On The Bitter Tea of General Yen (Capra, 1933)

Had the chance to see this at Film Forum. Was immediately taken with Barbara Stanwyck. She's like the original Greta Gerwig!

Frank Capra’s The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933), set in Shanghai during the Chinese Civil War, features Barbara Stanwyck as an American missionary’s fiancée who develops a psychosexual interest in General Yen, played by Nils Asther in yellowface. General Yen, too, is fascinated with Stanwyck’s character Megan and holds her hostage at his estate. The film is not a romance in the usual sense of the word; rather, Yen waits patiently for his hostage to capitulate and accept her capture, while Megan fights against the anxiously erotic feelings she has for this strange, baroque man. After an intense sex dream, Megan decides to give in to Yen, but it is too late — the general has poisoned himself because of his unrequited love. While other films may portray the female figure as a damsel in distress against a foreign Other, no white man comes to save Megan and preserve her white purity. The film is less an action narrative in which Megan is to be saved than a horror film about interracial desire. While the configuration of the General Yen character as a godless heathen yet elegant mandarin is undoubtedly racist, it is canny casting: for what is General Yen but an erotic fiction of a white woman’s imagination in the first place? Orientalism is a way to read and author text into being. The text does not produce itself. The character is so ridiculous, and so intertwined with Megan’s own sexual self, that he does not really exist at all, but is a mirror or projection, a phantasm. Asther’s performance is not that of an Oriental mad villain, but an impression of the white imagination. The on-screen prohibition of sexual contact between actors of different races belies a thematic fascination with miscegenation.

"Serve the People Film Night: Short Films from the Movement" at the Interference Archive

I recently had the pleasure of visiting the Interference Archive in Brooklyn to peruse Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York, an exhibit of cultural artifacts produced within the Asian American movement. The items date from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The exhibit was put together by Ryan Wong, a former curator at the Museum of Chinese in America, and was culled from MoCA collections, the A/P/A Collections at NYU, and various private collections. It offers a chance to learn more about this under-documented history and allowed me to reflect upon how much Asian American lives have (or haven’t) changed politically, aesthetically, and socially in the past thirty years.

The exhibit is attentive to the multimodal ways activists communicated with each other and fostered relationships with the broader community: there are the traditional political tracts, photographs, newspapers, and magazines, but also buttons, protest signs, drawings, and musical recordings. The material trace left by the movement is impressive, but it is merely evidence of the more vital, physical means by which these folks organized for change: in person, in space. While the Internet has undoubtedly opened up vast avenues for connection and conversation, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like for these political intimacies to occur in the flesh. A gathering spot like the vibrant Basement Workshop on Elizabeth Street seems all but impossible today in post-recession Manhattan.

Notable also was the movement’s occupation of the public sphere, from the protest marches over the police beating of Peter Yew in 1975 to the multiday renegade street fairs providing community services in Chinatown; organizers publicized the event by driving through the narrow streets, announcing details via bullhorn (!). Complementing the use of physical space was the open acknowledgement of the laboring body in those spaces; people identified, across racial lines, as workers. The deep working class roots of the Asian American movement was the most striking aspect of the exhibit and something I will return to in a moment.

The archives also suggest that the movement also carved necessary public spaces out of privatized ones. Wong has displayed a number of flyers from college and university events which showcase the breadth of topics that once stood under the rubric “Asian American.” I was surprised to see that student groups held informal conferences featuring racially diverse speakers on various platforms from Third World Feminism to Black Power to antiwar work. These gatherings were voluntarily attended by students and were hosted at – but were not of – academic institutions. They are a far cry from the university-sponsored events populated by academics that are the norm today, and raise questions about the future sites of Asian American activism in the neoliberal university.

In the arts, tales of racial oppression and calls for interracial solidarity were expressed, without irony, through the lyrics of folk groups like A Grain in the Sand (listen to “A Wandering Chinaman” on the exhibit’s iPod) or the postmodern jazz experimentation of Fred Ho. The earnestness of these artists was alienating for a moment; I had forgotten how effective a political tool music had been in the past. How and why have popular music forms become so neutered from contemporary politics? We can point to some (only some) hip-hop, but what’s keeping other genres from touching upon issues other than love and partying? And what new forms would it take?

- - -

Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at the Interference Archive has made the rounds amongst AAWW bloggers, notably here and here. While Esther Wang noted that “the mood inside the gallery was more 30-year college reunion than political education session” at the exhibit’s November opening, I’m happy to report that the exhibit has grown to attract a younger, broader crowd and has been extended until March 23.

This new energy was evident at Serve the People Film Night on January 14, a screening of short films produced during the Asian American Movement. The conversation afterward, moderated by the exhibit’s curator, Ryan Wong, and film programmer Chi-Hui Yang, opened up a space for face-to-face public dialogue that distinguished physical spaces of the movement, like the Basement Workshop or renegade Chinatown Street Fairs, from online conversations on blogs and social media or enclosed university classrooms.

The short films screened were Wong Sinsaang (1971) by Eddie Wong; Manzanar (1972) by Robert Nakamura; Cruisin’ J-town (1974) by Duane Kubo; …I Told You So (1973) by Alan Kondo; and excerpts from Spikes to Spindles (1976) by Christine Choy and Fall of the I-Hotel (1983) by Curtis Choy. Wong introduced the screening, and Yang and framed these films as attempts to self-consciously create an Asian American aesthetics. In the past few decades, scholars and critics such as Lisa Lowe and Yen Le Espiritu have asked us to be attentive to the ways in which the movement was propelled by a masculinist, heterosexist cultural nationalism, negating other ways of defining “Asian American” in favor of a unitary ideal. Despite that, the films also remind us that class awareness was an essential organizing rubric for the Asian American movement: Asian Americans in the films repeatedly express their alliance with blacks and Latinos via shared residential and class segregation and their status as racial others. Wong Sinsaang is a study of the director’s toiling laundryman father; poet Lawson Fusao Inada, in …I Told You So, surprises us with a primarily Chicano social milieu; the artists and musicians in Kubo and Kondo’s films admit they expect to be poor; and cross-racial labor alliances imbue the struggles for rights in Spikes to Spindles and Fall of the I-Hotel with tremendous energy and power. It was no mistake nor accident that Reagan and the neoliberal private sector would assiduously destroy these modes of sociability in the years to come.

The films show us that the Asian American movement saw not just interracial and inter-ethnic solidarities, but inter-generational understandings as well. They feature young Asian American activists, dream-seekers professing deep confusion about their identities, who have their sincerity matched by radical, fiery elders giving voice to their experiences of racial oppression. Despite the linguistic and cultural disconnect between generations, the films suggest that the Asian American movement would not have happened without mutual support between the generations.

This concept was tested in multiple ways in the public discussion following the screening. It was heartwarming to see so many different generations – from older folks originally part of the movement, to bespectacled graduate students, to the timorous and college-aged – speaking freely in a non-institutional setting about the history and potentiality of Asian American identities. Nearly everyone who spoke included some disclosure about their parents’ immigration history or their experiences growing up in majority white or majority Asian environments, suggesting the extent to which for many, to be “Asian American” is not merely a theoretical exercise but remains rooted in the awareness of being materially situated in a particular time, space, and place.

Many young people spoke, in particular, of the marked difference between West Coast and East Coast Asian American communities as evidenced by the films. Instead of seeing the activists of the 1970s as our forebears, they seemed to be peers to many of us younger folks in that New York audience. Although the activists of the Asian American Movement could have been our parents, they were decidedly not. Rather, like them, our experience of being Asian in America is partially defined by moments of cultural distance from more recently immigrated parents. On the East Coast, the influx of Asian immigrants and refugees of recent decades has necessitated that the Asian American movement continually renew itself, repeating the anxieties and disidentifications (the word of the night) of an earlier era. Many in the audience noted these parallel struggles.

There were fissures, too, between the older generation, American-born and hungering for Sixties-style activism, and the current generation of millenials, the children of the post-1965 professional managerial class. Although we only briefly interrogated the incontrovertible fictiveness of “Asian America” in the first place, there seemed to be a general understanding of the limitations of assuming a coherent Asian American identity. The most pressing issue, to me, was the juxtaposition between the working-class consciousness of the originary movement and the growing embourgeoisement of the current generation of young Asian Americans. Many young Asian Americans today do not anchor their racial identities alongside Latinos and blacks, but through lived experiences with white middle-class lifestyles. (This is not to speak for everybody, or to critique anybody, but to acknowledge the changing referents by which many Asian Americans are forming their racial identities.) Given these shifting circumstances, the exhibit and screening allowed us to ask: what forms should future activism take? How can this new generation of largely -- but not uniformly -- middle class, college-educated digital natives learn from and continue the work of the Asian American movement?

n+1 = 0

Why is n+1 so infuriating? For me it is because it presumes to speak for and about those educated at elite liberal arts colleges and universities without recognizing the many racial, sexual, gender, and class complexities in this demographic. It rolls its eyes at Theory and Cultural Studies (their capitalization, not mine) yet its bibliography only goes as far as Marcuse and Jameson. It has not even deigned to notice the important intellectual contributions made by queers and people of color indebted to these methods. Its idea of community sees no further than the dining hall at Yale transplanted to DUMBO. It thinks it's edgy by throwing a bone to a few "desi" (their pointedly used, smug term -- brownie points! pun intended! lol) authors once in a while. It wrings its hand at the failed state of the academic left but doesn't dare grapple with the politics of its highbrow gatekeeping (indeed, that's what it's celebrated for!). And yet it has the gall to publish an Occupy! broadsheet and write critiques of something it calls the "dominant class." I would really love to know whether the n+1 editors feel they are helming a politically radical arts & culture publication! (Actually, I think I know the answer!!) n+1 is proof that left politics / Marxism is becoming fashionable / part of hipster culture, and it will leave behind anything that is ugly or difficult. Admittedly, this move to the left is partially necessary due to growing precarity of artistic and intellectual pursuits, not just motivated by fashion, but the way n+1 is going about social change is so naive and has a long, long way to go. Like many straight white men it claims a place at the table long before it has been earned and completely ignores the work that has been going on for a long time.

To be continued…

Update, 9/7/14: I no longer (wholly) endorse these sentiments, but I think it's fun to keep for posterity.

On HBO's Girls

Or, "Why the Racial Controversy Over HBO's Girls Should Be Understood by White People"

The problem with HBO's series Girls is not that it does not represent people of color. The problem is that it doesn't realize it. What good is a television show that includes people of color but merely recognizes them as honorary white people, essentially flattening their difference in the name of “diversity”? Sure, Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker) from The Office and Donna (Retta) from Parks and Rec are black, but does that significantly shape the universe of the show besides as a license for those actors to showcase “sassy” black attitudes? Also lame, but at least trying, are the miserably failed attempts by Glee to understand its characters as “Jewish,” “Asian,” etc. First, try addressing how and why the show pretends such diversity is the norm in Lima, Ohio. Let's not even get started on NBC's Outsourced.

If current mainstream television has failed to produce "acceptable" portrayals of people of color, what might it do instead? Lena Dunham has said that “next season she will try to make it happen.” Forget that. I don't want her attempting anything near creating a fictional subjectivity that is supposed to do the nuanced work of exploring race on her show (ie., a token character). Not because white people can't write characters of color – that is not the argument – but rather, because someone so ignorant as to the realities of lived racial experience – including her own – should tread very carefully when trying to make that an issue in her art/work.

Which brings me to what I'm trying to say, which is that Girls doesn't need to recognize people of color; it needs to recognize its own whiteness. I admit, I'm surprised that a group of hipsters living in Brooklyn doesn't have an Asian friend. I would have thought, for better or worse, that it would have been one of the mandatory boxes one checks for this stereotype, along with various markers about fashion, music, drugs, etc. I suppose I underestimate my own presence, or give far too much credit to the white people surrounding me in cafes and boutiques.

However, it certainly seems possible that a group of hipster girls in Brooklyn in 2012 live in a completely white bubble with no friends of color. What breaks my heart, though, is how oblivious it appears Dunham & co. appear to be about it. “Oh, there are other kinds of folks around? I didn't even notice!” As [I forgot who] mentioned, the real girls watching Girls interact every day with working-class brown immigrants in bodegas, restaurants, and public transportation, but the girls on Girls merely slap their money down on a counter with no one behind it. The streets of their neighborhoods are white. This is nonsense (well, not for Greenpoint, actually). Do people like Dunham and Lesley Arfin really not notice the brownness of their city, and, by extension, their own whiteness, such that they might look around and say, “Hmm, I'm in a group of entirely white people”? Does race only exist as something put upon other people; not recognized within one's self if that self is a privileged white girl?

Update, 9/7/14: Believe it or not, I still haven't finished season one of Girls. Hope to write something more thoughtful whenever that happens. P.S. Still haven't seen Mad Men either, nor The Wire...

Marvels and Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986

Yellow Claw #1 (Atlas Comics, 1956) [taken from here]

Marvels and Monsters: Unmasking Asian Images in U.S. Comics, 1942-1986
The William F. Wu Collection at NYU Fales Library & Special Collections

I recently had the chance to visit this unique exhibit of comics at NYU's Fales Library. The stuff was culled from the collection of William F. Wu, whom I knew as the author of The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American Fiction, 1850-1940. Wu noticed – and then began collecting – representations of Asian Americans in popular comics while growing up in 1950s Missouri. According to the exhibit's introduction, comic books were a phenomenally powerful medium from the 1930s into the 1950s: they were the number one printed medium in the United States, even outranking newspapers (70 million Americans read comic books vs. 50 million who read newspapers); a 1945 survey by the Market Research Company of America found that 95% of boys and 91% of girls read them. By all means, their content can no longer be considered marginal.

As Jeff Yang, the curator of the exhibit, explained in an NPR interview, the period covered in Wu's collection is particularly important because it spans the decades when the United States engaged in wars with Asian nations -- "from World War II, the war in the Pacific, through the Korean War, Vietnam War, and then the economic and political battles with Japan and China that followed. And so comic books, in a lot of ways, pick up a lot of this resonant energy around how Americans were thinking of Asians in ways that virtually no other medium does."

This "resonant energy" is something I've been thinking about too. How did the various wars affect the ways in which Americans understood Asians and Asian Americans, and how did it manifest itself in American culture? (Specifically, I've been working on this in the novels of Thomas Pynchon and in some women's writing from the 1950s and early 1960s.) Christina Klein's Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 offers a theory of mythic exchange and reciprocity, best embodied in the song "Getting to Know You" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951 The King and I. "Getting to know you/ Getting to know all about you/ Getting to like you/ Getting to hope you like me": a discourse that allowed Americans to believe that their political and economic imperialism was actually a point of equal exchange and consent. Also interesting is Mari Yoshihara's Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism, which examines how white women achieved certain forms of socio-political power through their co-option of Asian materials or tropes.

"Marvels and Monsters" adds another layer to the Asian/Asian American presence in postwar popular culture. The exhibit includes some of America's most popular comic books: the ones I recognized included Spiderman and Wonder Woman, but I know pitifully little about comics. The stereotypes recurring here are the ones you'd expect, like as the Brain, the Lotus Blossom, the mysterious, seedy Chinatown, etc. The exhibit does a pretty good job of contextualizing how each of these stereotypes morphed over the course of Asian immigration, but I kept wonderfully specifically why comics proved to be a good medium for these kinds of racial anxieties. As Wu remarks in the video interview that is part of the exhibit, comic books are an already exaggerated genre, and Asians in America have always been marked as "aliens," the perpetual Other. This trope of inscrutability perhaps lent itself well to stories replete with villains and frightful superpowers that needed to be subdued. More explication on why specifically this genre was so potent would have been helpful. (As would have been more on the context of these Asian characters/plotlines in comic books in general. How common was this? What other kinds of villains appeared regularly? What about "girls' comics"? Or were they reading the same ones as boys? Who were the people creating these characters and storylines? The exhibit mentions briefly that they were fellow immigrants, primarily Italians and Jews. How did that influence the portrayal of Asians in comics?) Despite these gaps, the exhibit opens up a huge field for exploring the connection between the wars and the presence of Asians/Asia in the American imagination.

I found Wu's book The Yellow Peril helpful while working on my paper about Asians in the writing of Thomas Pynchon. Sadly (or not so sadly, really), Wu gave up his academic career to become a writer of speculative fiction. Finding this exhibit has helped me clarify some hunches I've had about Pynchon, and I'm itching to start re-reading his novels with comic books and these images in mind.

Classification of Young American Females According to Brian Wilson

Classic.
(from The Poke)

Catherine Breillat's "The Sleeping Beauty" (La Belle Endormie)

The Sleeping Beauty (La Belle Endormie). Dir. Catherine Breillat. France, 2010.

I wasn't familiar with Breillat's previous films and was looking forward to this feminist deconstruction of the classic fairy tale as my introduction to her work. It received a positive, if vague, review from Manohla Dargis in the NYT which spurred me to see it. Dargis posits the film as a road movie of sorts, making this one of the few quality films out there about solo female travel. I found The Sleeping Beauty pretty challenging, however, because I think Breillat's work is intellectually informed by a style of French feminism I'm not particularly attracted to. That's just a guess, though: many other American reviewers seemed to understand (but dislike) the film just fine. I suspect they are missing something though. So my review is speculative, based on the bits and pieces I could glean about Breillat's understanding of femininity, sexuality, and fantasy.

In this retelling of the tale, a trio of fairies augments the spell placed on princess Anastasia (played by Carla Besnainou) by a wicked witch. Instead of dying when she pricks her finger on a yew spindle, Anastasia will fall asleep at age six and wake up one hundred years later aged sixteen. Why? Because childhood is interminably long, and because “A little girl's life is really boring,” as she complains. (The slow-drip childhood is also the foundation of Terence Malick's recent Tree of Life, a film far more lucid, and far more American...I'll leave that for another post.) Breillat's princess does not merely fall asleep to wait passively for her prince to come. Instead of excising Anastasia from the film until the final act, Breillat chooses to follow her through her dreamland adventures.

As I said, I couldn't help but wonder if the cause of The Sleeping Beauty's opacity was cultural. In a move that seems more motivated by the Freudian underpinnings of French feminists like Hélène Cixous than American political liberalism, Anastasia disdains her girl companions in favor of being a boy, specifically a valiant knight named Sir Vladimir. This is not expanded by any means to the heights of Alain Berliner's 1997 child gender-identity study Ma Vie en Rose, nor is it meant to. Obviously, Anastasia merely wishes for the agency granted to boys and men; she argues that it is no use being a princess if she cannot do whatever she wants. This textbook reliance on penis envy is simplistic and trite, but reveals the unquestionably French psychosexual register this film operates upon.

Anastasia yearns to be freed from the restrictions of performative, mimetic femininity, embodied in an ballet scene put on by the princess and her friends. Anastasia will only perform this feminine masquerade for a man: despite the presence of her mother and grandmother, she refuses to go onstage unless her father, the king, is present. Angrily pulling out the chopstick placed in her hair as part of her Japanese costume (Breillat tiredly figures the Orient as the ultimate feminine), Anastasia pricks her hand and falls into slumber.

She is transported into the late 1970s – Joy Division graffiti gives this away. (Understanding why Breillat chose that decade requires more knowledge of French history than I have here.) She is taken in by a kindly woodland family consisting of a single mother and her pubescent son, Peter (Kerian Mayan). The mother dresses her in Peter's old clothes, while Peter dotes on the girl like a little sister. Soon, however, the line between stranger, sister, brother, and lover become confused. Breillat is brave to explore the confused sexual feelings between a six-year old and a slightly older boy; the two share an affection that is both fraternal and romantic. But when Peter feels his libido calling, he leaves home in order to accompany a malicious Snow Queen. Anastasia sets off on a knightly quest to retrieve her brother/not-quite-lover/crush.

This takes her through some fantastic scenes, such as an eighteenth century European kingdom ruled by albino children with a predilection for pastel colors and giant meringues; a romp with a knife-obsessed Roma girl who continually speaks of how “excited” she would be to slit Anastasia with her dagger (spoiler alert: it will come as no surprise when, as an adult, she seduces Anastasia); and a trip to Lapland on a doe, under the blazing northern sky. The young Carla Besnainou is a charming companion throughout, but the film lacks emotional and rhythmic centers: the cryptic dialogue did not do much to advance our adventure, nor did the film's pacing assure me of how long it would take to get there. This perhaps mimics the luxuriant passage of time for a six-year old, in which old friends are forgotten as quickly as new ones are met, and random occurrence guides the way. Yet despite Anastasia's abhorrence of girlhood, Breillat clearly treasures it in the delicate pinks Anastasia dons or via her fixation on the delectably crunchy toasts, biscuits, and gateaux that are high points in the film. Young Anastasia comes to learn that she cannot win Peter back, but that she has proven well her power by journeying successfully throughout the world befriending people and animals: though her prince may no longer exist, she is indeed a regal princess because she has become a citizen of the world. (A welcome message in cinema.)

With this, we enter the present day and the film's inexplicable latter third. Anastasia wakes up sixteen years old and staring into the eyes of the handsome Johan, who turns out to be Peter's great-grandson (though how is eighteen-year old Johan the great-grandson of Peter if Peter was a boy in the late 1970s?). The two embark on an exploratory sexual relationship, punctuated by the return of Anastasia's Roma friend, who convinces her that only other women can teach women about sex: it's better between women, she says, because it's “more mysterious.” The ineluctable enigmas separating men and women are reiterated here, with Anastasia confined to her castle, whalebone corset, and tightly-buttoned white dress; Johan wears black, lives in contemporary Paris, and comes and goes as he pleases. The two tussle and tumble and marvel at their intense connection: it comes as no surprise to Anastasia, however, since she has been waiting for Peter – and his goodness, courage, and intelligence – for a century. Yet Johan does not particularly possess these things; he comes off as a somewhat average young man. Anastasia doesn't mind, or is so blinded by physical desire she cannot tell: as she laments to Johan, who amateurishly desires to possess her, men cannot understand that women are continually in search of their originary girlhood loves. This is an another example of the large, supposedly obvious claims about femininity the film asks us to accept. In the end, Anastasia finds herself pregnant and (metaphysically) alone: a comment of bitter disappointment. The point is, I think, that though Johan eventually professes to love her, the purity of her first feelings for Peter cannot be requited by the metaphoric violence of her sexual relationship with Johan.

If this film is complicated, it is because it struggles to explore a topic very few have tread: the psychosexual development of a young girl, from age six to sixteen (considered a woman in the film). Were I a reader of Cixous, Irigaray, or Kristeva, I would hope that I could better understand the film's cloudy (to me) subtexts. Thus, for the moment, I'm considering my own ignorance more than the possibility of Breillat's bad filmmaking as the reason for my bewilderment at The Sleeping Beauty. I will certainly be watching her others, especially the retelling of Bluebeard, as a comparison.