chin identified the thinking of people who
identify Asian Americans as Asian, oriental, and exotic, and hence as friendly,
amenable, and submissive, as ‘racist love,’ a thinly disguised form of American
orientalism” (65). According to Chin,
Asian American writers who “fake” Asian culture by buying into white “racist
love” have delegitimized their own culture and history as Asian Americans.
Critics have taken issue with
Chin’s demarcation between “real” and “fake,” particularly as his focus shifted
from separating writers based on their utilization of traditional Asian
cultures to represent “Asian America” to separating writers based on the accuracy
or authenticity of the traditional myths and customs represented in their
works. Chin is especially critical of
writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, and Amy Tan whom he
argues misrepresent “the Chinese American sensibility” by rewriting or
appropriating traditional Chinese myths for their own purposes. His key complaint with these writers is less
that they appropriate or misrepresent Chinese
culture for marketing or other personal reasons but that they misrepresent
Chinese and Chinese American men by
depicting them as “misogynistic,” “perverse,” “passive,” “antiindividualist,”
“morally and ethically opposite to Western culture” and torn between their dual
identities as Asians and Americans (The
Big Aiiieeeee! 9)—in other words, less than the “heroic” men whom he found
and idealized in the Chinese “heroic tradition.”
I outline Chin’s arguments in such
depth in order to help situate my analysis of his work in light of his cultural
nationalist agenda as well as to contextualize his claims within the larger
debate over representations of Asian and Asian American men in American popular
culture. The Chickencoop Chinaman premiered in 1972 around the time when
Asian American activists began protesting the Vietnam War and U.S.
imperialist practices overseas while rallying for
equal rights and an end to discrimination on a domestic level. As Asian Americans were becoming more and
more aware of their status and treatment by mainstream America, they became
more vocal in their protests against racial discrimination. It was during this period that Frank Chin and
his cohort published Aiiieeeee! in an
effort to give voice to struggling Asian American male writers. In their introductory essay, “Fifty Years of
Our Whole Voice,” Chin et al. contend that it is through language that culture
is expressed and maintained:
Language is the medium of culture and the people’s
sensibility, including the style of manhood.
Language coheres the people into a community by organizing and codifying
the symbols of the people’s common experience.
Stunt the tongue and you have lopped off the culture and
sensibility. On the simplest level, a
man in any culture speaks for himself.
Without a language of his own, he no longer is a man. (Aiiieeeee!
37)
Their use of such heavily gendered language is
indicative of their masculinist focus.
Moreover, this masculinist impulse is inextricably tied to Chin’s own
sense of emasculation and subsequent desire for remasculinization through
language.
Chin’s/Tam’s use of racialized
discourse, particularly black English, in
Chickencoop is
further suggestive of his motive to rally against racial discrimination. By identifying with blacks through language,
Chin and Tam acknowledge the power behind cross-racial coalitions in the fight
against oppression. But there is
another, more significant function to this linguistic code-switching, or as
Susan Gubar calls it, “racechange,” as my analysis below will show.70
The plot revolves around Tam Lum, a
Chinese American filmmaker and writer who travels to Pittsburgh to interview a
man he believes is the father of the famous black boxing champion Ovaltine Jack
Dancer. In Pittsburgh, Tam stays at the
home of his childhood friend, “Blackjap Kenji,” where he meets Lee, Kenji’s
friend and roommate, and her mixed-race son Robbie. More than half of the play takes place in
Kenji’s home, where the three adults argue over issues relating to language
use, racism, sexism, fatherhood, Asian American identity, American culture, and
the emasculation of Asian American men by this culture. After meeting with Charley Popcorn, the man
Tam believes is his boxing hero’s father, and realizing that he is not
Ovaltine’s father, Tam decides to make a straightforward documentary about
Ovaltine’s career as a professional boxer.
The play ends with a defeated Tam alone in the kitchen talking to his
children (who are not actually present at the time) about how his grandfather
worked as a slave laborer on the railroads.
Critical
Reception
Written and first read in 1971,
produced for the first time in 1972, and published in 1981 on the heels of the
Civil Rights movement and the resulting cultural nationalist movements that
formed among other minority groups in the early 1970s, The
Chickencoop
Chinaman deals explicitly with racial stereotypes and their effects on Asian
American identity formation, particularly for
males. The reader cannot help but feel
Tam’s frustration and anger over the ways that Asian American men have
historically been treated and represented in American culture. Chin does not disguise his critique because
his agenda is specifically to speak out against racial discrimination. His audiences (both real and invoked), though
possibly critical of his vociferousness, are nonetheless accustomed to hearing
racial minorities voice their protests.
Critics responded with mixed
reviews of the 1972 production of The
Chickencoop Chinaman.71
Clive Barnes, writing for the New
York Times (1972), said that while he did not like the play, its “ethnic
content” made it at least “interesting” (qtd. in McDonald xivxv); Edith Oliver,
in her piece for the New Yorker
(1972), admired Chin for his “moving, funny, pain-filled, sarcastic, bitter,
ironic play … which almost bursts its seams with passion and energy” (46); and
Jack Kroll of Newsweek (1972) wrote
that Chin “is a natural writer; his language has the beat and brass, the runs
and rim-shots of jazz;” however, he continues, “the basic emotional tone of
hysteria is too unmodulated, the action is too thin, an awkward structure
wrenches the play in and out of fantasy.
But there is real vitality, humor and pain on Chin’s stage; I will
remember Tam Lum long after I’ve forgotten most of this season’s other plays”
(55). Michael Feingold noted in the Village Voice (1972) that the play was
“blossoming all over with good writing, wellcaught characters, and sharply
noted situations,” but that when Tam delivered his monologues, “hot air,
disguised as Poetry, flies in” (qtd. in McDonald xv). According to Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald, Julius
Novick complained in the New York Times
that Frank
Chin was not a “master rhetorician” (xv). And finally, Betty Lee Sung, author of Mountain of Gold, wrote in East/West (1974):
I agreed with the drama
critics. I simply did not like the play,
nor did the audience, which kept dwindling act after act. My comments: [It] was an outpouring of
bitterness and hatred mouthed through lengthy monologue after monologue. Not that it was Randy Kim’s fault (the main
character actor) but it was Frank Chin showing through. (qtd. in McDonald xv) Myron Simon offered a
more critical review of one of the play’s productions in his essay, “Two Angry
Ethnic Writers,” published in MELUS
in 1976. He argued that Chin appeared to
be writing “primarily if not exclusively—for the Asian-American community”
(Simon also notes that there were about fifty people in the audience, more than
half of whom were “Asians”), and that if he wished to be successful at
targeting a wider audience, he must “acknowledge that he is an English language
writer” (22-23). Simon also asserted
that Chin’s “problem” was that he could not decide “for whom he wish[ed] to
write” (23). While I agree with Simon’s
observation, I also believe this was precisely the effect that Chin wanted his
play to have on his audiences, for “[w]ithout a language of his own, [Tam] no
longer is a man” (Aiiieeeee! 37), “so
out comes everybody else’s trash that don’t conceive” (Chickencoop 7). Simon’s
frustration with the play’s apparent contradictions is indicative of the “meta”
speech act of the play that encourages recognition of cultural difference,
instability, and indeterminacy. That he
doesn’t take his reading one step further to examine the rhetorical effect that
this strategy may have on its audience does not mean the text is rhetorically
ineffective. Rather, his response
supports my argument that rhetorical analysis encourages us to see things from
another perspective. Focusing on the
text as a literacy narrative and on Tam as a hyperliterate subject helps to
explain what Simon interprets as Chin’s inability to determine “for whom he
wishes to write.” Instead of dismissing
the text for its inconsistencies, I suggest that rhetoric invites us to inquire
into what those inconsistencies might mean.
Simon’s response to the production
points to the fact that a play/text does not have to garner a positive
reception in order to be considered rhetorically effective, and a play/text can
be, and often is, effective rhetorically in ways unintended by the author or
rhetor. While Chin’s play may not have
influenced his audiences in the ways that he intended, it was still persuasive
because it called other, mostly oppositional, discourses and arguments into
being, as we see in contemporary critical responses to his work. Chin’s writing created a discourse about
race, gender, sexuality, nation, and class that has helped shape the foundation
of the field of Asian American studies.
Many contemporary Asian Americanist
critics, most of who are responding to the written text, have criticized the
play but have done so more in the context of Chin’s larger cultural nationalist
agenda. Specifically, critics have taken
issue with the corpus of Chin’s work for its apparent misogyny and
reconstruction of Asian American masculinity through violence, aggression, and
heroism. King-kok Cheung, for example,
argues that in the contrast Chin draws between the “stock images” of Asian men
and “other men of color,” “one can detect not only homophobia but perhaps also
a sexist preference for stereotypes that imply predatory violence against women
to ‘effeminate’ ones” (“The Woman Warrior” 237). Similarly, she argues that while Chin and his
Aiiieeeee! cohort strive to redefine
Asian American manhood, their counter definition “generates an equally singular
interpretation of Chinese culture,” one that equates manhood with violence and
machismo (“Of Men and Men” 177). Daniel
Kim extends Cheung’s argument by suggesting that the homophobia in Chin’s work
is not just “detectable,” but “palpable and central,” and that it is linked to
the misogyny—by denouncing all things feminine, Chin decries not only women but
also men who are characteristically feminine in some way (“Strange Love”
271). As well, Viet Thanh Nguyen sees
certain works of Asian American literature written by men, in particular the
works of Frank Chin and Gus Lee, as reproducing—in an effort to assert an Asian
American masculine identity—the same kind of violence that was once used to
subordinate Chinese Americans (“The Remasculinization” 130-31). Elaine Kim further notes that, “The only good
woman in Chin’s stories is young, Chinese American, and dead. The old women—the mothers and the aunts—are like
mortuary furniture…” (“‘Such Opposite Creatures’” 76). While I acknowledge these criticisms against
Chin and his masculinist and misogynistic language, I believe that Chickencoop has a great deal more to
offer in terms of language use and its relationship to race and citizenship,
especially when we read it through the analytic of literacy.
Frank
Chin’s Rhetorical Strategies
Based on Frank Chin’s critical
essays, one would expect Chickencoop to
make a claim for a distinct Chinese American literacy—in other words, the
ability to communicate in a language not governed by the logic of the “dominant
discourse.” According to Tam, he has no
language with which to make sense of himself because the dominant discourse has
constructed him in Orientalist terms.
Therefore, he lays no claim to the dominant discourse but instead
insists that he was forced to create his own.
However, Chickencoop suggests
that no such language or literacy is possible.
As we see from the text, this language or literacy is founded on
miscommunication—no one really understands Tam, except perhaps “weird
Robbie.” Tam remains a tragic figure, a
fatherless, motherless, and incomprehensible man whose search for his
“Chinaman” identity and language is forever in progress.
A close examination of Chin’s
rhetorical strategies and the various languages and accents used by the
characters reveals a much more complex view of Asian American male subjectivity
than the text at first suggests. I begin
with a discussion of form because it is the most conspicuous rhetorical
strategy and because it helps to illuminate other rhetorical decisions that
Chin makes in constructing this narrative of literacy. As with other forms of fiction, drama is
often used for social or political commentary.
When it is used didactically or to convey a particular message to its
audience it is generally deemed to be “rhetorical,” that is, it contains
features or qualities of argument or persuasion. Critics such as Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke,
Walter Fisher, and Richard Filloy, however, have a slightly different view of
rhetoric. Booth is interested in the
rhetoric of non-didactic fiction, “viewed as the art of communicating with
readers—the rhetorical resources available to the writer of epic, novel, or
short story as he tries, consciously or unconsciously, to impose his fictional
world upon the reader.”72
Burke finds rhetoric in any form of literature or language that uses
symbols to move audiences into action or to affect situations. In other words, symbols are used by the
rhetorician or speaker as motives to enact change or to induce the audience to
feel, act, or think a certain way.
Walter Fisher and Richard Filloy, in “Argument in Drama and Literature:
An
Exploration,” take a similar position to that of Booth
and Burke, but instead of focusing on “authorial techniques or specific
individuated forms,” they focus on “audience response, the mental moves made by
auditors in interpreting a work.” They
argue that a work of fiction can be viewed as rhetorical insofar as it is
considered “in regard to an audience’s response” (346). In other words, a work is rhetorical as long
as the audience experiences the work
rhetorically.
My own analysis will draw on the rhetorical
theories of Booth, Burke, and Fisher and Filloy as a way of examining both how
Chin controls his readers and how his readers respond to his text. As a drama that is now more often read than
heard or performed, Chickencoop calls
attention to the delivery of speech and the (oral) performance of the
characters as rhetoric. Rhetoric and
drama have a long history together, with many classical rhetoricians comparing
their delivery to that of the dramatic actor.
Aristotle’s use of examples from the theater throughout his Rhetoric attests to his conviction that
rhetoric and drama share many of the same techniques and goals (Enders
66).
As an essayist, playwright and
novelist, Chin’s decision to write Chickencoop
in the form of a drama was clearly a deliberate move. In Chickencoop,
Tam Lum literally performs his identity through acts of literacy. According to Jinqi Ling, Chin’s frustration
over what he perceives to be the destruction of Asian American history and his
resulting obligation to educate younger generations of their cultural heritage
“demands that he go beyond the mere textuality of writing and seek ‘a style of
excess’ (Chaney 1993, 22),” that is, “a style through which he can not only
disturb the immobility of Asian America that results from its internalization
of racial inferiority but also force mainstream society to face its own
complicity in creating such a situation” (81).
I argue that Chin uses this “style of excess,” which I am identifying as
hyperliteracy, to persuade readers that Tam has been constructed by American
history, culture, and ideology as a cultural hybrid with no language of his
own.
The
Chickencoop Chinaman opens with Tam
Lum arriving by plane in Pittsburgh, where he is going to visit his childhood
friend, “Blackjap” Kenji. In his
conversation with the “Hong Kong Dream Girl”/stewardess, described
stereotypically as “Asian, beautiful, grinning, doll-like, and mechanical,” he
asserts his identity as a Chinaman, a product of words, history, and culture:
“Chinamen are made, not born, my dear.
Out of junk-imports, lies, railroad scrap iron, dirty jokes, broken
bottles, cigar smoke, Cosquilla Indian blood, wino spit, and lots of milk of
amnesia” (6). Thus from the outset of
the play, Chin draws on the history of Chinese railroad workers and their
marginalized status to make a claim for Tam’s identity as a hybrid figure.
We are told in the stage directions
that during the rest of this speech Tam “goes through voice and accent
changes,” “[f]rom W.C. Fields to American Midwest, Bible Belt holy roller,
etc. His own ‘normal’ speech jumps
between black and white rhythms and accents” (6). Describing himself as if he were a mythic
figure, Tam tells the Hong
Kong Dream Girl,
I am the natural born ragmouth speaking the motherless
bloody tongue. No real language of my
own to make sense with, so out comes everybody else’s trash that don’t
conceive. But the sound truth is that I
AM THE
NOTORIOUS ONE AND ONLY CHICKENCOOP
CHINAMAN
HIMSELF that talks in the dark heavy Midnight, the
secret Chinatown Buck Buck Bagaw.
(7)
By drawing on America’s history of exploitation,
racialization, and cultural amnesia and by using the languages and dialects of
its various minorities, Tam insists that Americans acknowledge his presence and
his acts of literacy as articulations of cultural difference and that they
further acknowledge their complicity in their construction of him as a
hyperliterate, hybrid figure. Tam is the
“presence [that] does not evoke a harmonious patchwork of cultures, but
articulates the narrative of cultural difference which can never let the
national history look at itself narcissistically in the eye” (Bhabha 168). Though Bhabha suggests that rhetoric takes
place in the very articulation of cultural difference since identities are
always “implicat[ed] in other symbolic systems, are always
‘incomplete’ or open to cultural translation” (162),
rhetorical analysis is interested in how the effects are achieved. In order for readers to acknowledge their
complicity, they must be persuaded by the discourse. The following analysis examines this process
of persuasion by drawing on Burke’s theory of identification and Jinqi Ling’s
astute reading of the text.
In his critical (nonfiction) work,
Chin has insisted that language, specifically American English, has had a
negative impact on “minorities” as it is presumed to be the standard to which
all other languages and accents should conform.
He writes,
The
universality of the belief that correct English is the only language of
American
truth has made language an instrument of cultural imperialism.
The minority experience does not
yield itself to accurate or complete
expression in the white man’s language. Yet, the minority writer, specifically the
Asian American writer, is made to feel morally obligated to write in a language
produced by an alien and hostile sensibility.
His task, in terms of language alone, is to legitimize his, and by
implication his people’s, orientation as white, to codify his experience in the
form of prior symbols, clichés, linguistic mannerisms and a sense of humor that
appeals to whites because it celebrates Asian American self-contempt. Or his task is the opposite—to legitimize the
language, style, and syntax of his people’s experience. (Aiiieeeee!
23-24)
As we see from this quotation and stage directions
from the play, Chin has created a character who is struggling with the very
issue of how to live, act, write, and speak as a “Chinaman,” not a Chinese or a
Chinese American, but one living on the borderland. As I
have suggested, Tam’s hyperliteracy or use of language “in excess” to argue for
his identity as a “Chinaman” is directly tied to his masculinity or, rather,
sense of emasculation as an Asian American male. Represented and constructed by mainstream
American culture as asexual, submissive, weak or “coded as having no sexuality”
(E. Kim, “‘Such Opposite Creatures’” 69), Asian American male writers such as
Chin have struggled to redefine Asian American male sexuality through
characters such as Tam Lum and “Blackjap” Kenji. Tam speaks of himself as a sexual being (and
reveals himself as sexist) when he talks to the Hong Kong Dream Girl:
Now you, my Hong Kong flower, my sweet sloe-eyed
beauty from the mysterious East, I can tell that your little fingers have
twiddled many a chopstick. Your
smoothbore hands have the memory of gunpowder’s invention in them and know how
to shape a blast and I dare say, tickle out a shot. Let me lead your hands. (6)
But Lee, Kenji’s racially ambiguous female roommate
whom Tam believes is part Chinese, calls Tam on his insecurity as a man and
recognizes his use of language to disguise his vulnerability. She tells Kenji,
He knows he’s no kind of man.
Look at him, he’s like those little vulnerable sea animals born with no
shells of their own so he puts on the shells of the dead. You hear him when he talks? He’s talking in so many goddamn dialects and
accents all mixed up at the same time … you might think he was a nightclub
comic. What’sa wrong with your
Chinatowng acka-cent, huh? (24)
Critical reviews at the time of publication and when
the play was first performed indicate that some readers/viewers were simply
turned off by Tam’s volubility and use of nonstandard English, alleging, for
example, that Tam’s monologues were “hot air, disguised as poetry” (Feingold;
qtd. in McDonald xv). Lee’s comment
supports the reading that Tam’s hyperliteracy is a direct result of his liminal
status and insecurity as an Asian American male. That this point was overlooked by many of
Chin’s early audience members, as indicated by the reviews, suggests that
Chin’s rhetoric was not always effective or that, as Simon argues, he was
writing primarily for an Asian American audience. And yet Chin’s construction of Lee as a
translator, or mediator, for audience members who might not recognize Chin’s
critique suggests that he was writing with a more mainstream audience in
mind.
Jinqi Ling makes a compelling
argument for Chin’s strategic use of characters such as Lee and Tom (an
assimilated Chinese American who is also Lee’s ex-husband). Ling sees Chin employing a strategy using
“shifting illocutionary acts,” which Richard Fowler has adapted from Bakhtin’s
notion of dialogism, as a way of reaching or persuading an audience that is
troubled by Chin’s use of language. Ling
explains, According to Fowler, in a (counter)hegemonically designed
communicative situation, the speaking agent assumes the role of an audience
ideologically opposed to the author: the author presents the addressee’s
position as false by making the speaking agent act on the audience’s beliefs,
and the addressee cannot refute such a relationship because his or her own
position is structurally implicated in the given communicative arrangement
(1981, 88). (86-87)
Ling sees Lee and Tom, who both speak “standard”
English, as playing the role of the speaking agent. They voice concerns that the audience might
have as well, thereby “implicating” the audience in the discursive
situation. Chin thus controls his
audience in such a way that they become participants in the construction of the
play. Their own views are challenged
through the characters with whom they identify, and that identification, Burke
tells us, results in persuasion (an influence on the audience’s views). Chin’s
construction of Tom as a quasi-alter ego figure to Tam is even more
revealing. In the stage directions, Chin
describes Tom as a “very neat, tidy, uptight hip Chinese American” who “speaks
self-consciously, styling his voice like others style hair” (52). Tom serves as the play’s “model minority”—a
Chinese American Uncle Tom, if you will—who recognizes himself as a
successfully assimilated Chinese American.
As such, Tom and Tam disagree on almost everything, and a close
examination of their dialogue reveals Chin’s assumptions about his audience and
further illustrates his strategy of influencing his readers and viewers through
their own participation in the construction of the play.
As an assimilated Chinese American,
Tom’s views mirror those of Chin’s mainstream audience members/readers. He says to Tam,
You and me … we’re both
Chinese. Now maybe you don’t like being
Chinese and you’re trying to prove you’re something else. I used to be like that. I wondered why we didn’t speak up more, then
I saw we don’t have to. We used to be
kicked around, but that’s history, brother.
Today we have good jobs, good pay, and we’re lucky. Americans are proud to say we send more of
our kids to college than any other race.
We’re accepted. We worked hard
for it. I’ve made my peace. (59) Tom’s self-control and his statement
that he “used to be like that” suggest that he is somehow more mature and
self-aware than Tam. That he is writing
a book on Chinese American identity further suggests that he is an “authority”
on the topic. However, Tom is also
insecure in his liminal identity. Tam
identifies this insecurity when he urges Tom to see that Lee is not in fact
white, but part Chinese:
Tom, you’re beautiful.
You wanted to be ‘accepted’ by whites so much, you created one to accept
you. You didn’t know Lee’s got a bucket
of Chinese blood in her? At least a
bucket?.... Look at her. Go on up and
get a good look, fella, and you tell me who’s prejudiced against Chinese. You wanted a white girl so bad, so bad, you
turned her white with your magic eyes.
You got that anti-Chinaman vision.
(59-60)
Ling reads this, as well as Tom’s remark that “in
American eyes we don’t appear as heman types” (Chickencoop 59), as an indication that Tom is “more troubled by
stereotyping than he admits” (88). Ling
goes on to say that Lee’s earlier comment in the play that Tom “wasn’t a man” (Chickencoop 18) “implies that Tom’s
embrace of the promises of assimilation may be an act that has ‘unmanned’
him. Only by rejecting Tam’s acute sense
of his anomalous cultural position can Tom feel secure in his ideologically
designated place in American culture as a successfully assimilated minority”
(88). Because Lee and Tom see themselves
as relatively comfortable in their identities, unlike Tam, they can ask him the
same question audience members might be thinking: “Who do you think you are?” (Chickencoop 13; 88). Viewed as speaking agents voicing concerns of
the audience, Lee and Tom encourage audience members to identify with them and
thus force audience members to consider their own subject positions and
ideologies in regards to Asian American identity and cultural difference. Through this identification, readers become
participants in the rhetorical construction of the play and are perhaps
persuaded to think differently about the characters’ and possibly their own
ambivalent identities.
Tam’s and Kenji’s use of black
dialect throughout the play is also effective as a rhetorical strategy because
black dialect is recognized worldwide as a form of American English, and
because the play premiered during a period in U.S. history in which blacks and
other “minorities” were rallying for equal rights. By using this dialect in his construction of
Tam and Kenji, Chin further argues for their construction as hybrid figures and
forces his audiences to grapple with the changing race and class relations of
the 1960s and 1970s. Chin asks audiences
to question what it means, ideologically, for an Asian American to “talk
black,” and to interrogate their own—perhaps contradictory, perhaps
angst-ridden—responses. The very
presence of black dialect spoken by characters that are not black indicates a
clear rhetorical move on Chin’s part.
According to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca,
By the very fact of selecting certain elements and
presenting them to the audience, their
importance and pertinency to the discussion are implied. Indeed, such a choice endows these elements
with a presence, which is an
essential factor in argumentation and one that is far too much neglected in
rationalistic conceptions of reasoning.
(116)
Hearing the dialect in an on-stage performance endows
Tam’s and Kenji’s speech with presence; it acts “directly on [readers’]
sensibilities” (116) in ways that reading a description of their speech as
“black vernacular” would not. Moreover,
seeing Asian Americans posture as blacks through their speech has a much more
powerful effect than simply reading the dialogue and stage directions on
paper. The effect of this incongruity is
to give readers/audience members further “aesthetic proof”73 that
Chin/Tam has no language of his own, and to encourage them to consider what it
means to perform a crossracial linguistic impersonation.
Chin seems to argue that, for Tam and
Kenji, the use of the dominant discourses is not so much an option as it is a
necessity. That “black and white are the
only options from which [Tam] has to choose,” argues Karen Shimakawa,
“illustrates the way in which for Chin Asian Americanness, as abject, simply
does not figure in the subject/object relation of white/black race relations in
U.S. American verbal discourse” (92).
Kenji’s response to Lee’s accusation that he and Tam are “faking
blackness” suggests that he, too, feels that he has no other recourse except to
“act black”: “School was all blacks and Mexicans. We were kids in school, and you either walked
and talked right in the yard, or got the shit beat outa you every day, ya
understand?” (20). As David Li explains,
“As products of the public school system, native-born monolingual Englishspeaking
Asian Americans were caught in a linguistic orphanhood. First, while encouraged to celebrate the
dominant language and culture, they were denied ownership of both: the races of
Asia do not match the pale face of English” (39). Without a language or a Chinese American
heroic tradition with which to identify, Tam and Kenji must borrow from/rely on
“American” and African American aesthetic/cultural traditions.74 We see this in Tam’s (and Kenji’s) linguistic
impersonations as well as in Tam’s encounters with both the Lone Ranger and Charley
Popcorn, as I discuss in further detail below.
By Act Two, we learn of Tam’s
childhood fantasy that the Lone Ranger was a “Chinaman” as he describes his
fascination with the “masked man” to his children in an interior
monologue:
Listen, children, did I ever tellya, I ever tellya the
Lone Ranger ain’t a Chinaman? I ever
tellya that? Don’t blame me. That’s what happens when you’re a Chinaman
boy in the kitchen, listening in the kitchen to the radio, for what’s happenin
in the other world…. I heard of the masked man.
And I listened to him. And in the
Sunday funnies he had black hair, and Chinatown was nothing but black hair, and
for years, listen, years! I grew blind
looking hard through the holes of his funnypaper mask for slanty eyes…. You see,
I knew, children … he wore that mask to hide his
Asian eyes!…. I knew the Lone Ranger was the CHINESE
AMERICAN BOY of the radio I’d looked for.
(31-32)
Just as Tam must “talk the talk of orphans” (8)
because he does not have a language of his own, so too must he create a fantasy
“Asian” Lone Ranger because American culture has deprived him of any Chinese
American mythical heroes. Despite their
material contributions to U.S. history in the building of the transcontinental
railroad, Chinese Americans have been erased from the popular imagination of
the “American West.” The
Lone Ranger thus becomes Tam’s idealized Chinese
American hero; however, as Shimakawa observes, “Tam is able to construct this
fantasy precisely because his experience of the Lone Ranger is primarily
through the radio—the voice of the
Lone Ranger comes to him completely disembodied; and it is only in this state
of pure language and sound that a legitimate, speaking Chinese American subject
is imaginable” (94).75 Her
observation highlights an important distinction that we must make as readers
and critics, especially in a study of literacy acts, which is that audience
members will experience the rhetorical force of the characters’ literacy acts
in ways entirely different than readers will.
For example, upon hearing Tam, the “multi-tongued word magician” (Chickencoop 3), speak and seeing his
racialized body on stage, viewers of the production experience a disconnect not
unlike what Tam feels when he sees the “real” white Lone Ranger. (Chin has both the Lone Ranger and Tonto
appear on toy horses, the men “both old and decrepit” [Chickencoop 32].) It is
especially significant that Chin intended this work to be seen and heard as it
points to the impossibility of a “legitimate, speaking Chinese American
subject.” Such a figure may be imaginable, but only insofar as the
racialized body is rendered invisible.
The play furthers the argument that
America has constructed Tam (and by extension other racialized minorities) as a
linguistic fraud through its depiction of Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s “Indian”
sidekick. In two separate incidents,
Tonto speaks “without accent,” causing the Lone Ranger to momentarily
misrecognize his “faithful friend”:
TONTO:
(without accent): Right, Kemo Sabay. Get off the horse now,
Silver needs to rest a spell.
RANGER: (cringing): You’re not Tonto!
Where’s my Kemo Sabay?
Where’s my faithful Indian
companion? Tonto!
TONTO: (faking accent): Ummk, Kemo Sabay.
You get off horse now.
(34).
The second time Tonto speaks
without an accent, the Ranger tells him, “Not that way,
Tonto. Be yourself.
Kemo Sabay me” (36). Just as an
accentless, English-speaking
“Chinaman” or a Chinese American who speaks “black
English” is unimaginable to Charley Popcorn (as well as to some audience
members), Tonto is unrecognizable and unimaginable as the Ranger’s “faithful
Indian companion” unless he uses the language that dominant (racist) culture
has created for him. Chin’s characters’
movement among various discourses is, in effect, a verbal play with linguistic
stereotypes. That Tonto can and does
speak without an accent reinforces the (racialized) literacy act as
performance, as social construct.
Of further significance is that these
(racialized) literacy acts are performed since audience members are visually
and aurally confronted with the literal Asian speaking body that, by speaking
“in excess,” or by using hyperbole, disrupts the stereotypes of Asians/Asian
Americans as passive, reticent, and only speaking accented English. In Performing
Asian America, Josephine Lee argues persuasively for the performance of the
stereotype by Asian or Asian American actors as subversive because stereotypes
“cannot be reappropriated without evoking their racist history,” and that in
revealing this history lies the “potential for [the stereotype’s] disruption”
(96). She posits that what I call Tam’s
“hyperliteracy” is in fact a necessary strategy for effecting this
“disruption”: “To [disrupt the stereotype], one must highlight or foreground
the anxiety inherent in the performance of the stereotype by overperforming its
already exaggerated qualities, pushing violence into hyperbolic slapstick, or
forcing its repetition until it becomes monotonous” (96). Tam’s hyperliteracy thus both represents and
critiques America’s construction of him as a “foreign” “linguistic orphan,”
while it also argues for his legitimacy by demonstrating his social and
cultural literacy (i.e., knowledge of other types of social and cultural
discourses). Though she does not
identify it in rhetorical terms, Josephine Lee views the Asian American actor’s
performance of stereotype as rhetoric because the actors are “playing
stereotypes” out of “choice” or “compulsion”; that is, the playing of
stereotypes must not be viewed as “mere performance,” but rather as a kind of
“historicizing” that “works to provide a specific context for [the]
performances, thus revealing the anxiety inherent in the historical encounters
that call them into being” (98).
Chin further complicates the
relationship between the Asian raced body and “American” English in his
construction of Charley Popcorn as a speaking agent. Upon meeting Tam for the first time, Charley
comments, “The way you talked, why, I took you for colored over the phone”
(40). By expressing confusion over Tam’s
speech, Charley’s character identifies and acknowledges a concern that Chin’s
audiences share. Like Henry in Native Speaker, whose face does not match his voice, Tam is misrecognized and in
fact inscribed as illegitimate precisely because neither his “black American”
nor his other voices match his face.
Like many of the audience members, Charley Popcorn has trouble
identifying Tam and Kenji as “Americans,” nor can he imagine them speaking
English without an accent. After Tam
tells him “I’m an American citizen,” Popcorn replies, “You don’t talk like a
Chinese, do ya?” (40). Through such
speaking agents, Chin draw in his audiences by giving them characters with whom
to identify, and then subverts those identifications by illustrating that the
characters with whom they relate are on as unstable ground as Tam himself. In effect, through his use of multiple voices
and accents and characters with questionable ethnic backgrounds, Chin
challenges dominant culture’s racial discourse and constructs, destabilizing
any notions of a universal national identity or a normative literacy.
In his construction of Tam, Chin
has created a figure who is lost precisely because he feels he has no
community, or that the community to which he ostensibly belongs is “fake” since
it was created by dominant white culture.
In contrast to the rhetorical situations of Kang’s and Bulosan’s texts,
Chin is responding to an American history and culture that has effectively
erased the contributions of Americans of Asian descent. As a second-generation Chinese American, Tam
legally belongs to this history and culture, and yet he is aware that as an
Asian American he is denied recognition as a contributor to this history and
culture. Tam alludes to this paradox in
his conversation with Lee about his kids.
He tells her, “I should leave them something … I should have done some
THING. One thing I’ve done alone, with
all my heart. A gift. Not revenge.
But they’ve already forgotten me.
They got a new, ambitious, successful, go-for-bucks, superior white
daddy” (27). And of the man his kids
call “daddy,” Tam confesses, “I hear he’s even a better writer than me”
(27). Finally, in an act that symbolizes
Tam’s feelings of inferiority at not being able to contribute to cultural
production by authoring or “fathering” a text (Chu), the Lone Ranger (in Tam’s
dream/reflection) shoots him in the hand, thereby symbolically destroying his
ability to write.
Tam’s fascination with the Lone
Ranger, whose mask, he believed as a child, hid his “slanty” Asian eyes, also
speaks to Tam’s experiences as a second-generation Chinese American. The Lone Ranger reveals himself to be a
racist white man who urges Tam and Kenji to be “honorary whites”: “In your old
age, as it were in your legendary childhood, in the name of Helen Keller, Pearl
Buck, and Charlie Chan, kiss my ass, know thou that it be white, and go thou
happy in honorary whiteness forever and ever, preserving your culture, AMEN”
(37). By bestowing on them “honorary
whiteness” and separating their culture from his own, the Lone Ranger refutes
Tam’s belief, held since childhood, that he could claim American culture as his
own. Chin’s use of the Lone Ranger to
argue this point is particularly effective because the Ranger is a
quintessential American male icon, a figure with whom all (especially male)
American audiences can identify.
As in previous chapters, at the same
time that Chin critiques dominant culture’s systematic racialization and
exclusion of Asian Americans from American cultural production and history, he
also argues for his own Americanness through the act of writing. Though his mythic hero Tam has no language to
call his own, Chin establishes himself as an agent of cultural production
through his critique and demonstrated knowledge of American history and
culture. In other words, Chin performs
through his literacy act that which Tam cannot.
I turn now to an examination of the
arguments that author Chang-rae Lee and his narrator-protagonist Henry Park
make about literacy and citizenship. As
with Chin and Tam, Lee and Henry’s literacy acts can be read as direct
responses to America’s construction of them as illegitimate Others. Through the rhetorical processes of
interpellation and identification as well as acts of hyperliteracy, both Lee
and Henry illustrate the shifting, ambivalent ground of identification while
creating the possibility of transforming readers’ ideologies about race,
literacy and U.S. citizenship.
Chapter 4: Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker
Introduction
Native
Speaker revolves around Henry Park’s, the narrator-protagonist’s, coming to
terms with his identity as a second-generation Korean American spy. The novel reads like a confession as Henry
recounts and reflects on his actions and identity as husband to his white American
wife Lelia, father to a “half-breed” child named Mitt, son of a Korean-born
immigrant, and mole for an independent intelligence agency that deals
specifically with “ethnic minorities.”
When he is assigned to spy on a rising Korean American politician, John
Kwang, Henry begins to question his own legitimacy as an American.
As a novel that foregrounds issues
of language acquisition, proficiency and use, Native Speaker falls under the category of “literacy
narrative.” Though it has not been
written about or discussed as such, Native
Speaker raises important and complex questions regarding literacy in
English and the articulation of Asian American subjectivity. Specifically, like Chickencoop, it inquires into the possibility of a legitimate Asian
American speaking subject and then destroys any hope for such a possibility
through the narrator-protagonist’s literacy acts. I argue that in his effort to suppress his
“Asianness,” Henry becomes hyperliterate, so much so that he ends up betraying
himself by revealing the very “Asianness” he aims to suppress. By constructing Henry as hyperliterate in his
meticulous use of language and his ability to move between different discursive
worlds, Lee ties his narrator-protagonist’s literacy practices to his
racialized, gendered, and classed identity.
Like Tam Lum, Henry Park realizes that, as an Asian American, he has no
legitimate claim on the English language.
And like Tam, Henry is “caught in a linguistic orphanhood,” “encouraged
to celebrate the dominant language and culture” and then “denied ownership of
both” (Li 39). Moreover, by addressing
the “different Englishes” spoken by the immigrants in his novel’s New York
setting, Lee questions what the future holds for these newly arrived peoples as
well as for those who have been in the country for years and who speak a kind
of pidgin English or “borderland Discourse,” or speak no English at all.
While Tam’s hyperliteracy is
enacted by his volubility and use of multiple accents and discourses, Henry’s
hyperliteracy is enacted by speaking and writing impeccable English. The historical contexts undergirding the
production of these texts help to illuminate the differences in Chin’s and
Lee’s strategies. As I discuss in the
previous chapter, as a product of the cultural nationalist movement of the
1960s and 1970s, and as a text that was written by one of the staunchest
proponents of that movement, Chickencoop
suggests, albeit in strictly masculinist terms, that there is a “real” Chinese
American history and identity. By
contrast, Native Speaker presents a
much more heterogeneous and multiracial portrayal of Asian America in its
depiction of Ahjuma (the woman who
comes to America from Korea to help care for Henry and his father when Henry’s
mother dies); various Asian immigrant communities in New York; the concomitant
“ethnic espionage” work that these communities engender; and John Kwang’s
dealings with these communities as city councilman. Native
Speaker thus engages recent trends in immigration and globalization as well
as with the arguably problematic way in which America deals with the changing
face of the nation.
Critical
Reception
Lee’s novel, published nearly three
decades after the Civil Rights and cultural nationalist movements, appeals to
an audience that, while perhaps better versed in multiculturalism than Chin’s
1970s audiences, is also experiencing anxiety over the increasing number of
immigrants from countries in Asia, the Americas, Eastern Europe, and Africa, as
well as undocumented workers from Mexico and Latin America—the latter of which
has caused increased anxiety, to which debates surrounding Proposition 187
attest.76 Lee may seem to
target a wider audience than Chin by writing a novel that fits the conventions
with which his readers are more comfortable and familiar—the spy genre—but as I
demonstrate below, an examination of his language and literacy practices
reveals that, in fact, he is writing to a highly educated and elite audience
and therefore excluding other readers who may hail from different (i.e., less
privileged) socioeconomic backgrounds.
The audiences to whom I am referring here include both real readers and
fictional audiences constructed by the author.
Critical reception of the novel has
focused on a number of topics, including Lee’s examination of the difficulties
faced by non-native English speakers in the U.S.; the effectiveness or
ineffectiveness of using the spy genre to tell an immigrant story; Lee’s prose
style; his examination of the “immigrant myth”; the interracial relationship
between Henry and his wife Lelia; and his depictions of Asian immigrants and
Korean Americans.77 While
nearly all critics acknowledge the relationship between Henry’s proficiency with
language (and his evasive “Henryspeak,” as Lelia calls it) and his identity as
a Korean American spy, few focus their complete attention on this aspect of the
novel. Mary Jane Hurst conducts what she
calls a “case study” of the relationship between language, gender, and
community in Lee’s Native Speaker. Hurst speaks as a scholar in the field of
linguistics, and she argues for the value of linguistic analyses of literature
because the two disciplines, to her mind, share the same cultural contexts and
thus are closely connected. Hurst’s
“case study” resembles a literary analysis in its examination of the symbolism
of Henry’s use/misuse/nonuse of language and the effects that this has on his
personal life in his relationship with his wife and in his job as a spy. In her examination of Henry’s tactic of
“distancing” or “masking” through language, she comes closest to combining
linguistic and rhetorical analysis with literary analysis. However, Hurst maintains her focus on the
theme of language use to express one’s identity or individuality rather than
analyzing the particularities of this form of language and the effects that it
has on Lee’s readers. Hers is a study in
social linguistics, an exploration of how language is used in a social context
in Native Speaker and what this means
for the characters involved and their relationships to the community.
While I, too, value a
socio-cultural approach to studying language, I also believe that an integral
component of such an analysis is the impact the language use has on its larger
audience—the readers of the text. Just
as we can analyze the ways in which Henry and John Kwang use language to
negotiate and argue for their respective places in the community, so too can we
analyze the ways in which Chang-rae Lee uses language to influence or persuade
his readers. Unlike Chickencoop, East Goes West,
and America Is in the Heart, Native Speaker was written more recently
(1995) and so cannot speak to the contemporaneous audiences of Chin’s,
Bulosan’s or Kang’s texts. Still,
considering this text alongside the early immigrant narratives helps to
illuminate the historical trajectory of conceptualizations of citizenship as it
relates to literacy and race.
Native Speaker and Its Sociohistorical
Context
I want to emphasize again the
importance in any rhetorical study of identifying the situation in which
rhetoric occurs or, rather, the situation out of which rhetoric evolves. Viewed from this situational perspective, Native Speaker can be read as a response
to Americans’ ambivalence about the increasing number of immigrants in this
country. According to You-me Park and
Gayle Wald, Native Speaker was
produced during a “moment of perceived crisis … when anti-immigration
sentiments were being fueled by collective anxiety about limited resources and
job opportunities for ‘legitimate’ subject-citizens” (609). As I mentioned earlier, the enormous influx
of both documented and undocumented immigrants and refugees in the last four decades
resulting, in part, from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which
eliminated national-origin quotas, incited fears and anxieties that have since
manifested themselves in both juridical and sociocultural ways.78 For example, both the 1990 Immigration Act
and Proposition 187 (passed in 1994) called for an increase in the border
patrol between California and
Mexico in an effort to restrict illegal
immigration. Lowe notes that the latter
policy, in its “attempts to deny schooling and medical care to illegal
immigrants” is “[r]eminiscent of the nineteenth-century laws barring Chinese
from naturalization, education, and safe working conditions” (20). Examples of America’s anxiety about Asian
immigrants abound, one recently publicized being the indictment of Taiwanese
immigrant Dr. Wen Ho Lee. Allegations
that Asian immigrants are operating as “sleeper spies” indicate how the
“foreignness” of Asians is so deeply embedded in the imagination of the nation.
As history has taught us, anxieties
about Asians have existed since the nineteenth century when Asian immigrants
were seen as a “yellow peril” threatening to replace European immigrants in the
work force. For contemporary readers,
however, the perception of the Asian immigrant has been influenced by other
factors, including immigrant exclusion laws; the internment of Americans of
Japanese ancestry during World War II;79 U.S. political, military,
and economic involvement in Asia; and, most recently, for some South Asians,
the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and resulting anti-terrorism
legislation. Lee’s novel, in its
portrayal of immigrant communities in New York, engages with U.S. immigrant
history, including conditions in Asia that have resulted in both voluntary and
involuntary migration.
As
Sucheng Chan reminds us, the movement of Filipino, South Korean, and
Vietnamese immigrants to the U.S.
“has been part of a larger ‘American connection’” to
Asia (149). Ties between the U.S. and the Philippines
have remained strong since the
U.S. colonized the archipelago in 1898. Not only do most educated Filipinos speak
English, as English has become the language of instruction in secondary schools
and universities, but the very presence of the (now former) Clark and Subic Bay
U.S. military bases along with infiltrations of American popular culture have
accustomed most Filipinos to “American” ways of life. These factors, in addition to the political
instability of the Philippines, the unequal distribution of income and wealth,
and overpopulation have all contributed to Filipino migration to the U.S. (Chan
149).
South Koreans, though not
“postcolonial” in the same way as Filipino Americans, also have close political
ties with the United States as a result of U.S. involvement in the Korean War
and the continued U.S. military presence on the peninsula. According to
Chan, the South Korean government has, since 1962, actively
encouraged emigration due to overpopulation in Seoul. The government also recognizes that
emigration is beneficial to the economy (151).
In addition to the ethnic groups
listed above, refugees from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam have been immigrating to
the U.S. since the end of the Vietnam War, although unlike other immigrants,
many have immigrated involuntarily and have also risked their lives trying to
escape. Moreover, according to Evelyn
Hu-Dehart, these “traumatized” immigrants often do not arrive with other family
members, and they generally do not come equipped with the “social skills” and
“human capital” that would assist them in their struggle to adapt to American
society (17). She explains how KaYing
Yang, executive director of the Women’s Association of Hmong and Lao in St.
Paul, Minnesota does not envision the Hmong and Lao presence in America as an
indication of improved U.S.-Asia relations, but rather she envisions them as
“forever refugees” (18). According to
the 2000 Census, the total number of Southeast Asian Americans is over 1.8
million, including approximately 1 million Vietnamese, 185,000 Hmong, 206,000
Cambodians, and 198,000 Laotians (Niedzwiecki and Duong 6).
Additionally, immigrants from
China, Taiwan, and India have arrived in large numbers due to the 1965
Immigration Act, while Japan is “the only Asian country with close ties to the
United States that has not sent large
numbers of people to America since 1965.”
Chan writes that this low figure is due to the fact that Japan is an
industrialized nation and can therefore provide an adequate lifestyle for its
citizens (151).
The 2000 Census shows that Asian
Americans now account for between 3 and 4 percent of the nation’s population,
numbering over 10 million. In just one
decade, between 1990 and 2000, the population of Asian Americans grew by 48
percent nationwide, second only to Latinos.
In terms of ethnicity, Chinese Americans comprise the largest ethnic
group at 2.4 million, while Filipino Americans number at 1.9 million, Asian
Indian Americans at 1.7 million, Vietnamese Americans at 1.1 million, Korean
Americans at 1.0 million, and Japanese Americans at 800,000 (Wu 20). It is estimated that the Asian American
population will grow from roughly 10 million in 2000 to 34 million in 2050—an
increase of about 4 percent of the population nationwide (Zhou 69). Chang-rae Lee is one of the immigrants who
arrived in the U.S. post 1965. As a
Korean American immigrant, Lee is a postcolonial
subject of the both the Japanese and U.S. empires. Though Korea was never a U.S. colony, the
United States’ political and military involvement on the peninsula since its
independence from Japan has effectively made South Korea a neocolony. Chungmoo Choi argues that the United States’
presence in South Korea is a “‘postcolonial’ colonialism,” a “colonization of
consciousness”: “American mass culture towered over Korea’s desolate cultural
landscape as South Korea became one of the most heavily armed fortresses of the
vast American empire. To live in this
state of internal displacement and external dependency is to live in a state of
colonialism” (81-82).
Although Native Speaker is situated in the U.S., identifying the ways in
which it is “postcolonial” and “transnational” helps to illuminate the subject
positionings of its characters and their literacy acts. For example, Henry’s ambivalent status as a
secondgeneration Korean American is deeply rooted in his family’s postcolonial
immigrant history and in his own experience as an American who, because of his
race, is constructed as a foreigner and a speaker of accented English. Because of his fluency in both Korean and
English, Henry can pretend to be an “illegal alien,” a newly arrived immigrant,
or an “Americanized” Korean depending on the situation or case on which he is
called to work. The goal, as his boss
Hoagland reminds him, is to speak in such a way as to gain the trust of his
ethnic immigrant “clients,” meaning the people on whom Henry is hired to
spy. He advises Henry to “[s]peak enough
so they can hear your voice and come to trust it, but no more, and no one will
think twice about who you are” (44).
Because of his race, he can also, like Frank Wu, wear many different
masks, which is precisely what makes him such a valuable spy. Significantly, Henry’s identity is very much
tied to his occupation as a spy: “I had always thought that I could be anyone,
perhaps several anyones at once. Dennis
Hoagland and his private firm had conveniently appeared at the right time,
offering the perfect vocation for the person I was” (127). We soon learn that Henry’s profession and, by
extension, his means for survival as an espionage agent is entirely reliant
upon the various postcolonial and transnational immigrant identities of his
“clients.”
That Henry so strongly identifies
with the people on whom he is instructed to spy also speaks to his ambivalent
subject positioning as reflected in his acts of literacy. For example, although Kwang emigrated from
Korea while Henry was born in the U.S., Henry sees the two of them as occupying
the same liminal position as non-native speakers of English:
[Kwang] was how I imagined a Korean would be, at least
one living in any renown. He would
stride the daises and the stages with his voice strong and clear, unafraid to
speak the language like a Puritan and like a Chinaman and like every boat
person in between. I found him most
moving and beautiful in those moments.
And whenever I hear the strains of a different English, I will still
shatter a little inside. Within every
echo from a city storefront or window, I can hear the old laments of my mother
and my father, and mine as a confused schoolboy, and then even the fitful
mumblings of our Ahjuma, the instant American inventions of her tongue. They speak to me, as John Kwang could always,
not simply in new accents or notes but in the ancient untold music of a newcomer’s
heart, sonorous with longing and hope.
(304)
Through identification and consubstantiation Henry
argues that he (as a schoolboy) was like Kwang and his parents and all the
“newcomers,” both racially and linguistically.
Yet while his hyperliteracy, his flawless, unaccented, and lyrical
language that he uses to make this claim may seem to suggest otherwise, I argue
that its very excessiveness reveals what it aims to disguise: Henry’s
non-native speaker status.
Henry’s identification with his
“clients” and with the various immigrant and refugee communities of New York
further impacts the way in which he uses language. As Henry ruminates on his U.S. citizenship
status, he considers the plight of so many others in their journey or
displacement to this nation:
By rights I am as American as
anyone…. And yet I can never stop considering the pitch and drift of [these
immigrants’] forlorn boats on the sea, the movements that must be endless,
promising nothing to their numbers within, headlong voyages scaled in a lyric
of search, like the great love of Solomon.
Yet, in the holds of those ships
there is never any singing. The people
only whisper and breathe low. Not one of
them thinks these streets are paved with gold.
This remains our own fancy. They
know more about the guns and rapes and the riots than of millionaires. They have heard stories of bands of young men
who will look for them to beat up or murder.
They know they will come here and live eight or nine to a room and earn
ten dollars a day, maybe save five. They
can figure that math, how long it will take to send for their family, how much
longer for a few carts of fruit to push, an old truck of wares, a small shop to
sell the dumplings and cakes and sweet drinks of their old land. (335)
Henry identifies with these recent immigrants;
however, as reflected in his use of “us” and “they,” he is also aware of his
privileged status as an assimilated Asian American and that, in many ways, he
is not like them at all. In fact, by
speaking for them, Henry suggests that they either cannot, or will not, speak
for themselves.
In “Do I, Too, Sing America?
Vernacular Representations and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker,” Daniel Kim remarks on what he calls a “radical
disjuncture between the language being described and the language of the
narrator” (252). He argues that the
“central irony” of Lee’s “immaculate prose style” is that it seems so removed
from the “immigrant sensibility” it strives to express:
Henry’s melancholy attaches itself to a kind of
language that he, as a wholly assimilated American subject, no longer speaks;
with every word he utters, with every elegantly turned phrase, he marks his
increasing distance from the “different English” he elegizes. While this is a novel that is attempting to
give the broken Englishes that immigrants speak the status of an American
vernacular, it can do so only through an English that seems entirely cleansed
of any defect or imperfection that would give away the non-native speaker. His is
the language that remains when every last trace of the immigrant tongue has
been scraped away. (253) While I agree
that Henry’s language distances him from the immigrants in the novel, I do not
agree with Kim that it signifies his status as “wholly assimilated”; on the
contrary, in his attempt to suppress his difference, Henry speaks such polished
English that it becomes a kind of hyperbolic gesture. I would extend Kim’s argument and suggest
that the novel does not even attempt to give broken Englishes the status of an
American vernacular. If that were the
case, Lee would have presumably allowed the immigrant characters (besides
Henry’s father and John Kwang) to speak.
By having Henry speak for the immigrants and by describing their speech
rather than allowing readers to hear their “different Englishes”—in other
words, by maximizing the use of impeccable English throughout the novel, by
using it “in excess”—Lee underscores both Henry’s inability to successfully
“pass” as a non-native speaker as well as the impossibility of a legitimate
American immigrant vernacular.
By depicting the gradual defeat of
John Kwang, an Asian immigrant on his way to becoming an esteemed political
figure in the community, alongside Henry Park’s struggle with his own identity
as a father to a mixed-race son, a husband to a white wife, and a mole for an
agency that specializes in ethnic espionage, Change-rae Lee responds to his
audiences’ fears, prejudices, anxieties, and concerns over the status of Asians
in America.
His novel suggests the futility of an Asian
immigrant’s and a second-generation Korean American’s attempts to fully
integrate into American politics, society and culture.
As I show in the analysis below,
Lee constructs a rhetorically complex novel that situates the reader alongside
the narrator as he tells his story. He
presents an ideology that readers recognize as part of their own belief
system. Lee then attempts to disrupt
readers’ positionings by persuading them that the very ideology with which they
identified in the first few pages of the novel is precisely the ideology that
has cast Asian Americans as “almost, but not quite” American. In other words, rhetorical analysis helps us
see how Native Speaker becomes the
“site of an ambivalent identification” (Bhabha 167), through which cultural
difference is articulated and whereby the contradictions of American democracy
are enunciated and negotiated.
Literacy
as Capital
Like those in New Literacy Studies,
Pierre Bourdieu is interested in linguistic exchanges for what they tell us
about society, history, and culture—in short, for what they tell us about
ourselves. Like Bakhtin, he is very much
interested in examining the socio-historical conditions in which languages
evolve. And like James Gee, Bourdieu
emphasizes the importance of understanding the situated nature of literacies
and the power relations that determine not just who gets to speak, but under
what circumstances or in which social situations they are able to speak so that
they will be heard. His views on speech
acts and their social conditions resonate with my study of the kinds of speech
acts we see operating in Native Speaker. He writes, “the efficacy of an utterance, the
power of conviction which is granted to it, depends on the pronunciation (and secondarily the vocabulary) of the person who
utters it” (70). Lee’s narrator Henry
Park is well aware of the “power and conviction” of utterances that are pronounced
correctly, but he is also aware that the “efficacy” of an utterance has as
much, if not more, to do with the person
who is uttering it. Bourdieu also
acknowledges the significance of the position of the speaker and emphasizes the
role that his or her social positioning plays in the production of discourses:
… the use of language, the manner as much as the
substance of discourse, depends on the social position of the speaker, which
governs the access he can have to the language of the institution, that is, to
the official, orthodox and legitimate speech.
It is the access to the legitimate instruments of expression, and
therefore the participation in the authority of the institution, which makes all the difference—irreducible to
discourse as such—between the straightforward imposture of masqueraders, who
disguise a performative utterance as a descriptive or constative statement, and
the authorized imposture of those who do the same thing with the authorization
and the authority of an institution.
(109)
Bourdieu’s focus on social position as a marker of
one’s discourse is relevant to my study of Native
Speaker because Henry speaks (and narrates with) the language of an
intellectual. His speech is what
Bourdieu would call an “authorized imposture” because it is the language of the
educational system in which he was reared.
However, Bourdieu fails to address the specifically racialized or
ethnicized identity of the speaker and how that impacts the force or conviction
of the utterance, although he does acknowledge the role that one’s body plays
in the internally persuasive discourse of one’s “social worth”: The sense of
the value of one’s own linguistic products is a fundamental dimension of the
sense of knowing the place which one occupies in the
social space.
One’s original relation with different markets and the experience of the
sanctions applied to one’s own productions, together with the experience of the
price attributed to one’s own body, are doubtless some of the mediations which
help to constitute that sense of one’s
own social worth which governs the practical relation to different markets
(shyness, confidence, etc.) and, more generally, one’s whole physical posture
in the social world. (82)
In Bourdieu’s terms then, Henry’s experiences with “different
markets” and even the price of one’s voice and body has made Henry acutely
aware of his racialized and ambivalent physical presence and “posture in the
social world,” which is precisely what causes him to be hyperliterate.80
By looking closely at Henry’s
literacy practices we see how he adopts the rhetoric of belonging to an
American upper class (through his demonstrated vocabulary and articulateness,
or his “linguistic capital”) and yet simultaneously (if we read his
articulations as hyperliterate) critiques the idea that full proficiency, even
mastery of English, will make one any more American or endow one with “symbolic
capital.” Through the rhetorical
processes of interpellation and identification, Henry positions his readers as
voyeurs, like himself, and establishes a close relationship with them in order
to then subvert their ideologies by making them question their
assumptions/ideologies about literacy and its relationship to race and U.S.
citizenship.
Interpellation
and Identification
Using strategies of interpellation
and identification, Lee constructs a critique of America by couching his
discourse in the genre and language of the spy novel. His choice of genre is closely connected with
his other rhetorical strategies as it interpellates readers in a way that is
common to all spy novels. In other
words, the role in which Lee casts his readers requires that they position
themselves alongside the narrator as spectator or voyeur. That is, readers are called upon by the
discourse to become investigators in much the same way as the spy in the spy
novel. Choosing to write in this genre
is itself a rhetorical tactic because it argues for Lee’s Americanness in the
same way that writing in the bildungsroman
form did for Kang and Bulosan. Lee
demonstrates his cultural literacy by writing in this popular form and hence he
gains “symbolic capital” through the production of his work. As with the other authors’ strategies which I
discuss in this dissertation, Lee’s strategy functions on two different (and
conflicting) levels. While on the one
hand Lee gains legitimacy or “symbolic capital” through the act of writing, his
novel functions rhetorically to persuade readers that his Asian American
narratorprotagonist, and by extension other “real” (i.e., nonfictional) Asian
Americans, are not in fact viewed in the popular imagination as legitimate
“American” subjects. Interpellation, the term coined by Louis
Althusser to describe the process by which subjects are “hailed” or formed as
subjects through ideology, can also be used, in a modified form, to describe
the process by which a rhetor establishes his/her identity with an
audience. Although for Althusser,
individuals become subjects in
ideology, I use his term here to describe the rhetorical process of persuading
a reader or listener to adopt another ideology.
In other words, the act of interpellation, as I use the term, is
rhetorical in the sense that the subject is hailed as something other than what
he/she already was and is therefore capable of being persuaded. In literature, readers are interpellated in
many different ways, the most obvious being through the form of direct
address. Lee uses this form in Native Speaker as a way of bringing his
readers into the story and making them complicit in the narrative
performance. Using direct address, he
tells his readers at the end of the first chapter, just seven pages into the
novel, And yet you may know me. I am an amiable man. I can be most personable, if not charming,
and whatever I possess in this life is more or less the result of a talent I
have for making you feel good about yourself when you are with me. In this sense I am not a seducer. I am hardly seen. I won’t speak untruths to you, I won’t pass
easy compliments or odious offerings of flattery. I make do with on-hand materials, what I can
chip out of you, your natural ore. Then
I fuel the fire of your most secret vanity.
(7)
Though on the surface Henry seems to be referencing
his work as a spy and addressing an ambiguous universal audience, I read this
passage as a completely candid description of the very interpellation that he
is enacting through his address. The
illocutionary force of the speech act lies in his warning that he is
interpellating his readers as complicit in America’s construction of him. We see by novel’s end that Henry has kept his
word. He makes readers feel good about
themselves through a process of identification; he remains honest to them
throughout (or so he claims, and we have no reason to doubt him); and he
“fuel[s] the fire of [their] most secret vanity” by demonstrating to his
readers in the end that they are partly responsible for his acts of
betrayal.
Henry directly addresses his readers
at another pivotal moment towards the end of novel when he admits to them that
he has betrayed one of his own. He
narrates, But I and my kind possess another dimension. We will learn every lesson of accent and
idiom, we will dismantle every last pretense and practice you hold, noble as
well as ruinous. You can keep nothing
safe from our eyes and ears. This is
your own history. We are your most
perilous and dutiful brethren, the song of our hearts at once furious and
sad. For only you could grant me these
lyrical modes. I call them back to
you. Here is the sole talent I ever
dared nurture. Here is all of my
American education. (320)
It should first be noted that direct address is used
infrequently in the novel and as such the occasions on which it is used must be
studied carefully. Their positioning in
the novel, as we shall see, is crucial to bringing about the effect of
transforming readers’ ideologies. As I
mentioned above, Henry first directly addresses his audience in the opening
pages of the novel. I argued that the
effect of this address was twofold: while it encourages readers to identify
with him and to see him as a credible narrator, it also interpellates them as
complicit in America’s construction of him as a hybrid, illegitimate
subject. However, readers are not aware
of this at the time because he is simply trying to establish a relationship
with them. It is only at the end of the
novel, when Henry himself admits to the awareness of his interstitial identity
and readers have already been interpellated, that he can challenge their role
in constructing him as a liminal subject.
It is here that Lee makes his harshest critique by suggesting that
America has taught Henry that in order to succeed and to be accepted, he must
“learn every lesson of accent and idiom.”
The irony is that no matter how educated Henry is, no matter how
proficiently or eloquently he speaks, he will always be an illegitimate, “false
speaker of language” (6).
Like interpellation, identification
is an act that transforms readers (or listeners) in some way that enables them
to think, act, speak, or see the world differently—and for others to see them
differently—simply because of this transformation. For Burke, all acts of persuasion, all forms
of human communication, or “symbolic action” as he calls it, are essentially
acts of identification. Furthermore,
Burke notes that in being identified with another person, one is also
“consubstantial” with that person. In
other words, they share a substance—“sensations, concepts, images, ideas,
attitudes” (181), etc.—but remain unique individuals.
Whether intentional or not,
Lee’s/Henry’s use of this strategy is effective on many levels. Henry uses a strategy of identification with
his readers by writing a confessional of sorts, by admitting to his readers that
he lied to Lelia. He tells us, “I will
speak the evidence now” (6), and proceeds to disclose the details of his
personal life, including his gravest acts of betrayal. Admitting these faults gains him the trust of
his audience that he will be a reliable narrator. Once again, readers become the voyeurs of his
life of betrayal as they read his confessional.
An identification also occurs through Henry’s use of impeccable English
as he convinces his audience that he has sufficiently assimilated or “mastered”
the language and that he is part of an educated, elite class.
Henry draws a clear distinction, as
early as his adolescence, between his own “educated” English and his father’s
limited proficiency. Recalling an
incident in which his parents were arguing over finances, Henry describes how
he interrupted their argument and started yelling at his father: “I kept at him
anyway, using the biggest words I knew … school words like ‘socio-economic’ and
‘intangible,’ anything I could lift from my dizzy burning thoughts and hurl
against him” (63). Already Henry has
learned the power of his acquired language to mark him as superior. He has also learned how language can function
as a disguise as he recalls a moment from his childhood in which his father
tried to show him off to his customers by urging him to speak “some
Shakespeare words,” as though the more American they sounded the more American they actually were.
Henry explains,
Instead, and only in part to spite him, I grunted my
best Korean to the other men. I saw that if I just kept speaking the
language of our work the customers didn’t seem to see me. I wasn’t there. They didn’t look at me. I was a comely shadow who didn’t threaten
them. (53)
This particular confession is significant because it
helps us see the formation of Henry’s ideological consciousness. He learns from a very early age how
profitable—in the economic, cultural and symbolic senses—English proficiency
can be, and he learns how language, uttered in the appropriate context, can
make one invisible. It is only later in
life that he realizes that, despite how well he manipulates his tongue, his
racialized body will forever prevent him from be able to hide amongst his
fellow Americans.
By novel’s end, we come to realize
that Henry’s racial and cultural betrayal of John Kwang is juxtaposed with his
wife’s betrayal of him by revealing his non-native speaker status. Lelia, a speech therapist, notices on their
first meeting that he is not a “native speaker,” identifying him from the
outset of the novel as a fraud. Lelia
says that it is not his accent that gives him away but rather how carefully he
constructs the sounds of his syllables.
She tells him, “‘You speak perfectly, of course. I mean if we were talking on the phone I
wouldn’t think twice.’” Henry suggests
that her comment has racial implications: “‘You mean it’s my face,’” he tells
her. She responds, “‘No, it’s not
that.... Your face is part of the equation, but not in the way you’re thinking.
You look like someone listening to himself. You pay attention to what you’re
doing.’” Lelia, who refers to herself as
“an average white girl” with “no mystery” (10) establishes herself here as the
“standard-bearer” of language (12), assuming an authority over Henry, a foreign
“mystery.”
Lelia assumes this power over Henry
from the outset of the novel as she constructs a list of adjectives to describe
him and to justify why she has left him.
She includes the descriptors “surreptitious,” “illegal alien,”
“emotional alien,” “Yellow peril,”
“neo-American,” “stranger,” “traitor,” and “spy” (5),
effectively hailing him as illegitimate.
While Henry’s profession requires that he change his identity according
to the job or how others wish to perceive him, Lelia’s construction and
perception of him is perhaps the most significant as Lelia’s role, we are told,
is to be the “standard bearer.” That
Henry is “immediately drawn to her” when they first meet because “she could
really speak” (10) is suggestive of both Henry’s self-consciousness about his
own fluency or proficiency with language and his internalization of mainstream
American ideology that privileges accentless speech and that equates whiteness
with “standard” English. Henry’s complicity
in racializing literacy is emphasized in his descriptions of nearly every white
female character in the novel: Lelia’s whiteness and ability to “execute” the
language; Mrs. Albrecht, the “ancient chalk-white woman” who “taught [him] with
a polished fruitwood stick” (233); the girl in his elementary school class,
Alice Eckles, whose “words forming so punctiliously on her lips” he tried to
mimic; and his remedial speech teacher whose “mottled milky skin” on her neck
was always “damp with the sweat of other palms” as she instructed her students
to feel the vibrations of certain sounds.
As Crystal Parikh notes, the act of offering up Lelia’s body “as an
instrument through which [the children] might be domesticated” (275) reinforces
the connection between whiteness and language, the racialized body and the act
of articulation.
When Lelia identifies Henry as a
non-native speaker she is referring to his enunciation of words—something we
cannot hear as readers—yet her betrayal of him is nonetheless thematically and
rhetorically significant. For not only
does his enunciation reveal his non-native speaker status but so does his
writing. Early in the novel he describes
the reports he writes on John Kwang as “an unbearable encroachment,” “an
exposure of a different order, as if [he] were offering a private fact about
[his] father or mother to a complete stranger” (147). In writing Kwang’s story—using a literacy
practice that seemingly constructs Henry as a participant in American
culture—Henry unwittingly reveals himself as an outsider like John Kwang. He tells us, “In every betrayal dwells a
self-betrayal, which brings you that much closer to a reckoning” (314). “This forever,” he confesses, “is my burden
to bear” (320). The “sole talent [he]
ever dared nurture”—which he claims to have learned from his “American
education” and which he hones in his profession as a spy—is the survival tactic
of betrayal and exploitation—a not-so-subtle indictment of America and its
“ugly immigrant truth” (319).
Other moments in the novel suggest
that Lee is in fact critiquing America rather than reifying the American
dream. For example, after Henry has been
assigned to spy on John Kwang, he talks about the reports that he has collected
and will continue to collect on the rising politician. In one scene, he imagines “one more version”
of Kwang that he wants to write for his boss, Dennis Hoagland. Henry says that in this report he would
detail
[w]here [Kwang] first went to a real school and
learned to read and write and speak his new home language. And where he began to think of America as a
part of him, maybe even his, and this for me was the crucial leap of his
character, deep flaw or not, the leap of his identity no one in our work would
find valuable but me. (211)
Though Henry refrains from passing judgment on Kwang’s
“crucial leap” of character, the fact of Kwang’s failure to “belong”—that he
naively saw America “as part of him” when America did not see him as part of
her—suggests a critique of America.
Kwang’s job as a city councilman
requires that he speak the language of politics and that he identify with the
immigrant communities he claims to represent.
However, his ultimate downfall, due to the exposure of his illegal
fund-raising tactics, and return to Korea suggests that survival in America for
an Asian immigrant politician requires more than knowing the language of
politics. While Kwang may claim
Americanness through his political speak, ultimately America dictates whether
or not he “belongs.” At the end of the
novel when Henry is touring the Kwang household he asks the realtor who “used
to live in such a grand place.” America,
as the realtor indicates, has decided that he does not belong. She tells Henry that they were “foreigners”
and that they returned to “their country” (347). By constructing Kwang as a public speaker
capable of engaging audiences of all colors, national origins, or religions,
Lee asks readers to consider the possibilities of an Asian American political
figure who could represent such a diverse constituency. However, Lee destroys any hope for the
possibility of such a figure by narrativizing Kwang’s subsequent downfall.
Both Henry and Kwang claim
membership in the nation through their voices and literacy practices. Henry, in his eagerness to prove his literacy
so as not to be identified as Other, becomes hyperliterate to the extent that
his deliberateness with English betrays him.
Henry is so self-conscious about his speech that he projects onto John
Kwang his anxiety that he will somehow reveal his “foreign,” non-native speaker
status. He narrates, “For despite how
well [Kwang] spoke, how perfectly he moved through the sounds of his words, I
kept listening for the errant tone, the flag, the minor mistake that would tell
of his original race” (179). Henry is
complicit here in the assumption that the face should match the voice. He has internalized the racist belief that
Asian Americans are foreign and hence will invariably speak with an
accent. He admits,
I couldn’t help but think there was a mysterious
dubbing going on, the very idea I wouldn’t give quarter to when I would speak
to strangers, the checkout girl, the mechanic, the professor, their faces dully
awaiting my real speech, my truer talk and voice. When I was young I’d look in the mirror and
address it, as if daring the boy there; I would say something dead and normal,
like, ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance,’ and I could barely convince myself
that it was I who was talking.
(179-80)
That Henry is aware of his complicity, anxiety, and
hyperliteracy adds to the rhetorical force of the novel. Henry establishes his ethos as a believable
yet uncritical narrator in scenes such as the one described above. But perhaps more importantly, he functions
here as a speaking agent for his readers.
By asking himself the very questions his readers might ask if they were
listening to a Korean American politician speak (that is, wondering when he
would make the “minor mistake that would tell of his original race”), he
appeals to his readers sensibilities and then later subverts their ideologies
by demonstrating to them that he is no different from Kwang in the eyes of
Americans.
Lee closes his novel with yet
another indictment of America as he portrays Henry assisting his wife with an
ESL lesson. While Lelia does the actual
instruction, Henry dons a mask and acts as “the Speech Monster,” a creature who
simply responds through comic gesture to the children’s recitations. As the children leave, both Lelia and Henry
interpellate the children as Americans by naming and labeling each student with
a sticker. Lelia hails them as “good
citizens” as she bids them on their way, furthering the belief that one must
learn English to be perceived as fully American. But as the last line of the novel suggests,
no degree of literacy will make Asian Americans or Asian immigrants any more
American. Henry identifies with the
students, not Lelia, when he tells us, “I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and
native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are” (349). As the “standard bearer” of language, Lelia
has the power to name and the power to grant or deny her students’ and
husband’s legitimacies based on their literacies.
“Linguistic Survival”
In her book Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Judith Butler
examines language as action by focusing on the use of utterances not just to
interpellate but also to inflict pain and to excite. She uses the term “linguistic survival” as a
way of highlighting the connection between “linguistic injury” and “physical
injury.” She writes, “To claim that
language injures or, to cite the phrase used by Richard Delgado and Mari
Matsuda, that ‘words wound’ is to combine linguistic and physical vocabularies.
The use of a term such as ‘wound’ suggests that language can act in ways that
parallel the infliction of physical pain and injury” (4). While Butler uses the term “linguistic
survival” to refer to the ways in which the body is not only threatened by but
sustains itself through language, the term can also be used more broadly to
refer, for example, to the ways in which people who are immersed in a culture
different from their own “survive” (i.e., get by) in the new culture or
society. The term might also be applied
to non-native speakers who are “linguistically vulnerable” both in the sense in
which Butler uses the term (i.e., they are often the targets of racial
epithets) and in the sense that their very survival in America is contingent
upon their ability to speak English.
Butler writes, “‘linguistic survival’ implies that a certain kind of
surviving takes place in language” (4), meaning that to be fully literate and
to speak without an accent enables one to enjoy certain rights and
privileges. Conversely, to not be fully
literate and/or to speak with an accent prohibits one from enjoying the
benefits of full membership in American society and may even cost you your
citizenship status.
Although the direct cause of his
retreat to Korea has nothing to do with his language ability, John Kwang’s
“failure” is symbolically paralleled by his loss of control over his
speech. At one moment towards the end of
the novel, Kwang becomes angry at Sherrie and begins yelling at her in a kind
of pidgin English: Henry narrates, “He’s yelling at the top of his voice. His accent is somehow broken, it comes out
strained, too loud. ‘Maybe you leave!
Take the goddamn car key! Park Byong-go shih, it will please me if
you will drive her home, right now!’” (309).
Lee’s use of Kwang’s deteriorating English as evidence of his gradual
breakdown serves to illustrate the value our culture places on speaking
“standard” English. Kwang’s downfall
bolsters Henry’s fear of becoming victim to the same fate—he explains, “I am
here for the hope of his identity, which may also be mine, who he has been on a
public scale when the rest of us wanted only security in the tiny dollar-shops
and churches of our lives” (328). In his
identification with Kwang, Henry tells his audience (the readers of the text)
that the same fate could befall him because of their shared race. Despite his legal citizenship status, as an
Asian American he is denied the enjoyment of social equality.
For Henry Park, “survival” means
more than just being able to “pass” as a native speaker of English. Because Henry’s job as a spy requires that he
disguise himself in order to navigate different communities, he must adapt
himself linguistically to the communities he infiltrates lest his “true”
identity be revealed. “Speak enough so
they can hear your voice and come to trust it,” Hoagland tells him, “but no
more, and no one will think twice about who you are” (44). As Parikh notes, Henry’s voice “links him to
a class that has ‘made it,’ has successfully assimilated to the dominant
language and culture” (276), and yet, as my reading suggests, the reality is
that he has not made it—he will forever be a linguistic fraud.
The
Award-winning Author
While my analysis has so far focused
on the characters in the novel and the readers of the text, I have not
forgotten the author’s role and strategies in constructing this narrative of
literacy. Because, like Tam and Chin, I
read Henry as Lee’s alter ego, many of the same arguments that I make about
Henry apply to Lee as well. In
particular, I am interested in Lee’s usage of highly crafted language to
critique the myths of inclusion and participation in American culture. That Lee’s debut novel received numerous
awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction, the Oregon
Book Award, and the Barnes and Nobel Discover Great New Writers Award attests
to its positive reception. In addition,
the book was included on the American Library Association Reference Service
Association’s list of “Notable Books 1993-1996,” and, according to Martin Kich,
the literary journal Granta “included
Lee in its list of the fifty best American writers under the age of forty”
(176). Lastly, and perhaps most
significantly for my study, Lee’s debut novel was considered for what a group
of New York librarians, educators, bookstore owners, and others who expressed
interest wanted to name as the book of New York in their “One Book, One City”
promotion. Their idea, modeled after
cities such as Chicago and Seattle, was to find a book that best represented
the city and to create a citywide book club.
Needless to say, the idea generated considerable debate over which book
best represented the city, was most appropriate, least offensive, etc.;
however, the idea was dissolved when they were unable to come to an agreement
over which book to use. I mention that
this honor was almost bestowed upon Chang-rae Lee because it is indicative of
how well the book was received and also why it did not reach more audiences. A New
York Times article suggested that some members of the group thought that
the novel might not be “engaging enough for high school students” (Kirkpatrick
B1).81 Lee’s attempt to reach
the widest possible audience is mirrored in John Kwang’s attempt to be the
“fervent voice in the wide chorus that is New York” (36). And, like Kwang, he is manipulating the
system by using the language and genre conventions with which his audience is
most familiar in order to forge an identification and to gain his own cultural
and symbolic capital.
Though Lee has commented that his
work reaches a very diverse audience, I argue that its language is one that is
associated with a highly educated or elite class (reflecting both Henry’s and
Lee’s upbringings) and so excludes other, less privileged audiences. Henry assures his readers that he and Lelia
are “solid” in the way of finances (2), his family having gotten “busier and
wealthier” along with the other Korean immigrant families, while Lee himself
lived in the affluent suburbs of Westchester County, New York and attended the
prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale University. Before committing to a career as a full time
writer and teacher, Lee worked for a year on Wall Street. After several years of serving as the
Director of the MFA program at Hunter College, Lee was appointed professor in
the Council of the
Humanities and the Program in Creative Writing at
Princeton University. Shortly after he
arrived at Princeton, he was told that the Princeton community had selected his
book for a new program called “Princeton Reads.” This program seems much more feasible given
the size of the community compared to the entire population of New York. But it is also more feasible given that the
Princeton community shares the same upper class language and background as Lee
and his narrator Henry. Lee’s language
puts him in conversation with this (and other) racialized white upper class
audiences and, as a result, excludes
some of his more mainstream readers. That his work has appeared in publications
such as the New Yorker, the New York Times and Gourmet magazine further suggests that his audience is comprised of
America’s educated and wealthy classes.
Whether intentional or not, Lee’s choice of language allows for
identification with a racialized white upper class audience that in turn endows
him with economic, cultural and symbolic capital. But it is also clear from the thematic
content of the novel that Lee is astutely aware that belonging to this
citizenry means more than just writing a novel in a particular language or
style. To cite James Gee again, “what is
important is not just how you say
it…but who you are and what you’re doing when you say it”
(124).
Conclusion
In the previous two chapters I show
how two very different texts—both in content and in form—have the potential to
alter readers’ ideologies about the relationship between literacy and U.S.
citizenship. Both Tam and Henry argue
that America has constructed them as “less than” even though they have proven
their legitimacy through their literacy acts.
As Asian American subjects, Tam and Henry will always occupy the space
of the in-between. This is an empowering
space to be in, however, as it is from the interstitial perspective that we can
begin to envision and enact change.
The next and final chapter examines
the use of dialect as a rhetorical strategy; however, instead of examining it
from the perspective of hyperliteracy, I focus on the particularities of how
both dominant and so-called “subordinate” languages function in the postcolonial
context/site of Hawai`i.
Conclusion: Reconstructing
Ideologies
This chapter furthers the argument
that rhetorical analysis allows us to see more clearly the ambivalence that
Bhabha suggests is a product of colonialism through an examination of Japanese
American “local” author Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s
Hanging.82 As a text that
is geographically situated in Hawai`i and written in both
“standard” English and Pidgin, Blu’s Hanging further complicates the investigation of U.S.
citizenship and subject formation as they relate to literacy. Moreover, the controversy surrounding her
work, as I discuss at length below, raises questions about the politics of
reading and writing practices and the ways in which subjectivity and nationness
inform and are informed by those practices.
It asks, in other words, that we consider critically the rhetorical and
theoretical functions of “Asian American literature” and, as well, the
ideological work that we do as readers and critics as we analyze those
functions. That the controversy around
Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s work raises questions about literacy, in terms of the ways
in which her texts are read and interpreted, as well as legitimacy, in terms of
who is authorized to speak about/write the nation/Hawai`i, points to the need
for a more extensive dialogue on the use of literacy as a theorizing framework
for the study of Asian American and local literatures, and on the
interconnections among literacy, nation, and strategies of representation.
I also argue here that reading
Yamanaka’s text as a literacy narrative opens up possibilities for analysis and
interpretation that further challenge the modern discourse of citizenship and
the dominant ideological construct of literacy that relies upon such a concept
as “standard” English. Blu’s Hanging thematizes literacy in its
juxtapositioning of Pidgin and “standard” English, but it also invites the use
of literacy as an analytic as it specifically addresses the unique and complex
colonial history of Hawai`i and its resulting racial, class, and linguistic
hierarchies. By shifting the focus to
the context of Hawai`i, we are compelled to consider the conflicting
configurations of literacy, citizenship, and nationness resulting from Hawaii’s
history and relationship with the U.S.
As a text like Blu’s Hanging
demonstrates, one’s “Americanness” in Hawai`i has been and still is largely
determined not by one’s country of birth but by one’s ability to speak
“standard” English. And yet, as both the
controversy and novel reveal, at issue is not just “Americanness” but also what
it means to identify as “local” and “Native Hawaiian” and the conflicts in
which these competing identities and nationalisms are engaged.
While my general focus is on the
multiple and various literacy acts of the author and her characters, I also
look specifically at the use of Pidgin and its rhetorical effects on the
audience and characters in the novel. I
explore the ways in which language is used in Blu’s Hanging as a form of oppression and subversion, and further
how language use in the aftermath of colonialism is marked by ambivalence. That is, Yamanaka’s and her characters’ use
of Pidgin is a performance of difference that, while “rupturing” the discourse
of colonialism by being “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 86), also has
the capability of transforming readers’ ideologies. Recognizing “Asian America” as postcolonial
and transnational and attending to other nationalisms in studies of the local
literatures and cultures of Hawai`i forces us out of an American-centered and
binary colonialist critique and encourages us to think about how the competing
anticolonial nationalisms of Native Hawaiians and locals impact one another,
and how this shift in focus can help change the way we conceive of what it
means to engage in acts of literacy as
national subjects.
Blu’s
Hanging presents us with characters who choose forms of communication and
self-representation that are deemed inappropriate or “illegitimate” by dominant
structures of power, and it is through such forms that we gain insight into
their struggle for survival; it is also through such forms that they, as
characters, gain agency as “authors of their own worlds,” as Henry Giroux so
aptly describes (17). As I have argued
in previous chapters, through the process of being confronted with alternative
literacies, readers learn to confront their own stereotypes about what it means
to write in and speak anything but the dominant language. The use of these alternative modes of
narration thus serves a rhetorical function by persuading readers to consider
the sociohistorical contexts in which the communication or act of literacy
takes place as well as encouraging readers to recognize other literacies as
legitimate.
In addition to putting pressure on
our assumptions about normative modes of discourse and narration, Blu’s Hanging also argues for the
recognition of Yamanaka as a legitimate critic of American society, culture,
and imperialism. As Patricia Chu states,
“one proves one’s Americanness by showing one’s ability to question the idea of
America, thereby fundamentally
altering that idea for everyone else” (7).
I would add to
Chu’s statement that by representing other forms of
discourse and knowledge production, Yamanaka, in ways similar to Cha and Chin,
fundamentally alters our views on the ideology of literacy and what it means to
be a “literate” “American.”
Embroiled
in Debate: Local Cultural Nationalism and the Controversy over Blu’s
Hanging
In
1998, Yamanaka received the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS)
Fiction Award for Blu’s
Hanging, but it was rescinded the following day by the Association due to
criticisms against Yamanaka for what many believed was a racist portrayal of
the character Uncle Paulo, a Filipino Hawaiian who molests the two eldest of
his four young nieces and rapes Blu at the end of the novel. The controversy around Yamanaka and her works
dates back to 1993 when her collection of poems, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, was published.83 At the time of publication, Yamanaka received
staunch criticism for her stereotypical representations of Filipinos as
oversexed miscreants, so when her second novel, Blu’s Hanging, came out, critics of her first book were not just
angry but felt justified in their claims that Yamanaka’s work was racist. With the publication of Blu’s Hanging, an even more contentious debate ensued over the
artist’s freedom of expression versus her responsibility as a
writer—particularly an ethnicized writer—not to perpetuate damaging
stereotypes.
The controversy over Yamanaka’s
fiction serves as a point of departure for my analysis because it directs
attention to the unique historical conditions from which both the controversy
and novel emerged and because it specifically addresses questions about
literacy and legitimacy—we see, for example, the divisiveness and racism within
the Asian American literary community as reading practices are ethnicized and
hierarchized. Through the starkly
different viewpoints expressed by the opposing groups in their critiques of Blu’s Hanging we also see how a “real”
reader’s identity or world view can impact the way he or she responds to the
text and thus how the same text can have different rhetorical effects depending
on the subject (audience) and context in which the text is read.
In order to better understand the
Yamanaka controversy, one must first understand the context in which her work
was produced. In her essay, “Between
Nationalisms: Hawaii’s Local Nation and Its Troubled Racial Paradise,” Candace
Fujikane explains how what she refers to as “Local cultural nationalism” “arose
very specifically as a response to the ways Eurocentric standards of
‘literature’ invalidate Local narrations of identity” (27). The imperialistic influences that both Native
Hawaiians and locals experienced and continue to experience can therefore be
viewed as creating a rhetorical situation.
In other words, the rhetoric developed by local cultural nationalists
would not exist had locals not felt threatened by U.S. imperialism. While I posit that the authors in chapters 1
and 2 are simultaneously arguing for their and/or their characters’
Americanness while critiquing American democratic ideologies, Yamanaka
simultaneously critiques American democratic ideologies while arguing for the
recognition and legitimacy of a “local” culture that is distinct from
“American” and Native Hawaiian cultures.
By viewing Yamanaka’s work in this light, we can better understand the
social, cultural, and historical context of her work and thus better understand
the social, racial, and ethnic tensions that formed the basis of the
controversy.
Although united in a common effort
to resist domination, relations between (and among) settler groups and Native
Hawaiians have always been fraught with power struggles. In “Sweeping Racism under the Rug of Censorship,”
Fujikane looks at what Haunani-Kay Trask calls “identity theft”—the practice by
which settlers, regardless of race, attempted and succeeded in dominating
Native Hawaiians, dispossessing them of their land, and then claiming it all as
their own. By effectively wiping out
Native Hawaiian peoples and their culture, settlers saw the land as an open
space on which to stake their claims and build a unique culture of their
own. Fujikane argues that when local
writers, such as Yamanaka, fail to acknowledge Native Hawaiians in their own
“imagined communities” of the text, they become complicit in U.S. imperialist
practices. Moreover, as a dialect that
evolved out of U.S. and British imperialism, the use of Pidgin as a resistant
language also serves to reproduce colonialist ideologies. For Native Hawaiians, Pidgin is a constant
reminder of colonialist authority and the subsequent deracination of indigenous
peoples at the hands of the colonizer as well as Asian settlers. Thus, while a text like Blu’s Hanging performs an important social and cultural critique by
problematizing the rhetoric of Americanization and the idea that being a good
citizen means speaking perfect English, it is important to recognize how the
text further reifies/perpetuates racial and nationalist stereotypes and thus
continues the cycle of oppression.
At issue, among other things,
during the controversy was the effect that this representation had on local
Filipinos. As Fujikane points out, the
production of Yamanaka’s first work created a discourse about literacy that in
turn reflected institutional racism in the academy. She explains that local Filipinos who voiced
criticism over Saturday Night at the
Pahala Theatre “were told by those from politically and socially dominant
groups—Local Japanese, Chinese, and white writers and university
professors—that if they read Yamanaka’s representations as racist, they do not
know how to grasp the complexity of literature” (“Sweeping Racism” 168). The same attitude persisted during the
controversy over Blu’s Hanging. Yamanaka’s advocates were completely deaf to
the charges that her depictions had psychological and material effects on local
Filipinos and Filipino Americans and argued that any criticism leveled against
Yamanaka for her stereotypical representations was a form of censorship. Protestations by Filipinos and other critics
of Yamanaka’s work were for the most part ignored until local Filipinos and
Filipino Americans banded together to make their voices heard. In effect, Yamanaka’s advocates (largely but
by no means exclusively whites and nonFilipino Asian Americans) were dictating
what constituted racism against local Filipinos and Filipino Americans. The literacy practices of local Filipinos and
Filipino Americans were considered suspect and invalid, fueling their feelings of
injustice and perpetuating the system of oppression. In this context, as in the context of the
novel itself, race becomes a marker for (il)literacy and (il)legitimacy. The Yamanaka controversy can thus be read as
a text that, like the other novels I examine, illustrates the presumption that
one’s degree of literacy is determined by one’s membership in a particular
ethnic or racial group.
An examination of the controversy
and its context reveals the rhetoricity of the text in terms of the situation out
of which it evolved and the situation or rhetorical discourse that it in turn
constructed. In other words, the
controversy illustrates Bitzer’s and Vatz’s respective views that situations
call discourses into being while discourse also has the potential to create
rhetorical situations. Such a reading
illuminates the text’s potential to effect change by urging and cautioning us
to think more critically about our roles as writers, readers and critics and
furthers our understanding of how rhetoric can help us to see how subjectivity,
language, and textual production, in the case of Yamanaka and her fiction, are
structured around an ambivalence that is a product of U.S. colonization. “The colonial presence,” Bhabha writes, “is
always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative
and its articulation as repetition and difference” (107).
Yamanaka’s work can simultaneously
be read as a colonized subject’s response to U.S. imperialism, an act of
“repetition and difference” of the “colonial text” (in this case, settler
literature), and itself an example of colonial literature. As Fujikane maintains, the controversy over Blu’s Hanging made even more explicit
the ways in which Native Hawaiians are rendered absent in settler
literature. Yamanaka’s advocates, along
with the media, praised Blu’s Hanging
for its “quintessential” representation of life in Hawai`i while the text
failed to acknowledge its Native Hawaiian population. Such an “erasure,” she claims, constructs
Hawai`i as an “‘emptied’ space open to settler claims of ‘belonging’”
(“Sweeping Racism” 164). In other words,
while Yamanaka effectively critiques the “standard” English ideology, her
stereotypical representations of Filipinos coupled with her erasure of a
“Native Hawaiian presence” illustrates her complicity in U.S. imperialist
practices that have been at work for well over a century.
U.S.
Imperialism, the “Local Nation,” and the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement Though
officially annexed in 1898 as a U.S. territory, Americans had exerted their
religious and colonial influence in Hawai`i from as early as the 1820s.84 Eager to convert the indigenous peoples of
the islands, Calvinist missionaries arrived only to find a significantly
smaller population than expected. By
1840, the population of Native Hawaiians numbered fewer than 100,000, a
decrease by nearly 90 percent in less than seventy years. Captain James Cook’s arrival in 1778 brought
not only Christian imperialist ideologies and practices to the islands, but
also fatal diseases that resulted in the extermination of hundreds of thousands
of Native Hawaiians. These diseases
reduced the native population from roughly one million upon Cook’s arrival to
less than 40,000 by 1890 (Trask, From a
Native 6). From the beginning,
Americans engaged in aggressive tactics of exploitation and military and
economic expansionism, and in 1893, U.S. businessmen and missionaries overthrew
Queen Lili’uokalani with the help of the
U.S. military.
In 1898, by order of U.S. Congress and “against great Native
opposition,” Hawai`i was officially annexed, effectively making Native
Hawaiians a “colonized people” (Trask, “Settlers” 2). U.S. economic motivations and expansionist
interests resulted in the decimation of the native population, the
dispossession of their land, and a thriving tourist industry that exploits
Native Hawaiian culture; these motivations also brought immigrant laborers to
the islands, resulting in competing nationalist movements that continue to this
day.
The self-described “local” population
is made up of Asian “immigrants” and children of Asian “settlers,” who by now
far outnumber indigenous Hawaiians.85 Local peoples’ claim that Hawai`i is their
“homeland” runs counter to Native Hawaiian sensibilities that directly link
indigenous peoples to the islands. By
asserting a claim to a history on the land, Fujikane notes, local cultural
nationalists “lay a claim … that balances on a fine line against claiming
illegitimately acquired land itself” (“Between Nationalisms” 30). Moreover, as Trask argues, by asserting a
claim to a “local nation,” local people remain complicit in the subjugation of
indigenous Hawaiians:
In truth, ideology tells a familiar, and false, tale of
success: Asians came as poor plantation workers and triumphed decades later as
the new, democratically-elected ruling class.
Not coincidentally, the responsibility for continued Hawaiian
dispossession falls to imperialist haole
[white] and incapacitated Natives, that is, not to Asians. Thus do these settlers deny their ascendancy
was made possible by the continued national oppression of Hawaiians,
particularly the theft of our lands and the crushing of our independence. (“Settlers” 4)
The “local nation,” Trask argues, has evolved in
response to the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement out of fear that locals
will lose many of the benefits that they have reaped from colonialist
practices, including economic mobility and political power.86 Trask summarizes the different issues that
both nationalist movements face: for Hawaiians, these include the “indigenous
land, “cultural rights,” and “survival as a people”; for locals, these issues
“have merely to do with finding a comfortable fit in Hawai`i that guarantees a
rising income, upward mobility, and the general accoutrements of a middle-class
‘American’ way of life” (“Settlers” 20).
For Trask, non-Natives have but two options: “Either they must justify
their continued benefit from Hawaiian subjugation, thus serving as support for
that subjugation, or they must repudiate American hegemony and work with the
Hawaiian nationalist movement” (20). The
only just option, she claims, is for “serious and thoughtful individuals,
whether haole or Asian … to support a
form of Hawaiian self-determination created by Hawaiians” (20). The
histories and politics of Native Hawaiian and local nationalist movements are
indeed complex, and they push us to consider how studying articulations of
Native and local identities can effect a kind of “denationalization” (Wong) or
“disowning of America” (Chuh), through critiques of the U.S. as an imperial
power.87 By acknowledging
Hawaii’s colonial history and by examining local cultural nationalist
production as “postcolonial,” we complicate and interrogate what it means to be
Asian
American in ways different from, but complementary to,
what it means for postcolonial U.S. immigrant subjects from Korea, the
Philippines, or Vietnam. Unlike these
territories, Hawai`i is now legally incorporated into the U.S. as the 50th
state and its inhabitants are official U.S. citizens. While many local Asian settlers (or their
ancestors) were brought to Hawai`i as indentured laborers, as they were on the
mainland, their settler “home” remains a conflicted and ambiguous territory as
indigenous Hawaiians, locals, haoles,
and commercial developers from Asia, particularly Japan, compete for ownership
of property and land. Perhaps especially
for locals, who occupy this liminal space in relation to Native Hawaiians and
mainland “Asian Americans,” the forces with which they must contend (claiming
Hawai`i as “home,” as distinct from the mainland, struggling with and battling
intrasettler racism and disputes, and resisting colonial influences) creates an
anxiety that is manifested in their literary production.88 In this chapter, I examine one of these
narratives for the way in which the literacy practices of its characters and
author demonstrate colonial ambivalence while arguing for a distinct local
national identity. Because my study’s
focus is on the analytic of literacy, my particular interest is in how U.S.
colonialist practices have impacted the politics of language use in Hawai`i,
and how acts of literacy in Yamanaka’s work function rhetorically as
articulations of identity.
Blu’s Hanging: A Brief Synopsis
Blu’s
Hanging (1997), the second in a trilogy of works by Yamanaka, is narrated
from the perspective of Ivah Ogata, the eldest of three children in a Japanese
American family that is struggling to survive after the death of their
mother. The Ogata family begins to disintegrate
as a result of this tragic loss: Maisie, the youngest daughter, becomes mute;
Blu, the only son, stuffs himself full of food, “[j]ust so he doesn’t feel Mama
gone so far away” (105); and Poppy, filled with grief and remorse over the loss
of his wife, becomes emotionally withdrawn, reliant upon drug use, and at times
hostile to his children.
As an adolescent surrogate mother,
Ivah not only faces the responsibility of caring for her siblings and father,
but also confronts the issue of breaking ties with her family in order to have
a life of her own. When the opportunity
arises for Ivah to go to Middle Pacific Institute, a prestigious boarding
school in Honolulu, she struggles with the decision over whether to be loyal to
her family or to herself. Her ultimate
decision to go to “Mid-Pac” stems in part from knowing that it may be the
family’s only chance for survival. If
Ivah is given this opportunity, her cousin Big Sis and teacher Miss Ito assure
the family that she can then pave the way for her other siblings.
Though Ivah will always be able to
communicate with her family, her move to Honolulu is seen as a threat because
it signals her move to another, more prestigious discourse community. While the ultimate fate of the Ogata family
is unknown, Ivah’s decision to leave them is at once hopeful for Blu and
Maisie, who may follow in her footsteps, but also ominous, a portent of an
uncertain future for the Ogata children as signified by Blu’s rape at the end
of the novel.
Performing
Difference
Blu’s
Hanging functions as a literacy narrative in multiple and complex
ways. While, for example, Allos’ journey
towards literacy in America Is in the
Heart includes his actual acquisition of English as well as his ability to
write articles, letters and poetry and thus participate in cultural criticism,
there are no characters in Blu’s Hanging
whose literacy is of primary concern.
Rather, the ideology of literacy or the ways in which literacy is
constructed and imagined in Hawai`i is challenged and problematized in this
text through each of the three sibling’s encounters with both people and
institutions that serve to maintain the hierarchy of languages and power
through the enforcement of “standard” English.
Following the work of New Literacy Studies scholars such as James Gee
and Brian Street, I take an “ideological” approach to the study of literacy,
that is, I recognize and examine the ways in which literacy is inextricably
tied to social, cultural and political practices. My analysis thus looks at the literacy
practices of Yamanaka’s characters, as well as the author herself, in order to
explore the kinds of arguments they are making in regards to literacy and
citizenship, and the rhetorical effects that their arguments have on the other
characters and readers of the texts. As
in the introduction, I aim to show here how a rhetorical analysis of Blu’s Hanging furthers our understanding
of literacy practices in the context of colonialism and how such an
understanding has the potential to transform the way we think about our own and
others’ acts of literacy. I contend that
the performance of difference in Blu’s
Hanging is expressed through the use of Pidgin and other literacy acts, and
it is through these social articulations of difference that both Yamanaka and
her characters participate in the formation and authorization of a “local”
identity.
The languages Yamanaka’s characters
speak are largely dependent on their situation or social context, what New
Literacy Studies scholars term “situated literacies.” Choosing among the stratified languages that
the characters have at their disposal as a result of Hawaii’s colonial history
is a balancing act as well as an effective illustration of how language is used
as a survival tactic. As Fujikane
writes, Pidgin “has come to represent for local writers a language of survival
that enabled immigrant and Hawaiian peoples to form a hybrid culture of their
own” (“Between Nationalisms” 28). And as
Paulo Freire maintains, “Language makes explicit the ways in which people have
been resisting. In other words, language
gives you a glimpse of how people survive” (Reading
the Word 137). For the Ogata
children, survival is of their utmost concern as they effectively have been
orphaned by the death of their mother.
The characters in Yamanaka’s work
utilize what James Gee calls “borderland
Discourse” as part of their strategy for
survival. According to Gee, borderland
Discourses evolve out of situations in which people with “diverse primary and
community-based Discourses” come together and interact. He uses this term to refer specifically to
children marginalized by mainstream ideologies—that is, children who feel
alienated by the school-based discourse who then create their own discourse in
the spaces between home and school to communicate with students from other
marginalized communities (162). Brought
together by capitalist projects’ labor needs on the plantations of Hawai`i,
immigrants had to find a common language with which to communicate. Pidgin evolved out of this forced contact and
later became the first language spoken by children born on the plantations. Although the children in Blu’s Hanging were not born on the plantations, they may be said to
belong to this latter group that must contend with the “standard” English
ideology as indoctrinated by their teachers at school.
Gee’s notion of borderland Discourses
emphasizes the socially constructed nature of languages and literacy practices
and the complex processes that students (and immigrants) encounter when dealing
with conflicting and likely unfamiliar discourses and values. Though my analysis focuses on a particular
literary work, Gee’s and Bhabha’s views on liminality and the borderland help
to illuminate the nature of Pidgin or Creole languages both in the context of
Hawai`i and for immigrant communities elsewhere in the United States. By drawing a connection between the Ogata
children in Yamanaka’s fiction and Gee’s “real-life” examples of marginalized
children (who are mostly from racial minority or disadvantaged socioeconomic
groups) whose home-based Discourse conflicts in many ways with the school-based
Discourse, I suggest that a text like Blu’s
Hanging has the potential to inform and to encourage readers to think about
the ways that discourses are used in our society, both consciously and
unconsciously, not just to communicate but also to empower as well as
disempower. Recognizing the material and
psychological effects of our discourses is one way to work towards a more just
and equal society.
The
Politics of Pidgin: Hawai`i Creole English vs. “Standard” English
Hawai`i Creole English (HCE), or
Pidgin, is a hybrid language that emerged from the plantation system when
various immigrant groups, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos, were
brought to Hawai`i to work as indentured servants in the 1800s. Pidgin is thus a combination of the following
different languages spoken by plantation owners and workers: English,
Portuguese, Hawaiian, Japanese, Filipino, and Chinese. According to a recent study conducted by a
team of professors at the University of Hawai`i, there are approximately 600,000
speakers of Hawai`i Creole English in the state of Hawai`i.89 Considered a “substandard” or “deviant” form
of English, Pidgin was never used as a language of education and in fact, as
Suzanne Romaine explains, “the State Department of Education has actively
campaigned against it for many years in an effort to eradicate it completely”
(531). In 1924, a system of English
Standard schools was put in place.
Admission to the schools was largely restricted to the white middle
class by denying admission to those who could not pass a “standard” English
test (i.e. nonwhites) (531). Romaine
writes, “By institutionalizing what was essentially racial discrimination along
linguistic lines, the schools managed to keep creole speakers in their place,
maintaining distance between them and English speakers until after World War
II” (531).
Though it continues to be viewed as
a “substandard” language or dialect, since the mid-1970s local writers have
used it with more frequency in their works to argue for its legitimacy as a
literary language, its function as a marker and validation of local identity,
and its symbolism as a form of protest against colonial influences.90 In utilizing Pidgin for these rhetorical
purposes, however, writers have had to consider the extent to which they would
incorporate Pidgin and the stylistic ways in which they would represent the
language based on the audiences they were (and still are) trying to reach. For example, Milton Murayama has stated that
in order to reach the widest possible audience for All I asking for is my body, he limited his use of Pidgin in the
novel to the dialogue (Romaine 535).
Unsurprisingly, publishing houses in the 1970s were not yet ready to
accept or acknowledge the legitimacy of Pidgin as evidenced by their response
to the title of his book. According to
Romaine, “they regarded it as ‘ungrammatical’ with its missing copula, and
wanted it ‘corrected’ to All I’m asking
for is my body” (535).
That tension around the use of Pidgin
still exists today is evident in contemporary local literatures and in a
statement made by Hawai`i Governor Benjamin Cayetano in 1995: “One of the
realities of life is that our kids may have to go out into the world beyond
Hawaii, to compete for jobs, and certainly if they can’t speak the accepted
means of communication well—English—then they’re going to have a hard time”
(qtd. in Young 107). As Young observes,
the prevalence of such an attitude towards language in today’s political
discourse illustrates the strength of Pidgin as it continues to resist domination
(110). Darrell Lum, editor of Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly,
also advocates the use of Pidgin as a way of “validating” the people: “We
continue to deny the value of our language.
Local literature is about validating a people.
When you acknowledge a language, you acknowledge a
people” (qtd. in Romaine 533). The
rhetorical nature of literacy narratives again becomes clear: in the case of
Hawai`i local literatures, the use of Pidgin is a strategic move both to
undermine universalized
“standard” English as well as to
solidify and assert a “local cultural nationalism.”
By looking at the sociolinguistic
context in which the text was written and published, we have a better
understanding of the exigency for Blu’s
Hanging. As a text that addresses
the tensions around language use that I describe above, specifically in the
academic setting, Blu’s Hanging
introduces readers to the difficulties that both students and teachers in
Hawai`i face, and presses upon readers the value of this so-called
“substandard” dialect. Hawai`i Pidgin
has never had its own recognized orthography, which is precisely why it has not
been recognized as a legitimate literary language but instead is viewed as a
deviant or substandard form of English (Romaine 528). By reproducing Pidgin in written form and creating
characters who learn to express themselves through writing, Yamanaka argues for
the legitimacy of Pidgin as a language
as opposed to a dialect.
Reading
Blu’s Hanging as a Narrative of
Literacy
Reading Blu’s Hanging as a literacy narrative is particularly challenging
because of its narrative structure. Ivah
narrates the story in “standard” English, but her dialogue throughout is in
Pidgin. While one might argue that
Yamanaka’s structuring of the text in this way privileges “standard” English
over nonstandard English, I argue that what Yamanaka illustrates here is
precisely how intimate the connections are between discourse and
community. Ivah the narrator is not
situated in the same region or place as Ivah the protagonist. She narrates the story in retrospect, after
she has moved away from her family and community and adopted the language of
her current social milieu (possibly Mid-Pac or Honolulu).
In
her essay, “Translating Self and Difference through Literacy Narratives,” Mary
Soliday writes that stories about
literacy are places where writers
explore what Victor Turner calls ‘liminal’ crossings between worlds. In focusing upon those moments when the self
is on the threshold of possible intellectual, social, and emotional
development, literacy narratives become sites of self-translation where writers
can articulate the meanings and the consequences of their passages between
language worlds. (515)
While Ivah does not directly reveal to us “the
meanings and consequences” of her movement through and among different
discourse communities, we are persuaded by her actions—that is, her facility to
move between different language worlds and, perhaps more importantly, her
strategic use of the different discourses, either as a way of associating with
a group or disassociating, as the case may be, attests to her awareness of the
stratification of languages in Hawai`i as well as the social and political
implications of speaking a particular language in a given situation or social
context. In Bourdieu’s terms, Ivah
possesses “linguistic capital,” that is, the ability to “produce expressions”
appropriate to a particular audience or “market” (18). As the narrator, Ivah profits symbolically by
her ability to move between discourses.
However, because Ivah only demonstrates her knowledge of “standard”
English to her readers and not to the other characters in the novel, the
rhetorical impact of her “linguistic capital” can only be analyzed through the
effect that such a strategy has on the readers.
As a character, Ivah demonstrates a strong ethos by showing her audience
that she can in fact move between different language worlds. Her performance of her linguistic
capabilities attests to her development and successful transition from her home
life to a life of independence. This is
not to suggest that speaking “standard” English ensures success; rather, Ivah’s
ability to speak “standard” English, and by extension, Yamanaka’s use of both
languages, enables her to reach and therefore persuade a wider audience. Both Ivah and Yamanaka use the strategy of
identification to appeal to Pidgin speakers and “standard” English
speakers. As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca
write,
Every social circle or milieu is distinguishable in
terms of its dominant opinions and unquestioned beliefs, of the premises that
it takes for granted without hesitation: these views form an integral part of
its culture, and an orator wishing to persuade a particular audience must of
necessity adapt himself to it. (20-21)
Had Yamanaka chosen Pidgin for Ivah’s narration, she
would have limited her audience significantly.
Choosing to narrate the story in “standard” English enables her to reach
the audience that needs the most persuasion.
By writing in both Pidgin and
“standard” English and by creating a character like Ivah, who is caught between
two different language worlds but who recognizes the values that are associated
with each, Yamanaka creates and legitimates the interstitial space of identity
where difference can exist “without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha
4). The implications of this for
heightening the awareness and acceptance of difference are significant, for if
Yamanaka’s work has the rhetorical effect of creating an awareness of interstitial
identities among (and even perhaps within) her readers, then her readers may
adopt a new or different view towards what Bhabha envisions as the
“beyond.” That is, when readers look
critically at themselves to see how their ideologies and/or ideological
consciousness(es) are being reproduced or transformed in the act of reading,
they are looking at themselves and their relationship to the text (and
therefore culture) from an interstitial perspective. This perspective, Bhabha contends, can lead to
“political empowerment, and the enlargement of the multiculturalist cause” (3)
as readers/critical thinkers interrogate their positions in their respective
communities and society at large. Bhabha
goes on to say that “the boundary becomes the place from which something begins its presencing in a
movement not dissimilar to the ambulent, ambivalent articulation of the beyond”
(5). For the Ogata children,
articulations of difference
through acts of writing and speaking Pidgin constitute
the “enunciative boundaries” of which Bhabha is speaking in that it is through
their articulations that the rhetorical force of the novel becomes clear. Reading Blu’s
Hanging from this perspective illuminates the text’s potential for claiming
this “beyond” space where real intervention becomes possible.
Blu also shows early signs of
acquiring linguistic capital when he “pretends talk Haole” by mimicking the way
his teacher, Mrs. Ota, speaks. Ivah
describes the scene:
He disregards my remarks and
continues in Mrs. Ota’s voice, enunciating each syllable in a false British
accent. “The haiku should be about
nature. The first line must have five
syllables, then seven in the second, then five again in the last line.” He flips through the pages of his tablet to
act as though he were reading from a teacher’s guide.
“Haiku does not rhyme like our
other poems,” he scolds. “And finally,
class, it came from the Japanese.”
(195)
By appropriating or mimicking “standard” English in
this context, Blu succeeds at illustrating the rigid nature of both the
dominant language as well as the institution of education, where such a
structure of linguistic hierarchies is actualized and reproduced. His act of mimicry here also demonstrates to
his audience (both his immediate audience—the other characters in the novel—and
readers of the text) that he is not only capable of speaking “standard” English
but he is also aware, like Ivah, of the situated nature of literacies and,
perhaps more importantly, the power and authority that “standard” English
assumes. Both Ivah and Blu recognize the
relationship between language and social spaces—that is, they are acutely aware
of the social circumstances in which both Pidgin and “standard” English are
required or appropriate; that they choose not to follow the “rules” as dictated
by the schoolteachers is evidence of their firm commitment to value their
language as well as to resist linguistic domination by their oppressors.
In turn, by having Blu imitate his
teacher’s discourse, Yamanaka critiques colonial authority and the passing on
of academic knowledge. Though Blu finds
in the medium of poetry a way to express his grief over the loss of his
mother—recalling the “red church dress” which she gave to Ivah when she died
and the “long eggplants and wild violets” that grew in her garden—his English
teacher penalizes him for not writing poetry that “flows and rhymes”
(185). On his second attempt, Blu gets a
C-/D+ for writing another personal poem about his neighbor’s dying dogs, even
though it rhymes. His final attempt—a
poem that praises his teacher in rhyme and that his friend “Ed the
Big Head Endo” helps him write—earns him an A+. By juxtaposing the “standard” English
ideology that rewards students for writing structured but meaningless verse alongside
Blu’s own Pidgin poetry, Yamanaka argues for a reconsideration of what
constitutes “literary” language and a reconfiguration of what it means to be
“literate.” In addition to using
“standard” English to critique the hegemonic nature and use of the language as
well as the institution in which this language and dominant ideology are
enforced and reproduced, Yamanaka figures the absence of verbal language in the
youngest sibling, Maisie, as a mode of resistance. Ivah tells us, “Since mama died, Maisie said
about five things: I scared. Sleep with me. More.
There she is. Mama”
(14). Maisie’s silence throughout most
of the text, like the other characters’ acts of literacy, represents the
inbetween space of identity wherein her character argues for a recognition of
the corporeal effects of imposed language use.
Her speechlessness can thus be read as both an effect of linguistic
colonization and a strategy of resistance to that colonization. As Cheung notes, some Asian American women
writers have employed silence—both thematically and rhetorically—to “question,
report, expose—the silences imposed on themselves and their peoples” but also
to “reveal, through their own manners of telling and through their characters,
that silences … can also be articulate” (Articulate
3-4). Because Maisie does not speak in
school, her teachers cannot scold her for using Pidgin; instead, they misread
her vulnerability and body language that communicates her fear as “sociopathic
behavior” (Blu’s Hanging 61). Maisie, just five and perhaps the most
distraught over the loss of her mother, has trouble negotiating the two worlds
that Pidgin and “standard” English represent.
By reading her nonverbal forms of communication as legitimate speech
acts, as “articulate silences,” we are reminded to focus not simply on the act
itself, but on the person who performed the act, the witness or hearer, and the
context in which the act took place.
Yamanaka sets up the context for one of Maisie’s nonverbal acts of
communication—wetting her pants in school:
“What did I ask you to do, Maisie
Ogata?” asks Miss Tammy Owens in her
Texas drawl. “Yet you continue to defy
me day after day after day. Now I don’t know what the hell is going on in
that manipulative little head of
yours—but if I say read, you read. If I
say share, you share. If I say change your underwear, then you—”
(46) Maisie’s response to Miss Owens becomes clearer to us when we look at it
from a sociolinguistic perspective. We
know that Maisie understands what Miss Owens is saying, but in the context of
the classroom where Maisie and her peers and siblings are constantly made to
feel inferior because of their language, it is no wonder that she feels coerced
into silence. While she is able to
express her fears through body language (she wets her pants because she is
afraid to ask to use the bathroom), her teacher is unable or unwilling to read
or acknowledge this form of communication.
Instead, Miss Owens punishes and humiliates her by forcing her to remain
in school without wearing any underwear.
The very act that gets Maisie into trouble stems not from her
“manipulative mind” but rather her inability to deal emotionally with an
authority figure who is going to scold her regardless of whether she speaks or
not.
At the beginning of the novel,
Maisie is not old enough to know how to defend herself, yet through the loving
guidance and assistance of her new Special Education teacher, Miss Ito, she
learns to become more confident in her writing, reading, and speaking abilities. In her first assignment, Maisie is asked to
respond in letter form (in her notebook) to Miss Ito’s question, “Who do you
love?” Maisie writes, “DeaR MiSS iTo,
DaDDY The BeST, IvaH CooK, Blue ShaRe, MY Ka-SaN aND HoPPY, MaMa StiLL HeRe,
YouRS TruLY, MaiSie o” (104).
Significantly, Maisie begins speaking again shortly after she hears Miss
Ito speak Pidgin for the first time. In
response to Tammy Owens’ condescending remarks about how Miss Ito keeps her
home, Miss Ito exclaims, “‘[Y]ou keep acting stupid, Tammy, you keep on lifting
your haole nose in the air at me and my friends, you going hear worse things
than ‘haole’ come out of this Jap’s mout’” (128). Finally, one of Maisie’s teachers validates
Pidgin, and the next day, on Maisie’s birthday, she reads aloud the directions
on a box of cake mix, in a voice that Ivah’s describes as “raspy and low.” Maisie repeats after Miss Ito, “‘Mix … three
… eggs … with two sticks of … butter’” (130).
Maisie’s speech act has a powerful effect on her listeners, as Ivah
tells us, “I listen to the teacher speak each word as my sister repeats them
slowly. I keep each word as I would a
precious stone. These are gifts from
God.
Listen to the voice that hangs in
the air” (13).
Maisie continues to communicate
through writing and speech, and by novel’s end we see how she has learned the
persuasive function of language. For
example, after Blu suffers the harrowing experience of rape at the hands of
Uncle Paulo, Ivah and Maisie comfort him, “his whole body shaking with
sobs.” In this moment, Blu finds the
greatest consolation in hearing Maisie speak his name: “‘What my name?’ he
whispers to her. She says nothing. ‘What my name? Tell me.’
Maisie touches his hair then presses her mouth to his ear. ‘Blu’” (248). In his most vulnerable moment, Blu asks
Maisie for the gift of her voice to remind him who he is, and for the first
time, Maisie uses her words to defend Blu when he is unable to defend himself. In her “updown handwriting,” in “dog shit …
cat shit … and the red, red dirt that stains [their] heels,” she scrawls on the
walls of Uncle Paulo’s house the words “MaLeSTeR HaNG i KiLL You HuMaN RaT”
(251).
This is Maisie’s first public act of literacy. Guilty and afraid of what others might think,
Uncle Paulo “scrubs with Brillo, fast and furious, checking to see who’s
looking, his walls stained for life” (251).
Maisie is beginning to learn that she has the strength, the vocabulary,
and the voice to defend herself and her siblings against violence and oppression.
And yet what the above scenes also
poignantly illustrate is that the alternative to complying with the dominant
ideology, what I have been identifying as strategic articulations of difference
through use of a hybrid or “borderland” discourse, is not celebrated in the
novel. The Pidgin that the children
speak, while used as a resistant language, is still a product of colonialism;
it is a language, in other words, that has been forced on them by structures of
domination. Thus, while I have argued
for the subversive function of the Ogata children’s multiple literacies, I also
recognize the expense of achieving such fluencies. The children do not choose to have Pidgin at
their disposal any more than they choose to be marginalized and oppressed by dominant
culture.
What we see in Blu’s Hanging is a reconfiguration of literacy that allows for
multiple kinds of literacies and ways of knowing and understanding the
world. While Blu suffers the most from
abuse inflicted by his classmates, Uncle Paulo, and his own father, it is Blu
who holds the family together. His
resourcefulness and self-sacrifice suggest a kind of “domestic literacy” that
provides the sisters with the emotional and financial resources necessary for
survival. When Maisie has trouble
sounding out her words or expressing her feelings, Blu articulates them for
her, giving voice to her silence. And
when Ivah is overwhelmed by her new maternal duties, it is Blu who writes down
their mama’s list of things to do:
Blu said, ‘I write um all down in my tablet for help
Ivah rememba, you like, Mama? What you said, Mama? Again?
C’mon, you guys. Okay, tell me
what to write, Mama. Tell me what I
gotta do. We can write um all down. Thass how you remember important things,
right, Ivah?’ (44)
Finally, in one of the most moving
scenes in the novel, Blu takes on the role of the mother in order to spare Ivah
the shame of having to purchase sanitary napkins when she begins
menstruating. As a Christmas gift, Blu
buys Ivah “Kotex” and “Modess” and attaches a note in which he tells her,
So when I check under the bathroom sink, I saw that if
Eugene was right and you had your rags then you had no pads and you probly was
like Elsa which was shame! And since us
got no mommy to go buy it, I went Friendly Market and look for sanaterry belt
and pads. (Isle 4 near the Charmin and
MD.) I not shame and I no care ‘cause
you got no mommy to tell you about birds and bees. So here my Christmas present (Kotex) and
birthday present (Modess) to you. Only
had two kinds so wasn’t that hard. And I
will buy for you again if you want me to.
Your brother,
Presley
Vernon “BLU” Ogata (100-01)
Literacy moments such as these argue for alternative
ways of thinking about what constitutes knowledge or learning and how knowledge
is produced and transmitted.
Despite what I read as the novel’s
argument for claiming Pidgin as a legitimate discourse, Yamanaka also validates
“standard” English as she concludes the novel with Ivah’s departure for
boarding school where, presumably, she will gain the cultural, linguistic and
symbolic capital that will eventually free the family from poverty and
trauma. Ivah’s fluency and participation
in the dominant discourse does not suggest that she has rejected her home and
family; rather, it illustrates her ability to move between and negotiate
multiple discursive worlds. Furthermore,
Yamanaka’s use of both languages suggests not that she privileges one language
over another but that she wants her readers to question language hierarchies
and the potential material, ideological and psychological effects of those
hierarchies.
By viewing Pidgin as an effect of
colonial hybridity or ambivalence, we see how the use of this language, by both
the characters in Yamanaka’s fiction as well as the author herself, functions
as a “form of subversion.”91
According to Bhabha, “The ambivalence at the source of traditional
discourses on authority enables a form of subversion, founded on the
undecidability that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the
grounds of intervention” (112). The use
of Pidgin thus serves a dual function: Yamanaka and her characters persuade
their audiences/readers not of their identities as Asian Americans or
Asian/Pacific Americans, but rather as locals while they also reveal the
“problematic of colonial representation” (Bhabha 114). Bhabha writes that, “Hybridity reverses the formal process of disavowal so that the
violent dislocation of the act of colonization becomes the conditionality of
colonial discourse” (114). It thus
follows, then, that hybrid or Creole languages such as Hawai`i Pidgin have both
created and evolved out of two distinct rhetorical situations. The “violent” act of colonization produces a
language that disrupts colonial authority through its “partial presence”
(Bhabha 114), and every instance of its use thereafter is a reminder of this
ambivalence and its colonial underpinnings.
Multiplying
Literacies, Advocating Legitimacy
History has taught us that literacy
crises evolve out of (and hence reflect) our culture’s anxieties about shifting
demographics. As an archipelago of islands
that has been populated by an extremely diverse group of people, both before
and since the inception of the plantation system in 1850, Hawai`i has much to
teach us about handling such radical changes in demographics. Cultural representations of the tensions
around language use, such as those narrativized in Yamanaka’s fiction, are
particularly effective for increasing awareness about racial and linguistic
discrimination—and in particular how the former continues to be masked by the
latter.92 Such awareness
furthers the understanding and acceptance of other forms of discourse and urges
us to read literacy narratives not simply as narratives about language
acquisition or proficiency, but as narratives that compel us to consider what
we are doing and saying—about ourselves, our ideologies, and our culture—every
time we read, write or speak. As
teachers, we can also use Yamanaka’s work to explore with our students other
forms of discourse and acts of literacy that are considered “substandard” or
“deviant” by mainstream America, and the possibilities as opposed to the
limitations for those who are, like Ivah, either forcibly or voluntarily
negotiating multiple discursive worlds.
Theorizing literacy in the context
of Yamanaka’s work further illuminates how the school becomes a site of
conflicting voices and values or “contact zone” where, as a text like Blu’s Hanging demonstrates, the
relationship between knowledge and power becomes all too clear. In its depiction of teachers who dictate how
knowledge is produced while students, like Blu and Maisie, vie to be “authors
of their own worlds,” Blu’s Hanging
argues for a reconceptualization of literacy that examines how knowledge is
produced through interactions among and between people from disparate cultures
and language communities. While Blu’s
poetry, in the eyes of his teacher, does not “flow and rhyme,” it speaks to his
own experiences and therefore has value and adds meaning to his life. Readers are asked to question what counts as
“legitimate knowledge” as well as
“legitimate literacy” in this text
and to think through the value and potential of what
Paulo Freire has theorized as
“emancipatory literacy.”
According to Freire and Macedo, the
objective of emancipatory literacy is to assist learners not simply in becoming
functionally literate, but also in understanding the social and political
forces that have led to their marginalization.
Armed with this knowledge, learners can then work towards emancipating
themselves, collectively or individually, from oppressive conditions and begin
to feel empowered by finding their individual voices. Yamanaka creates characters that, despite
their struggle with the dominant ideology that tells them they are inferior,
demonstrate a maturity and strength of character well beyond their years. Though they are caught between the two
incompatible discourses of home and school, the children are, to different
degrees, aware of this incompatibility and even use it to their advantage.
With its use of Pidgin throughout more
than half of the novel, this text constructs the (non-Pidgin-speaking) reader
into the role of one who is, like the characters themselves, forced to engage
in more than one literacy practice. From
the outset of the novel, readers are not only faced with a language, or
dialect, with which they may be unfamiliar, but they are also faced with their
own prejudices about Pidgin. This
prejudice (and sense of unfamiliarity) was expressed in the media when Blu’s Hanging was first published. On May 4, 1997, Megan Harlan wrote in the New York Times Book Review that the
book was “[t]extured with sometimes inscrutable streams of Hawaiian pidgin”
(21). Harlan’s use of the word
“inscrutable”—a term that has been used to stereotype Asians and Asian
Americans—suggests a “foreignness” and illiteracy that is reminiscent of early
reviews of Younghill Kang’s East Goes
West. Her use of this stereotype is
damaging to both the Asian/Asian Pacific American community and to her own
ethos as a critic because it suggests an anxiety over being confronted with a
dialect with which
she is unfamiliar.
The orthography that Yamanaka uses for Pidgin is hardly
“inscrutable”—though she may use a few words that readers have never heard
before, “inscrutable streams” suggests whole passages that are difficult to
comprehend.
For some readers, the white
schoolteachers in Blu’s Hanging
function as speaking agents when they voice their prejudices against the
children’s speech. From a rhetorical
perspective, we might say that the negative depiction of the white
schoolteachers functions as aesthetic proof in support of Yamanaka’s conclusion
that Pidgin is a resistant and legitimate language. By portraying the schoolteachers negatively
in contrast to her sympathetic portrayal of the children, Yamanaka gives the
figure of the schoolteacher pertinency, or endows her with presence—another way
of arguing for her importance to the message of the novel as a whole (Perelman
and Olbrechts-Tyteca 116).
The arguments that proponents of
Pidgin make in the debate over its use are not unlike those in the debates over
Ebonics and bilingualism—at the core of those arguments is a fundamental belief
in the rights of individuals to express themselves in the language they know
best. Proponents also maintain that
those who do not speak the same language or dialect should validate others’
choice of language or dialect nonetheless.
This belief was expressed by the resolution on language that the
Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication
adopted in 1974, entitled “Students’ Right to Their Own Language.” Committee members recognized the need to
publicly address and act on the issue with which so many teachers of English
and Composition were struggling. The
committee not only acknowledged but affirmed students’ “rights to their own
patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever
dialects in which they find their own identity and style” (College Composition and Communication 25).93 The issue, or rather the controversy over the
use of dialects, specifically in the classroom setting, is not new or unique to
our culture and, despite the CCCC’s resolution, debates over differing language
use and styles remain heated to this day.
The two most prominent examples are the Ebonics debate, which became
widely publicized in 1997 when the school board in Oakland, California
requested that their teachers not only recognize black English as a legitimate
language but also begin instructing their students in this language as a way to
help them improve their overall academic skills, and the bilingual education
debate, which traces its roots back to 1968 when Congress passed the Bilingual
Education Act, which provided funding for schools trying to meet the needs of their
non-native-English-speaking student populations.94
Though these debates focus on
different racial and ethnic groups with different linguistic and social
histories, the arguments are fundamentally the same. With an everincreasing number of immigrants
arriving in this country, the issue is bound to involve greater proportions of
society in the future. “Standard”
English will likely always retain its elite status; what is perhaps not so
obvious to mainstream American society is the effect that the “standard”
English ideology has on those who speak nonstandard forms of English and for
whom English is a second language. Lily
Wong Fillmore has argued that, in America, where linguistic diversity is not
valued, many young students lose their primary language as a result of learning
English, which they are taught is their only real means for participating in
society. The result, she claims, is
often tragic for the family, for when a child loses her primary language, she
can often no longer communicate effectively with her parents. Fillmore writes, “What is lost is no less
than the means by which parents socialize their children: When parents are
unable to talk to their children, they cannot easily convey to them their
values, beliefs, understandings, or wisdom about how to cope with their
experiences” (343).
Continuing the exploration of
literacy in a (post)colonial context begun in the introduction, this chapter
examined the effects of Yamanaka’s strategic use of a dialect along with
“standard” English. As with Dictée, though to a lesser extent, Blu’s Hanging constructs the reader into
the role of a person with a compromised literacy. In grappling with a bilingual and
heteroglossic text, readers become participants in the construction of the text
and consequently are forced to reevaluate their own reading practices and views
on what it means to be a literate speaking/writing subject of the nation.
Examining Yamanaka’s text as a
literacy narrative helps to reveal certain contradictions in the discourse of
American democracy and highlights an important link between the ways in which
we talk about (and often conflate) literacy, race, and citizenship. Her work further compels us to recognize
these contradictions and to better understand the debate over the use of Pidgin
and the “standard” English ideology in order to work towards a more inclusive
view of literacy and American citizenship.
This concluding chapter points to both the increasing need for and
difficulty of analyzing Asian American literacy narratives due to postcolonial
and transnational migrations and shifting demographics within the U.S. Ever larger numbers of Asian Americans, many
with little or no proficiency in English, but perhaps fluent in one or more
other languages, pose a challenge to our conceptions of literacy as it relates
to “Americanness.”95 The
politics of language use in Hawai`i and the discursive production of identities
in Hawai`i literacy narratives have much to teach us about the challenges we
face in trying to theorize and conceptualize multiple literacies working with
and against each other to both assert and resist nationalist and hegemonic
ideologies.
Arif Dirlik has suggested that in
order to understand Asian Americans, “it is no longer sufficient to comprehend
their roots in U.S. history or, for that matter, in their countries of origin”;
rather, he claims that we need to “understand a multiplicity of historical trajectories
that converge in the locations we call Asian America but that may diverge once
again to disrupt the very idea of Asian Americanness” (41). I argue that by examining certain Asian
American texts through the analytic of literacy we come closer to understanding
this multiplicity, and that by studying the rhetorical dimensions of these
texts we are encouraged to see how authors use literacy to challenge or
“disrupt” conceptions of “America” and “Asian America.”
Notes
1 I use the
term “America” throughout this dissertation to connote the United States as a
hegemonic power. This connotation is
derived in part from the deployment of the term “America” to designate the U.S.
when in fact there are several (geographical and constructed) “Americas.” Recognizing the U.S. as empire and
transnation both unveils the inadequacy of the term “America” to represent the
geographic space or “imagined community” of the U.S. nation and highlights the
power structures of colonization and domination embedded in the term. In other words, “America” is an
epistemological object or term that, when employed and identified as such,
calls attention to the very need to critique the ways in which the U.S.
continues to establish itself as a dominant world power.
2 I do not
mean to suggest that in order for these works to be considered rhetorically
effective, the authors or characters must be granted “legitimacy.” Rather, I see texts as performing a
rhetorical function as long as they influence the reader in some way. And of course, readers can be influenced by
the same text in different ways just as texts can serve multiple rhetorical
functions.
3 Wong
identifies these trends as 1) “the easing of cultural nationalist concerns as a
result of changing demographics in the Asian American population as well as
theoretical critiques from various quarters ranging from the poststructuralists
to the queer”; 2) the increased “permeability” “in the boundaries between Asian
Americans and ‘Asian Asians’ … as well as between Asian American studies and
Asian studies”; and 3) the trend of situating Asian Americans “in a diasporic
context” (“Denationalization” 1-2).
4 A
discussion of fantasy theme analysis appears in chapter 2.
5 “Literacy”
is most commonly defined as “the ability to read and write”; however, this
definition has been broadened to fit other contexts such that “literacy” is no
longer solely about printed text—there is also “functional literacy,” “cultural
literacy,” “computer literacy,” “visual literacy,” and “domestic literacy,” to
name just a few of the many different ways in which people might be considered
“literate.” Valerie
Strauss, in a February 17, 2004
article in the Washington Post
entitled “Schools Investing in Fiscal Literacy” discusses the dire need to
begin teaching “financial literacy” to students from as early as the first
grade in order to minimize personal debt and potential bankruptcy later in
life.
6 See Arnold
Leibowitz’s “The Official Character of Language in the United States: Literacy
Requirements for Immigration, Citizenship, and Entrance Into American Life” (1984).
7 Social
historian Harvey Graff is to be credited for coining this term in his groundbreaking
study of the same title. In The Literacy Myth (1979), Graff
challenges the widespread assumption (myth) that literacy inevitably leads to
social advancement and political power.
8 It is
beyond the scope of this dissertation to investigate the numerous critical
discussions about the definitions and uses of the term “postcolonial.” For the purposes of this project, the term is
used in reference to Asian Americans who migrated or fled from countries such
as the Philippines, Vietnam, and India, which have been colonized by western
imperial nations, as well as from countries such as Korea and China, which were
both colonized by Japan. As I discuss in
the conclusion, the term is also used in reference to Asian Pacific Islanders
who hail from Hawai`i, as this archipelago was colonized by the U.S.
and later became a U.S. territory
in 1898. Applied to Asian Americans, the
term “postcolonial” complicates any notions about Asian Americans as a
homogeneous group or Asian America as a specifically “American”
construction. Reading Asian American
literacy narratives through the lens of postcolonial studies emphasizes the
effects of linguistic colonization and draws attention to the ways in which
writers strategically enact a decolonization through their language use and
literacy practices. As Susan Koshy
argues in “The Fiction of Asian American Literature,” “The radical demographic
shifts produced within the Asian American community by the 1965 immigration
laws have transformed the nature and locus of literary production, creating a
highly stratified, uneven and heterogeneous formation, that cannot easily be
contained within the models of essentialized or pluralized ethnic identity
suggested by the rubric Asian American literature, or its updated post-modern
avatar Asian American literatures” (31516).
For a particularly informative and engaging critique on the problems of
using “postcolonial” as a descriptor for the U.S., see Jenny Sharpe’s “Is the
United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race” (1995).
9 “Transnationalism”
denotes the complex flows of people, culture, and capital across national
boundaries.
10 I use
“read” here in the functional sense; that is, I do not mean to suggest that, by
contrast, audiences can “read” Yamanaka’s works (i.e., that they can read the
Pidgin and understand all of the cultural references). English speakers who are functionally
literate will be able to read Yamanaka’s works, whereas not all English speakers
who are functionally literate will be able to read Dictée.
11 I thank
Jeanne Fahnestock for helping me to frame my argument in this way.
12 See Moira
Roth’s “Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 1951-1982: A Narrative Chronology” in Writing Self, Writing Nation (1994) for
a more detailed chronology of Cha’s life.
13 See n7 in
Laura Hyun Yi Kang’s “The ‘Liberatory Voice’ of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée” in Writing Self, Writing Nation.
14 In addition
to the works cited in this chapter see, also, Yi-Chun Tricia Lin’s bibliography
in Asian American Novelists: A
Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (2000). Theses and dissertations that address the
text include, among others, Sue Kim’s “The Dialectics of Sensibility: Theresa
Hak Kyung Cha, Thomas Pynchon, Bessie Head, and the Institutionalization of
Postmodern Literary Criticism” (2003);
Sandra Si Yun Oh’s “Martyrdom in
Korean American Literature: Resistance and Paradox in East Goes
West, Quiet
Odyssey, Comfort Woman, and Dictée”
(2001); Veronica Iulia Csorvasi’s “In Search of a New Syntax: Maxine Hong
Kingston and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha” (1999); and Kristina Chew’s “Pears Buying
Apples: Virgil’s Georgics, Plato’s Phaedrus, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée” (1995).
15 Though
definitions of “mail art” vary widely, it is generally viewed as any form of
artwork that is mailed via the postal service or other delivery services. According to the website “Mail Art: A
Pathfinder,” “mail art forms include postcards created by or modified by
artists, decorated envelopes, and artist’s books or other objects. Common characteristics include the design and
use of rubber stamps and stickers, handmade paper, photocopying, collage, the
design and use of non-official postage stamps, humor, and the incorporation of
text into the artwork.”
16 These six
include Donald Richie’s “The Asian Bookshelf: Transcendent Lives” (1983); Susan
Wolf’s “Theresa Cha: Recalling Telling Retelling” (1986); Michael Stephens’ chapter
in The Dramaturgy of Style (1986);
Stephen-Paul Martin’s chapter in Open
Form and the Feminine Imagination (1988); Trinh T.
Minh-ha’s references in Woman, Native, Other (1989); and bell
hooks in her book Talking Back: Thinking
Feminist, Thinking Black (1989). See
Kang’s entry on Dictée in A Resource Guide to Asian American
Literature (2001).
17 I am
referring here to the cultural nationalist discourse/project of the 1960s and
1970s associated with Frank Chin and his cohort’s claim that in order to fight
racism and social oppression, “real” Asian
Americans (as opposed to
“Americanized” Asians) must reclaim their history, culture, and language. For Chin et al., this reclamation is made
possible through language and literature so long as (male Chinese, Japanese, or
Filipino American) writers work towards recuperating an “Asian American
sensibility” that is grounded in male privilege. Though they do not make this explicit claim
about male privilege, their work demonstrates such a strong gender bias that
some critics, including Elaine Kim, King-kok Cheung, Daniel Kim, and Viet Thanh
Nguyen, among others, have labeled their language misogynistic. See Chapter 3 for a more extensive discussion
of Chin’s cultural nationalist agenda.
18 While there
were immigrants in America from other countries in Asia, these three groups had
by far the largest numbers of immigrants.
According to Ronald Takaki, the number of Asians in America in 1965 was
roughly one million, or less than one percent of the total population of the
U.S., while by 1985 that figure rose to roughly five million, or two percent of
the U.S. population. The demographics of
the Asian American population changed significantly as well. As Takaki notes, “in 1960, 52 percent were
Japanese, 27 percent Chinese, 20 percent Filipino, 1 percent Korean, and 1
percent Asian Indian. Twenty-five years
later, 21 percent of Asian Americans were Chinese, 21 percent Filipino, 15
percent Japanese, 12 percent Vietnamese, 11 percent Korean, 10 percent Asian
Indian, 4 percent Laotian, 3 percent Cambodian, and 3 percent ‘other’”
(420).
19 Chuh
writes, “Neither space—in her work, represented by Korea (variously a Korea
that is at once itself and a possession of Japan) and the United States—nor
time, the progression of identity ordered through a narrative beginning,
middle, and end, can be understood in terms of a single narrative of nation,
according to Dictée. The time described is transnationalist time, which structures a narrative not
developmentally but cornucopically.
Distinctions between past and present, or foreigner and citizen, or
outsider and insider, are maintained only through a deliberate erasure of the
dynamic relations between the nation’s exterior and interior. Transnationalist time references the fracture
between historic and lived time for the Asian American subject, and thus
reconfigures the relations between a nation and its citizen-subjects”
(“Imaginary Borders” 286).
20 See Stella
Oh’s “The Enunciation of the Tenth Muse in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée” (2002), Min Jung Lee’s “Baring
the Apparatus: Dictée’s Speaking
Subject Writes a Response” (1999), and Eun Kyung Min’s “Reading the Figure of
Dictation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée”
(1998).
21 See Michael
Rydzynski’s “New Technologies Inspired Works of Korean-American Artist,”
available at <http://www.irvineworldnews.com/Bstories/jan17/cha.html>.
22 This
quotation is taken from Elaine Kim’s “Poised on the In-between: A Korean
American’s Reflections on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée” in Writing Self,
Writing Nation. Kim identifies Cha’s
poem as a piece of mail art completed in 1977.
23 For
example, Ong argues that by beginning his narrative with “The late summer of
that year” instead of identifying the precise year, Hemingway’s readers are
instructed to occupy the position or role of one who was there with the
narrator and hence does not need to be given any more information (13). Ong suggests that through this particular
rhetorical technique Hemingway addresses his audience in such a way that they
are made to feel familiar with the context/s in which the narrative takes
place.
24 A detailed
explanation of Grice’s maxims appears later in this chapter.
25 Mary Louise
Pratt explains that we can assume the violations in literary works are not
unintentional based on our knowledge of how literature gets produced and
disseminated. Writers clearly edit and
revise their work, as do their editors, so unintentional violations would
presumably be noticed before the text was actually printed for
publication. See pages 169-75 in Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary
Discourse.
26 Ong makes
an exception in the case of two deaf people who might exchange words through writing
in the presence of one another, or two Chinese speakers whose dialects are so
different that they can only understand each other’s written language. I would add to this list the current
possibility of two people conversing in the presence of one another over email
or text messaging.
27 J.L.
Austin, in his book, How to Do Things
with Words, examines the performative function of language and classifies
types of utterances into one of three categories: locutionary acts, or uttering of a proposition such as, “I will
bring my dictionary tomorrow”; illocutionary
acts, or acts which the speaker makes in uttering the locution such as
promising to bring the dictionary tomorrow when one says “I will bring my
dictionary tomorrow.” This locution may
perform multiple illocutionary acts, depending on the intention of the
speaker. The speaker may also or instead
be making a prediction, a threat, or an assertion. Finally, when a speaker performs locutionary
and illocutionary acts, she is also performing perlocutionary acts. In
other words, she is performing an act that in turn produces effects or
consequences on the audience.
28 Grice
identifies four different types of intentional violation: “1. [The speaker] may
quietly and unostentatiously violate
a maxim; if so, in some cases he will be liable to mislead. 2. He may opt
out from the operation both of the maxim and of the Cooperative Principle;
he may say, indicate or allow it to become plain that he is unwilling to
cooperate in the way the maxim requires.
He may say, for example, I cannot
say more; my lips are sealed. 3. He may be faced by a clash: he may be unable, for example, to fulfill the first maxim of
Quantity (Be as informative as is required) without violating the second maxim
of Quality (Have adequate evidence for what you say). 4. He may flout
a maxim; that is, he may blatantly fail to fulfill it” (30).
29 Spahr’s
argument for the ways in which the text calls for a “decolonizing practice of
reading” points to one of the text’s most unique rhetorical effects. She claims that while critics acknowledge the
formal aspects of postmodern works and their relation to “larger political
issues,” they have been more attentive to the design or construction of these
works than they have to the rhetorical effects that the works have on their
readers (24). Spahr urges us to see how
a fractured, postmodern text like Dictée
does not alienate the reader or fracture the reader’s engagement with the text,
but rather “forces the reader out of linear, absorptive reading practices and
into vertical, circular, inter- and intra-cultural ways of reading all of which
undermine the coercive aspects of postmodernism that [Frederic] Jameson would label colonialist” (25).
30 Lowe writes
that these terms “are attempts at naming the material contradictions that
characterize Asian American groups” (67).
31 James Gee’s
“borderland Discourse” theory is useful for understanding and interpreting the
liminal space in which members of oppressed groups can communicate. I discuss this theory at greater length in
the concluding chapter. According to
Gee, “borderland Discourses” are spaces where “people from diverse backgrounds
and, thus, with diverse primary and community-based Discourses, can interact
outside the confines of public-sphere and middle-class elite Discourses”
(162). Gee uses the capital “D” in
“Discourses” to reflect his modified definition of the term. According to Gee, “Discourses are ways of being
in the world, or forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs,
attitudes, and social identities, as well as gestures, glances, body positions,
and clothes. A Discourse is a sort of
identity kit which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions
on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular social role
that others will recognize” (127).
Excepting instances in which I quote Gee directly or refer to his ideas
I will use the lower case “d” for “discourse.”
32 Although
Bhabha’s theories and arguments are grounded in a specifically western
context—that is, he draws from Lacanian psychoanalysis, Derridean
deconstruction, and European postmodernism in order to construct his arguments
about English colonialism—his work is useful to those studying other forms of
oppression and subversion and negotiations of cultural difference operating
outside of the realm of the postcolonial.
Bhabha’s work is especially relevant today given that we live in an age
of transnationalism, globalization, and diasporic societies. The tense relations, for example, among
blacks, Latinos, and Korean immigrants in South Central, L.A., as demonstrated
by the 1992 L.A. riots, might be theorized using Bhabha as a critical
framework. Because his investigation
focuses on the ways in which dominated peoples and cultures have not only
survived but have impacted the lives and cultures of the oppressors, his
theories can be (and have been) applied to many different types of comparative
cultural studies. While there are
certain advantages to this broad applicability—namely that using the discourse
of colonialism might help to shed light on other forms of domination and
strategies for resistance, there are significant drawbacks as well. Using colonialism analogously risks glossing
over conditions and queries particular to other types of cultural study while
at the same time eliding the complexities of the colonizer/colonized
relationship.
33 Though it
was published in 1981, Chickencoop
was produced for the first time in 1972 by the American Place Theatre of New
York.
34 The term
“hyperliteracy” has been used to describe the linguistic practices of other
fictional and non-fictional characters.
Morris Young, for example, notes that Maxine, the narrator of Kingston’s
The Woman Warrior, becomes
“hyper-literate” in her kindergarten classroom as a result of her anxiety about
language and “the performance she must enact” (100). Young writes, “While [Maxine] fumbles with
language, she also takes painstaking care to be ‘hyper-literate’—the ‘complete,
grammatical sentence that comes squeaking out at impossible length’—so that her
legitimacy and citizenship will not be questioned though such unease will mark
her nonetheless” (100-101). For
Harryette Mullen, “hyperliteracy” connotes the ability to communicate in
multiple languages and discourses.
According to Mullen, Fran Ross’s Oreo is hyperliterate as she is an
“accomplished code-switcher … as capable of speaking vernacular black English
with her grandmother as she is able to schmooz with her mother in
Yiddish-inflected English” (115).
35 For more
detailed information on the various immigrant groups, including years of
immigration, number of immigrants, legal status, exclusion laws, literacy
rates, gender ratio, socioeconomic backgrounds, etc. see Takaki’s Strangers from a Different Shore (1989;
1998) and Sucheng Chan’s Asian Americans:
An Interpretive History (1991).
36 Poems
written on the walls of Angel Island between 1910 and 1940 by Chinese
immigrants while waiting to be admitted into the U.S. have been documented and
translated in Island: Poetry and History
of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 by Him Mark Lai, Genny
Lim, and Judy Yung (1980).
Marlon Hom has collected recently
translated Cantonese vernacular rhymes written in the early 1910s by Chinese
Americans living in San Francisco’s Chinatown in Songs of Gold Mountain (1987).
Janice Mirikitani has compiled the written and translated work of
first-generation Japanese immigrants into an anthology called Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology
(1980). See also Poets Behind Barbed Wire, edited by Jiro Nakano and Kay Nakano
(1983) for a collection of tanka
poems written by first-generation Japanese Americans interned in wartime
relocation camps. Early Korean immigrant
writing appears in Brenda Paik Sunoo’s Korean
American Writings: Selected Material from Insight, Korean American Bimonthly (1975).
More recently, Xiao-huang Yin has published a book of Chinese American
literature written in both English and Chinese and dating back to the
1850s. See Chinese American Literature Since the 1850s (2000).
37 According
to Sucheng Chan, attempts to exclude Asians began in 1855 in California, but
the laws did not have any impact since they were declared unconstitutional by
the higher courts. In 1882, Congress
passed the first of several Chinese Exclusion Acts barring entry of Chinese
laborers for ten years, but making exemptions for merchants, teachers,
students, diplomats and travelers. In
1917, an immigration act was passed to prevent Asian Indians from entering the
country. Japanese and Koreans were
denied entry after the passage of the 1924 Act, and in 1934, the
Tydings-McDuffie Act was passed, limiting the number of Filipinos allowed to
immigrate to fifty persons per year. See
pages 54-55 in Sucheng Chan’s Asian
Americans: An Interpretive History (1991).
38 See Sucheng
Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History
and Ronald Takaki’s Strangers from a
Different Shore for overviews of the history of Chinese immigrant workers
in America.
39 According
to the chronology in the most recent edition of East Goes West (1997), Kang attended Harvard University in 1922 and
again between 1925-1927 during which time he completed a Master’s degree in
English education. From 1923-1925 he
pursued studies at either Boston College or Boston University; it is unclear
from existing records which university he attended.
40 I am
borrowing this phrase from Ronald Takaki’s book of the same title (1989; 1998).
41 Han is
referring here to the naturalization law that denied citizenship to
“Orientals.” According to the Naturalization Act of 1790, only “free whites”
were granted citizenship by the United States government.
42 See
Patricia Chu (2000); Elaine Kim (1990); and Rachel Lee (1999).
43 I thank
Jeanne Fahnestock for helping me to identify the situation in these terms.
44 See Kyhan
Lee’s “Younghill Kang and the Genesis of Korean-American Literature” in Korea Journal (1991) and Sunyoung Lee’s
“The Unmaking of an Oriental Yankee” in the 1997 Kaya edition of East Goes West.
45 According
to historian Gary Okihiro, the origin of the term “yellow peril” dates back to
the late 1800s when Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany commissioned a painting
depicting Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and “‘the smaller
civilized states’” (represented as “women in martial garb”) looking toward “an
approaching ‘calamity which menaces them’” (118). Wilhelm explains in the accompanying caption
that the “threatening danger” is “in the form of Buddha” and that a “Chinese
dragon” “represents the demon of Destruction” (qtd. in Okihiro 118). Okihiro notes that while Kaiser Wilhelm
probably coined the term “yellow peril,” the idea dates back as far as the
fifth century B.C.E. when the Greeks and Persians were at war, or in the
thirteenth century C.E., when the Mongols swept through and destroyed much of
eastern Europe (119).
46 Lee notes,
based on Kang’s own commentary in his Guggenheim Foundation fellowship
application from October 1931, that while on the one hand “Death of an Exile”
refers to the “tragic character of To Wan Kim,” the “deeper meaning” lies in
its allusion to what Kang himself described as “‘the idea of rebirth in the
soul of the hero, which had also been in exile.
At the end of the novel, the romantic soul in him is dead, and the soul
that remains and feels itself at home in the world is the soul that is facing
life in the real sense, pragmatically’” (381).
Given Kang’s own interpretation and the more obvious reading that refers
to To Wan Kim, it is understandable that Kang’s publishers did not want to
market the novel under this title; as Lee notes in a footnote to her essay,
Maxwell Perkins at first suggested the titles, “The Americanization of
Younghill Kang” and “Rebirth in America,” while Thomas Wolfe’s original
contributions were “Yankee out of Korea” and “Oriental Yankee.” The “eventual title and subtitle of the
book,” she writes, “were the result of a collaborative brainstorm” by Wolfe,
Perkins and “presumably Kang” (397 n12).
47 The second
edition of East Goes West was
published in 1965, though I have not found any reviews or critical commentary
from this time period.
48 Due to the
U.S. colonization of the Philippines, Filipinos were considered “nationals” of
the United States. As they were neither
“aliens” nor “citizens,” they could not be excluded on the same basis as other
“Orientals.” In order to restrict
Filipino immigration, their status had to change. Under the 1934 TydingsMcDuffie Act, Filipino
Americans were reclassified as “aliens” and immigration was restricted to a
quota of fifty persons per year. As
“aliens,” Filipinos were now ineligible for certain assistance programs under
the New Deal. Filipinos were also
discriminated against as the Supreme Court determined that because they were
not “white,” they could not even apply to become naturalized citizens (Takaki
332). See also Ian Haney López’s White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race
(1996) for an investigation of the ways in which race has been used by the
court system to justify and manipulate legal definitions of citizenship.
49 After the
U.S. annexation of the Philippines in 1898, tens of thousands of Filipinos
migrated to Hawai`i and the continental U.S. The vast majority were poor,
uneducated laborers while, according to Takaki, “several hundred, possibly a
few thousand—were pensionados, or
government-sponsored students.”
According to Takaki, 84 percent of those who migrated to California
between 1920 and 1929 were males under thirty years of age. The few Filipino women who migrated to
Hawai`i did so at the request of their husbands or the HSPA (Hawaiian Sugar
Planters’ Association), which determined that men with families were more
reliable as workers than men who were single.
Since migrants on the “mainland” were constantly moving from one
location to another, wives did not often accompany their husbands but rather
waited for them at home in the Philippines assuming, like their husbands, that
their sojourn to America was only temporary (Takaki 58-59). See also Chan’s Asian Americans: An Interpretive History and E. San Juan’s
introduction to On Becoming Filipino
(1995) for more information on the history of Filipinos in America.
50 Although
this period marked the first significant migration of Filipinos to the U.S., it
was certainly not the first time Filipinos had set foot on U.S. soil. Forced to work on trading ships during the
Spanish galleon trade era from 1565 to 1815, many Filipinos jumped ship on the
bayous and settled in the Louisiana territory.
51 David
Palumbo-Liu, in his introduction to The
Ethnic Canon (1995), argues for a “critical multiculturalism” by
encouraging “diverse and often contradictory modes of interpretation and
critique within the specificities of history, national cultural politics, and
transnational movements of cultural objects” (22). These critiques or “counterreadings”
challenge such widespread beliefs by arguing against reductive and homogenous
readings of ethnic literature as literature that simply represents the “ethnic
experience.” While all literature may be
said to represent experience, the issue here is that the experience being
represented is seen as “foreign” to dominant culture and hence is marginalized.
52 While the
book is generally read as a fictional autobiography, many critics claim that
the narrator, Allos, represents not just Bulosan but other Filipinos in
America. Carey McWilliams, in his
introduction to the novel, expresses doubt that the experiences depicted in the
novel were Bulosan’s alone and writes that “it can fairly be said … that some
Filipino was indeed the victim of each of these or similar incidents” (vii);
Marilyn Alquizola also identifies Allos as a fictive narrator who represents
both the author and other
Filipinos in her essay, “Subversion
or Affirmation: The Text and Subtext of America
Is in the Heart”; and E. San Juan Jr. calls the text a “novelistic
synthesis of Filipino lives” and identifies Allos, the narratorprotagonist, as
“Bulosan’s persona” (On Becoming 9-10).
53 Other
fantasy themes that I have identified in works by Asian Americans include the
fight for the Korean independence movement in Ronyoung Kim’s Clay Walls, and the rhetorical visions
of Japanese American men during World War II as expressed in John Okada’s No-No Boy. Those who answered “no” to two questions on
the loyalty questionnaire were viewed by the Japanese as “loyal” and “true”
Japanese, while those who answered “yes” to both questions were considered by
the American government to be “loyal” Americans. Question 27 asked, “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States
on combat duty, wherever ordered?” and 28 asked, “Will you swear unqualified
allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United
States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or
obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power or
organization?” (Weglyn 136). The
rhetorical visions of each group provided the members/characters with a sense
of purpose and belonging at the same time that they motivated them to take
action. As immigrants or second- or
third-generation Asian Americans who were still perceived as “foreign,” these
groups created fantasy themes as a way of dealing with their status as exiles,
non-citizens, or racialized minorities who faced discrimination and
marginalization despite their legal citizenship status.
54 This is not
to say that Filipinos were regarded as entirely unthreatening. Filipinos, like the other Asian immigrants
who came before them, encountered racial discrimination and violence,
especially during the first half of the twentieth century. In California, where anti-Filipino violence
was most prevalent, a series of race riots triggered by racism and sex broke
out in January 1930, leaving dozens injured and at least one dead. As Takaki explains, the riots were the result
of “economic rivalry and sexual
jealousy” (327). EuroAmerican farm
laborers felt that Filipinos were taking job opportunities away from them and
were incensed by what they considered improper mixing among Filipinos and white
women. They were seen as a sexual threat
to white men and reinforced already existing anxieties about “white racial
purity” (Takaki 329). In order to
“preserve the white race,” California Attorney General U.S. Webb “insisted that
the antimiscegenation law be applied to Filipinos” (Takaki 330).
55 See
Patricia Chu, Assimilating Asians;
Susan Evangelista, Carlos Bulosan and His
Poetry; Elaine Kim, Asian American
Literature; Rachel Lee, The Americas
of Asian American Literature; and E. San Juan, Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle.
56 Lee argues
that “part of the appeal” of these women “lies in their speaking an American
inclusiveness that remains synonymous with the narrator’s dream of
brotherhood…. these women, in their ‘maternal solicitude’ underscore the
primacy of the male subject and the importance of his forging brotherly bonds
with other men” (32).
57 See, for
example, Kandice Chuh (2003; 31-57) and Melinda L. de Jesús’ “Reclaiming
History, Rewriting Desire: Reclaiming Queerness in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Bienvenido
Santos’ Scent of Apples” (2002). For discussions on sexuality as it relates to
Asian America see David L. Eng’s Racial
Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (2001); Q&A: Queer in Asian America, eds.
David L.
Eng and Alice Y. Hom (1998); Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of
the Gay and Lesbian Experience, ed. Russell Leong (1996); Crystal Parikh’s
“‘The Most Outrageous Masquerade’: Queering Asian-American Masculinity” (2002);
Dana Takagi’s “Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in
Asian America” (1996); and Jennifer Ting (1995, 1998).
58 In Takaki’s
discussion of the Filipino race riots of the 1930s, he quotes a number of
sources that make explicit this stereotype.
In one example, he cites remarks made by San Francisco Municipal Court
Judge Sylvain Lazarus in a 1936 Time
magazine article: “It is a dreadful thing when these Filipinos, scarcely more
than savages, come to San Francisco, work for practically nothing, and obtain
the society of these [white] girls…. Some of these [Filipino] boys, with
perfect candor, have told me bluntly and boastfully that they practice the art
of love with more perfection than white boys, and occasionally one of the
[white] girls has supplied me with information to the same effect. In fact some of the disclosures in this
regard are perfectly startling in nature” (qtd. in Takaki 329).
59 See Michael
Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation
in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (1994).
60 Wu also
identifies prevalent stereotypes of Asian American women, though this list is less
thorough: “My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail
order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and
the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster,
look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair” (6).
61 According
to Dorothy Ritsuko McDonald, Chickencoop,
Chin’s first play, “won the East West Players playwriting contest in 1971 and
was produced by the American Place Theatre of New York in 1972” (xiv).
62 Despite the
heterogeneity of Asian ethnic groups, Asians were and often still are lumped
together as “Orientals” in the American imagination. Racial epithets, such as “gook” and “chink,”
and stereotypes, such as the “inscrutable Asian,” which are used to
discriminate against Asians in America regardless of ethnic background, reflect
this homogenization. However some
stereotypes are reserved for specific ethnic groups. Filipino Americans, for example, have
historically been constructed as hypersexual as opposed to asexual or
homosexual, while many South Asian Americans have been stereotyped as
“techies,” cab drivers, convenience store clerks and, since September 11, 2001,
terrorists who threaten their own nation’s security.
63 Frank Chin
and his narrator-protagonist Tam Lum are both American-born and claim English
as their native language. Chang-rae Lee,
on the other hand, was born in Seoul, Korea and moved to the United States when
he was three years old (Cooper 24); Henry Park, as Lee writes, was born in
America “at the end of a long plane ride from Seoul” (Native Speaker 334).
64 Huang and
Trie were at the center of the 1996 scandal in which both naturalized U.S.
citizens were accused of illegal fundraising for President Clinton’s
re-election and the Democratic National Committee. ‘Asia’ and ‘Asian America’ became conflated
in this scandal, as represented in the political cartoon on the cover of the
March 24, 1997 edition of the National
Review in which President Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Al Gore were
caricatured as buck-toothed and dressed in “Asian” garb. Wen Ho Lee, also a naturalized U.S. citizen,
was indicted in 1999 for mishandling classified information. He was charged with over 50 criminal counts
and held in solitary confinement in New Mexico for nine months. According to Volpp, it has become clear that
Lee is a victim of racial profiling.
Several officers of the Los Alamos lab and the Energy department have
admitted publicly that Lee was targeted because of his ethnicity. See also Frank Wu’s discussion in Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and
White (104-16 and 176-90).
65 See E.D.
Hirsch Jr.’s Cultural Literacy: What
Every American Needs to Know (1987).
66 Other
t-shirts that Abercrombie & Fitch produced read “Rick Shaw’s Hoagies and
Grinders. Order by the foot. Good meat. Quick feet”; “Buddha Bash: Get your
Buddha on the Floor”; and “Wok-N-Bowl.”
After numerous protests across the country Abercrombie & Fitch
pulled the line of t-shirts from stores nationwide.
67 Elaine Kim
writes that according to the producer of the first Charlie Chan film, John
Stone, the Charlie Chan character “was deliberately decided upon partially as a
refutation of the unfortunate Fu Manchu characterization of the Chinese, and
partly as a demonstration of his own idea that any minority group could be
sympathetically portrayed on the screen with the right story and approach”
(qtd. in E. Kim, Asian American 18). Other critical studies of stereotypical
representations of Asian Americans in mass media and popular culture include
James Moy’s Marginal Sites: Staging the
Chinese in America (1993); Darrell Hamamoto’s Monitored Peril: Asian Americans and the Politics of TV Representation (1994);
Jachinson Chan’s Chinese American Masculinities:
From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee (2001); and Screening
Asian Americans (2002), edited and with an introduction by Peter X. Feng.
68 Lee
clarifies an important distinction between the terms “alien” and
“foreign.” He says that “‘foreign’
refers to that which is outside or distant, while ‘alien’ describes things that
are immediate and present yet have a foreign nature or allegiance” (3). “The difference,” he says, “is political”;
the tourist is “foreign” because her presence is temporary whereas the immigrant
is “alien” because she has no intention to leave (or her “declared intention is
suspect”). Lee writes, “Only when aliens
exit or are ‘naturalized’ (cleansed of their foreignness and remade) can they
shed their status as pollutants” (3). On
the construction of Chinese immigrants as “contaminated” and “diseased,” see
Nayan Shah’s Contagious Divides:
Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (2001).
69 See Daniel
Kim’s “The Strange Love of Frank Chin” for an insightful discussion of
homoeroticism and self-loathing in Frank Chin’s works. According to Kim, Chin bears a “deeply
ambivalent” identificatory relationship to the stereotype of the Asian “gay”
man. He writes that although the
stereotype “is presented in [Chin’s] writings as an image of what Chin is not,
it also represents what he believes he has become, what he irremediably feels
himself to be: a yellow man who harbors a deep and abidingly strange love for
the white man—strange because it is highly eroticized but antisexual,
simultaneously libidinal and identificatory.
Moreover this love is intimately intertwined with an equally profound
hatred that is at once sadistic and masochistic” (270). See also King-kok Cheung’s “The Woman Warrior
versus The Chinaman Pacific: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between
Feminism and Heroism?” in Conflicts in
Feminism (1990).
70 In her
book, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face
in American Culture (1997), Susan Gubar looks at cross-racial (black/white)
impersonations or imitations in various media such as film, fiction, poetry,
photography, journalism, and painting and explores their impact on American
culture. She writes that the term
“racechange” is “meant to suggest the traversing of race boundaries, racial imitation
or impersonation, cross-racial mimicry or mutability, white posing as black or
black passing as white, pan-racial mutuality,” and that representations of
“racechange” “test the boundaries between racially defined identities,
functioning paradoxically to reinforce and to challenge the Manichean meanings
Western societies give to color” (5-6).
To my knowledge, there is as of yet no broad study of literary
representations of “racechanges” among Asians and blacks.
71 The
critics/reviewers I cite here are commenting on the live production of the play
and not on readings of the text. While
analysis of literary critical reviews would be fruitful for comparative
purposes, I have chosen to limit my study mostly, but not entirely, to
contemporaneous reviews of actual productions and critical examinations of the
text as performance. The body of work
focusing on the text of Chickencoop
is especially large since so many people have taken issue with Chin’s
masculinist and misogynistic rhetoric.
Precisely because of the volume of work aimed at criticizing Chin and The Chickencoop Chinaman, I have chosen
to discuss only a few of the critics in order to illustrate how his work is
rhetorical in ways that perhaps Chin did not intend or expect.
72 This
quotation is from the unpaginated Preface to the 1961 edition of Booth’s Rhetoric of Fiction.
73 Fisher and
Filloy use the term “aesthetic proof” to refer to proofs that “have their
origin in an aesthetic response to the work’s elements” (347).
74 I do not
mean to suggest that these traditions have equal currency in U.S. culture, for
it is obvious that they do not. As
Shimakawa suggests, by appropriating black discourse, “all Tam and Kenji have
succeeded in doing is moving from one position of subordination or site of
oppression to another; that is, African American speech may have provided
limited access to expression, but in the context of a larger U.S. American
culture, the opportunities for expression via that avenue are limited indeed”
(93).
75 Shimakawa
notes that while the play references the comic-strip version of The Lone Ranger, she believes the radio
transmission is “more significant—both because of Chin’s prop directions and
because the trope connecting the radio and the Old West is picked up in the
play’s closing monologue” (174 n8).
76 See Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and
California’s Proposition 187 (2002) by Kent Ono and John Sloop for an
illuminating analysis of the rhetoric surrounding Proposition 187 and its
implications for the discourses of race and U.S. immigration and
citizenship.
77 See, for
example, Min Song’s review in Amerasia
Journal; Mary Jane Hurst’s “Presidential Address:
Language, Gender, and Community in
American Fiction at the End of the Century”; Rand Richards Cooper’s “Excess
Identities”; Tim Engles’ “‘Visions of me in the whitest raw light’:
Assimilation and Doxic Whiteness in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker”; Daniel Kim’s “Do I, Too, Sing America? Vernacular
Representations and Chang-rae Lee’s Native
Speaker”; Crystal Parikh’s “Ethnic America
Undercover: The Intellectual and
Minority Discourse”; and You-me Park and Gayle Wald’s “Native Daughters in the
Promised Land: Gender, Race, and the Question of Separate Spheres.”
78 As Lowe
explains, due to the increasing demand for low-wage labor in Asian and Latin
American countries in the period after World War II, the proportion of U.S.
workers in the manufacturing industry fell as the proportion working in the
service industry increased. She writes
that during this period, “the capital imperative came into greater
contradiction with the political imperative of the U.S. nation-state.” Transformations in the economy, she explains,
“have produced increased demand for immigrants to fill minimum-wage, unskilled,
and part-time jobs, yet these same economic processes have initiated new waves
of anti-immigrant nativism and exacerbated the state’s need to legislate
immigration” (15). The 1965 Immigration
Act “opened” immigration such that “low-wage, service-sector workers” as well
as
“proletarianized white-collar
professionals” could enter (15; 189-90 n42).
These post-1965 immigrants, Lowe maintains, represent an economic
contradiction: “the state claims to be a democratic body in which all subjects
are granted membership, while the racialized immigrant workers from whom
capital profits are historically excluded from political participation in the
state” (183 n19). In addition to these
low-wage workers and white-collar professionals, approximately 1.5 million
refugees have come to the U.S. since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. As well, immigrants from South Korea and the
Philippines, two countries also affected by U.S. colonialism and
neocolonialism, have arrived in large numbers since 1965. Lowe argues that “The post-1965 Asian
immigrant displacement differs from that of the earlier migrations from China
and Japan, for it embodies the displacement from Asian societies in the aftermath
of war and colonialism to a United States with whose sense of national identity
the immigrants are in contradiction precisely because of that history”
(16). Moreover, Kandice Chuh points out
that Asian nations can no longer be perceived, from a Eurocentric perspective,
“primarily as sources of labor and raw materials for ‘Western’
capitalism.” She writes that instead,
some Asian countries are now “recognized exporters of capital and are
influential nodes in the multilateral trajectories of transnational
capitalism.” Thus, in addition to the
immigrant laborers described above, there is currently “a large professional,
managerial class whose migrations may be multilateral and whose members are not
necessarily interested in formally attaching themselves to the United States by
way of citizenship” (Imagine Otherwise
7).
79 Since many
people could not (and still cannot) distinguish among Japanese Americans,
Korean Americans, or Chinese Americans during this period in U.S. history,
Korean Americans and Chinese Americans wore buttons that identified them as
such in order to avoid suspicion. I
mention this here because it reflects the stereotypical notion that “all Asians
look alike”—a notion that, like the “yellow peril,” contributed to the racial
formation of Asians in America.
80 My
understanding is that when Bourdieu uses the term “market,” he does not mean it
in the purely economical sense; rather, a market is a social space in which
relations among its members are determined by their various forms of “capital,”
including economic, cultural, and symbolic.
According to Bourdieu, economic capital refers to material forms of
wealth; cultural capital refers to knowledge or skills related to the cultural
arena; and symbolic capital refers to the recognition or acknowledgment that
one receives from others for having or accumulating these other forms of
capital. See Bourdieu’s Language and Symbolic Power (1991).
81 Based on my
own experience teaching the novel to college students in an Asian American
literature course I have found that students do not generally respond well to
the text. Some find it confusing and
would prefer that Chang-rae Lee had written a straightforward tale of an
immigrant father and his son, while others would prefer that he had just
written a “regular” spy novel without interweaving issues of immigration and
assimilation.
82 Generally
speaking, “local” is used in Hawai`i to refer to those who were born and raised
there, while Native Hawaiian refers to the indigenous population. Steven Sumida includes in his definition of
“local” nonwhites (Native Hawaiians, Asian Americans, Samoans, or Puerto
Ricans); those who have “historical,” “ethnic” origins in the “working classes
of Hawai`i,” such as Portuguese Americans or Spanish Americans; and some haoles (“local haoles,” or local
foreigners) who have been raised amongst locals in Hawai`i (And the View xiv). Moreover, he emphasizes that “‘Hawaiian’ is
not a synonym for ‘local’… A Hawaiian is quintessentially a local, but a local
is not necessarily a Hawaiian” (xv).
Because a significant portion of my discussion centers on conflicts
between and among locals, haoles, and
Native Hawaiians, the term, as I use it, will not include these latter two
groups.
83 For more
information on the controversy over Blu’s
Hanging and Saturday Night at the
Pahala Theatre, see, for example, Candace Fujikane’s “Sweeping Racism under
the Rug of Censorship” (2000), “Blu’s Hanging
and the Responsibilities Faced by Local Readers and Writers” (1998), and
“Reimagining Development and the Local in Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre”
(1997). See also Donna Foote’s “Trouble
in Paradise” (1998); Peter Monaghan’s “Asian-American Studies Group in Turmoil
over a Rescinded Book Award” (1998); Scott Whitney’s “Naming All the Beasts:
Lois-Ann Talks Back” (1998); and Jamie James’ “This Hawaii is Not for Tourists”
(1999).
84 I recognize
that by beginning my discussion with U.S. and British imperialism I am
complicit in the reading and writing of Hawai`i from a “postcolonial”
perspective. As Steven Sumida writes,
“we of a postcolonial world are habituated to the notion that Hawaii’s history
began in 1778 with Captain Cook’s arrival and the report of his expedition back
to Great Britain. This colonial version
of Hawaii’s history literally begins with Europeans writing and reading it”
(“Sense of Place” 222). While I
understand this logic and acknowledge my participation in colonialist
discourse, I would argue that it only makes sense to begin here because my
discussion centers on the effects of U.S. imperialist practices in
Hawai`i.
85 I use
quotation marks around these terms to reflect the conflicting ideologies of Asian
settlement in
Hawai`i. Trask is especially critical of the use of
the term “local” over “immigrant” or “settler” because
she believes it glosses over the
history of Asian immigration and Asian settlers’ “long collaboration in
[Native Hawaiians’] continued
dispossession, and the benefits therefrom” (“Settlers” 2). However, as Fujikane points out, the term was
also used to reflect the “collective efforts” of locals and Native Hawaiians to
resist continental imperialism in the form of immigration from the U.S. and
Asia, as well the growing tourist industry (“Between Nationalisms” 26-27). She notes that the term is somewhat ambiguous
because of its association with coalition politics and because it is also a way
for locals and Native Hawaiians to distinguish amongst themselves—in other
words, as a way of avoiding ambiguity.
She writes, “For while the terms ‘Local’ and ‘Native Hawaiian’ are not
necessarily competing terms, Native Hawaiians often find themselves in the
position of having to choose the identity that most urgently needs to be
represented. Within the context of
current struggles for sovereignty, many Native Hawaiians align themselves with
the Native Hawaiian Nation, and we need to look more closely at where this
political struggle places the identity ‘Local’” (“Between Nationalisms”
30). For a discussion of local
literature and its politics, see Candace Fujikane’s “Between Nationalisms:
Hawaii’s Local Nation and Its Troubled Racial Paradise” (1994). For a detailed introduction to the local literatures
of Hawai`i, see Steven Sumida’s And the
View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai`i (1991).
86 This is
particularly the case for local Japanese who now hold more dominant positions,
both economically and politically, than any other ethnic group in Hawai`i.
87 By
“disowning America” Chuh means a process by which the use of the term
“postcolonial” critically interrogates Asian Americanist critique such that
“Asian Americanist discourse might resist transformation into a depoliticized
instrument of hegemonic nationalist pedagogy” (Imagine Otherwise 14). The
larger aim of this project of “disowning America,” then, is both to acknowledge
how globalization and transnationalism have impacted Asian American subject
formation and to work towards “garnering the economic and social advantages
that accrue to achieving the national subjectivity of Asian-raced peoples in
the United States” (114).
88 Fujikane
writes that while both Native Hawaiians and locals claim Hawai`i as a
“homeland,” “because the stakes for Native Hawaiian nationalism and local
cultural nationalism seem asymmetrical, the latter produces highly ambivalent
narratives” (24).
89 See Ohama
et al.’s “Evaluations of Hawaii Creole English and Standard English,” Journal of Language and Social Psychology
(2000).
90 According
to Romaine, Pidgin and other varieties of Creole English were used for literary
purposes in Hawai`i dating back to the early 1930s; however, it was not until
after World War II that local writers “began to feel confident enough in their
own experience to rely on local settings and local speech to convey their
message” (534). See also Sumida (1991).
91 As Suzanne
Romaine writes, “The very act of writing in a marginalized language whose
status as a language is denied by the mainstream is symbolic of the
appropriation of the power vested in the written word, and is at the same time
a challenge to a key feature of colonial practice: the use of language policy
as a means of social control and discrimination … writing in HCE becomes, in
the terms of Le Page & Tabouret-Keller 1985, an ‘act of identity,’ a
counter-discourse in which a different reality of otherness is constructed”
(533).
92 For
example, as Brian Street explains in Social
Literacies (1995), researchers have found that literacy tests developed by
companies and given to prospective employees are often used for the purpose of
screening out people from certain ethnic, class, or racial backgrounds rather
than testing for skills that are necessary for the job (18).
93 The
resolution continues to read as follows: “Language scholars long ago denied
that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that
any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to
exert its dominance over another. Such a claim leads to false advice for
speakers and writers, and immoral advice for humans. A nation proud of its
diverse heritage and its cultural and racial variety will preserve its heritage
of dialects. We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training
that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to
their own language.” (College Composition and Communication
25)
94 This act
expired in 2002 as President George W. Bush garnered support for his new
“school reform” bill known as “No Child Left Behind.” The new act strongly discourages instruction
in languages other than “standard” English and, according to James Crawford,
federal funding “will be spread more thinly than before—between more states,
more programs, and more students” (2002).
95 A recent
article in the Washington Post Express
titled, “Census: Less English in U.S. Homes,” reported that, according to the
Census Bureau, “Nearly one in five Americans speaks a language other than
English at home … an increase of nearly 50 percent in the past decade.” Spanish is the most common language other
than English spoken at home by people five and older, followed by Chinese,
French, German, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Italian, Korean, and Russian (3).
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