Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
You know when other people read your draft, and point out—through the lens of their own understanding—that you’ve buried the lede?
It’s a feeling I’m all too familiar with, resurfaced after the initial comments on my first draft from my committee and a conference audience.
The points themselves are, I think, sound. I can read, by this point (I hope).
But I swung by the student writing centre this week to dump a whole brain of storms on a hapless yet helpful sophomore; and, judging from his reaction, my ideas generally require a serious amount of wrangling.
Having finished grading finals, it looks like I’ll be spending the weeks until Christmas break reorganising my first chapter and thoroughly outlining the second.
The New Chinese
While away at the conference, I reread Tiffany Tsao’s The More Known World.
I had forgotten how much of a rollercoaster it is to experience that book, which lurches dizzyingly through memory and unreality.
Pay no attention to the cow-sized mosquitoes; the novel challenges its reader with a thesis that expands provocatively on the first book’s analogy of Asian American epistemic identity. Both Murgatroyd Floyd, the unintentional Asian American, and his mentor Ann Hsu must contend with the revelation that the More Known World is a refuge for them at the expense of other inhabitants from both dimensions.
I’d forgotten how heartbreaking Ann’s childhood arc is. That entire portion of the narrative, which is rife with awful and overpowering guilt, goes well beyond the conventional Asian American mother-daughter trope to enter the territory that erin Khuê Ninh covers in Ingratitude: In rejecting her mother for another dimension, Ann does not reject the old country in favour of assimilation, as one might expect.
Instead, what she rejects is the economics of immigrant assimilation, in pursuit of a new political form that turns out to be just as deeply enmeshed in the logic of American empire. I hope to be able to make the case for Tsao as an author concerned with the privilege of being Asian American in the world.
Related to the economic construction of Asia, I read Five Star Billionaire before my trip.
The cover of the edition that I borrowed has a blurb from Doris Lessing: “Unputdownable.” Initially, I was not sure what else Lessing could have been reading for Five Star Billionaire to be the best of the lot; but Google tells me that she was actually referring to The Harmony Silk Factory.
That’s rather disingenuous of the publisher, but does put Lessing in a better light.
Though I didn’t care much for Aw’s debut novel—I didn’t finish it, and after a while all the Malaysian and Singaporean Anglophone historical novels about the war blur together—it’s still better than Five Star Billionaire, which is about a bunch of Malaysian Chinese flocking to Shanghai in pursuit of get-rich-quick schemes. Overall, I found the novel to be a frothy read with a preposterous and emotionally empty plot.
In all fairness, I did find fascinating how Aw’s characters work to reinvent themselves—sometimes even by committing a little light identity theft—as mainland Chinese or Taiwanese, all for that sweet, sweet renminbi.
Photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash
In other words, in the narrative Five Star Billionaire, Aw inverts the long-running representation of the Nanyang as a frontier society for Chinese immigrants to create new lives for themselves. Shanghai, instead, is the palimpsestic setting of this fantasy.
The parodic unrealism of Kevin Kwan’s Singaporean setting in Crazy Rich Asians can, at least, be recuperated as a kind of imagined homeland, or as a commentary on the artificial nature of the accommodatively neoliberal postcolonial state.
But, in Aw’s Five Star Billionaire, there is no diasporic orientation towards China. Instead, China acts as a blank slate for financial, if not any cultural, projection.
It brings to mind a passage from Aimee Bahng’s Migrant Futures (which I purchased in 2019 at University Press Books in Berkeley—a store that, unfortunately, went belly-up during the pandemic):
The cover of Kishore Mahbubani’s 2008 The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East presents readers with what seems to be the global sign for financial growth: skyscrapers under construction. … But the unpainted, all white structures feel eerily hollow and decontextualized. … This scene of speculative building—construction predicted but not contracted to sell—feels like an already haunted future, in which New Asia has become an empty lot, evacuated of its denizens and prepared to signify the sheer potential of capital.
Such is the Shanghai of Aw’s novel: naked capital, an empty plot of land, vacated of ethnic or cultural meaning. It could be anything. But, right now, it’s nothing.
I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that Aw was born in Taiwan, a territory that figures in Five Star Billionaire as well, and which serves as a reminder of an alternative cultural genealogy for Malaysian Chinese. (Closer examination of this relationship can be found in Chan Cheow Thia’s amazing Malayan Crossings, and Timothy Barnard’s Writing the South Seas is another hard recommend from me.)
Given that my second chapter is—among other lofty goals—using Tsao’s speculative fiction to think through Southeast Asian Chinese American literature as a circulating and circulatory body of work in the new millennium, I guess I must reread Caroline Hau’s Chinese Question too… (Plus, I was just given assigned reading homework: James Kyung-Jin Lee’s Pedagogies of Woundedness!)
In fact, part of Tsao’s doctoral dissertation (Berkeley, English ’09) does gesture at the transnational political constitution of the Southeast Asian Chinese as capitalist subject and economic object. Discussing the author Timothy Mo, whom she describes as a British-Chinese novelist, she writes:
Through this example of “the wily Chinaman” stereotype, Mo indirectly challenges the criteria by which we determine the reality of a nation’s existence. For the reader, who possesses the awareness that such ignoble “Chineseness” is what has been forced upon the Chinese rather than what they have freely chosen to be, this “Chineseness” possesses a reality because it is embedded in material circumstances beyond their control rather than purposeful artifice.
Tsao concludes: “Taking the Chinese stereotype as a model, Mo asks us to conceive of national identity in the same terms as Chinese identity… an involuntary identity which has been imposed upon them rather than an identity they have freely shaped for themselves.” One decade later, she will go on to examine ethnic Chinese as economic figures much more incisively, in her marvellous essay “Monsters Made, Not Begotten.”
Impossible Things Before Breakfast
Finally, I come bearing an update for those who live vicariously through my trashy indulgence in pulpy paperbacks.
Allowing for a few missed instalments, I’ve finished Laura Joh Rowland’s eighteen-book Sano Ichiro series, a noir procedural that follows the titular protagonist’s ill-fated investigations in Tokugawa Japan.
I wearily dragged myself through the last book, The Iris Fan, long after the storyline jumped the shark. (I might be able to tolerate a little light haunting, but I draw the line at ectoplasmic ghost possessions.)
Granted, the series was not shy about the considerable historical liberties taken for dramatic effect, as in Sano’s homoerotic political rivalry with the real historical figure of Chamberlain Yanagisawa.
But what am I to make of The Iris Fan’s preposterous conclusion? Here, Sano learns that the shogun’s heir is conspiring to purchase forbidden Dutch military technology and take over the rest of Asia—a few hundred years ahead of schedule, if you compare this chronology against the historical record.
Wait, wait, there’s more! In the novel’s climax—which involves the gory bodily disintegration of one ghostly possession victim—the newly crowned sixth shogun suffers mystical brain damage and becomes the well-meaning Sano’s mind-controlled puppet, thus staving off the nefarious world domination plot.
I’m no expert on East Asian history, but I’m fairly sure that didn’t actually happen to the shogun Ienobu.
Still, I think this twist gives a marginal payoff to Rowland’s series, outrageous as most of it was. Now, Rowland, a Chinese-Korean American author, has effectively crafted an alternate history that forestalls Japan’s imperialist conquest of East Asia, defusing the latent emotional difficulty of the setting. Whether or not this was intentional, the move made an otherwise a completionist slog slightly more tolerable.
Way back when I started on my prospectus, I’ve been skirting the possibility that Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian American postcoloniality overlaps significantly with Korean (American) postimperial cultural studies. But I just reread Christina Klein’s article on Bong Joon-ho, “American Studies Needs to Think about Korean Cinema,” and lately I’ve decided I can’t avoid tackling this question head on!