Racism, National Identity, and Asian American Masculinity
Focusing on Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings, my final chapter investigates how racism constructs Asian people as the perpetual figure of xenos whilst also examines the impact of such symbolic violence on the subjectivity and identity of Asian American. Racism not only plays a dominant role in shaping the nation’ contour but, more importantly, it enforces limitation and restriction on the people of Asian descent, thereby symbolically excluding them from the national imagination.
Illustrated with full color palette, Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese is comprised of three seemingly separate yet parallel storylines that are intertwined.
Concurrent with the coming-of-age plotlines of Jin Wang and Danny is the legend of the Monkey King—a celebrated character in Chinese folklore, literature, and media.26 Traditionally perceived as an antiauthoritarian figure, he was born out of a rock and has mastered the skills of martial arts and shape-shifting. Enduringly popular, the Monkey King has been rewritten in various genres and forms in Asian and Asian American popular culture.27 As Binbin Fu notes, “The legendary trickster figure has been repeatedly reimagined by Chinese American writers as a source of cultural strength, a symbol of subversion and resistance, and a metaphor for cross-cultural and
26 Despite various cultural elements and sources have enriched the character of the Monkey King, the most important text that establishes this mythical hero’s reputation is Wu Cheng’en’s
one-hundred-chapter novel, Xi you ji (The Journey to the West). Written and published in the sixteenth century, Wu’s novel depicts the seventeen-year pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang for Buddhist scriptures in India. Escorting Xuanzang in his expedition are his fellow disciples—Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, and Sha Wujing (commonly known as Monkey King, Pigsy, and Sandy). Although their fellowship is offered as atonement for their past sins, the Monkey King, Pigsy, and Sandy prove to be reliable and loyal allies in Xuanzang’s mission especially in times of hardships. At the end, the pilgrims attain immortality and enlightenment. Spending seven chapters in accounting the story of the Monkey King, it is Wu Cheng’en who portrayed the stone-born monkey as the “real hero” of his comic adventure and defined this mythical hero “in terms of his spiritual detachment, his prankish humor, his restless energy, and his passionate devotion to his master” (Hsia 115-130).
27 See Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey (1989), for example.
interracial negotiation” (275).
American Born Chinese likewise retells the story of this mythic hero in a new light in terms of both its content and format. Focusing on the Monkey King’s persistence to join the ranks of the immortal gods, the author offers the Monkey King’s struggle as a “stand-in for Asian Americans and anyone else who has been the minority side of a minority-majority dynamic” (Yang 2008). By transplanting the heroic figure into a contemporary Chinese American context, Yang subtly allegorizes the plight of Asian American community and transforms the traditional folklore into a social critique against racialized discourse that has constructed Asian American as the perpetual figure of xenos on the basis of ethnic and cultural differences.
Whereas the Monkey King’s quest is motivated by the search of Buddhist sūtras in Wu’s original novel; Yang’s adaptation is a Bildungsroman that depicts the Monkey King’s odyssey in coming to terms with his simian identity, thus seeing him embarks on a journey of self-discovery, self-acceptance, and enlightenment alike. Interestingly, Yang’s reimagining of the Monkey King myth not only reflects the historical
formation of Asian American’s identity in the United States but, more importantly, it also reveals that the nation’s contour—including America’s national formation, its ingredient of citizenry, policy, culture, as well as admission practices—is poignantly molded by racism.
A Shoeless Intruder
Perceiving that the heaven is hosting a dinner party where all the gods, the goddesses, the demons, and the spirits are invited, the Monkey King ascends to the heaven in great anticipation only to find out that his arrival is not welcome due to his lack of shoes (14). The conflict further escalated when the sentinel at the door insists,
“You may be a king—you may even be a deity—but you are still a monkey” and denies his entry despite the Monkey King’s defense (15). Feeling thoroughly embarrassed and enraged, the Monkey King storms across heaven, bashes up the doorman and deities, and sabotages the party before returning to Flower-Fruit Mountain, dejected.
Here, the shoes bizarrely become the focal point of the conflict. Trivial as it may be, the significance of the footwear is otherwise highlighted by its symbolic
connotations. The fact that access is only granted to those with shoes whilst the shoeless is barred from the party has hinted at the shoes’ functioning as the key signifier in the production of meanings and identities alike, and more importantly, it helps delineate the subjective boundary of the immortals, thereby securing a symbolic space (i.e. the party) which operates as a foundation of the immortals’ collective identity.
But if the party is a symbolic space that signals the immortals’ identity and subjectivity, then its value (to the doorman and the immortals alike) must be
equivalent to the Freudian concept of the phallus. So highly prized, the purity of the space must be secured at all cost for the collapse of the space represents a kind of (collective) narcissistic extinction. The doorman’s vigilance is thus an act of self-preservation, keeping the collective space intact through the inclusion of the desirable and the exclusion of the repulsive. Those with shoes are pleasantly welcome inasmuch as they reflect the solipsistic image that characterizes the space; the shoeless calls the frightening Freudian castration scene to mind on the contrary, hence a
disturbing source of anxiety that must be discarded at once. Without shoes, the Monkey King not only epitomizes the most intimidating kind of difference for the doorman but his otherness is also a sign of impurity, marked by its menacing potential
to disrupt the purity of the party space.
FIGURE III.1. The Monkey King’s Bare feet. American Born Chinese. New York:
Square Fish, 2006. 14.
Identities (of the Monkey King and the immortals) are thus closely tied to the material possession of the footwear. Gene Luen Yang in effect deliberately closes up on the Monkey King’s bare feet in a panel to illustrate how his lack of shoes renders him as an inappropriate guest, pointing out that identities of the desirable “guests” and the objectionable “intruders” are simply a construct within the relational field of such material distinction—with/out shoes (figure III.1). Moreover, Yang’s close-up image is further a visual device that implicitly criticizes the doorman’s and the immortals’
profound inability to think and identify outside the notion of materialism. The doorman’s obsessive gaze on the Monkey King’s feet not only implies that identity can only be defined materially but it is also an invention of the subject’s fantasy to combat difference. By focusing solely on the footwear, it effectively contains (or denies) what Homi K. Bhabha calls “the play of difference” and reduces diversity to the material distinction of with/out shoes (28), thereby sheltering the subject from the disturbing effects of otherness.
However, such psychological disavowal (of difference) also brings about a problematic propensity to explain and shape the world (i.e. the reality)—including the subject’s relationship to the others—from a pure materialistic aspect, within the realm of materiality inasmuch as it signals the doorman’s and the immortals’ subjectivity.
Hence, the various identities of the Monkey King—as “the sovereign ruler of
Flower-Fruit Mountain,” “a deity,” “a committed disciple of the arts of Kung-Fu,” and
“Master of the four major heavenly disciplines”—are blatantly neglected by the doorman (14); instead, his gaze are fixed on the Monkey King’s feet, seeking for the sole object (that truly matters) to determine his viability upon entry.
The Making of the Other: Racism at work
The Monkey King’s struggle for acceptance likewise echoes throughout the story of Jin Wang as the teenager is too denied a symbolic admission into the national space.
Born into a family of Chinese immigrants, Jin Wang is a second-generation Chinese American who recently moves out from San Francisco Chinatown to begin a new life in an all-American residential community with his parents. However, Jin is having a tough time fitting in with his school life.
Enrolling in Mayflower Elementary, his first day at school is a disaster. Mrs.
Greeder—Jin’s teacher—not only mispronounces his name as “Jin Jang” but also treats him as someone who just “moved to [the] neighborhood all the way from China”
whilst introducing him to the class (30). Jin is further isolated by his classmates as he is shown having his lunch alone whilst other children are having fun; but, worst of all, he is racially abused by one of the Caucasian boys who accuses him of eating dog meat (32-33). Jin’s predicament again befalls on his friend—Wei-Chen Sun—when he arrives to his school two months later. Coincidentally, his teacher again falsely
addresses Wei-Chen as “Chei-Chen Chun” and, like Mrs. Greeder, he has the same impression that Wei-Chen has “moved all the way from China” despite being
corrected by Wei-Chen that he was originally from Taiwan (36). Albeit implicitly, the Freudian slips of Mrs. Greeder and her colleague are teemed with a sense of rejection as both subconsciously deem Jin and Wei-Chen as Chinese foreigners instead of their fellow countrymen. By assuming the newly enrolled has “moved all the way from China,” the teachers’ slips of tongue further reveal an underlying influence of
“Atlantic Republicanism”—an ideology which has had a profound impact in the national formation of the United States, according to David Leiwei Li (2-3).
In conceptualizing the nation as a homogeneous unity in terms of culture and ethnicity, Li observes that the influx of Asian foreigners during the nineteenth century had given rise to a collective fear because not only would they disrupt the nation’s necessary homogeneity but the immigrants also “threatened to adulterate the national fantasy of Anglo-Saxon purity” (1). The potential debacle of the national space is frightening as it resembles an annihilation of a collective (national) subjectivity. But the growing tension was quickly alleviated with the enactment of related exclusion laws—including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act targeting potential Chinese
immigrants, the “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1908 barring Japanese immigration, the Immigration Act of 1917 creating the “Asiatic barred zone” that extended racial exclusion to exclusion by region, the Immigration Act of 1924 denying admission for permanent residence to persons ineligible for citizenship, the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 stripping Filipinos of their noncitizen American national status, and
etc—which politically excluding and legally disenfranchising the Asian, thereby ensuring the unity of the nation.
For Li, the legal prohibition of Asian citizenship was a form of self-preservation
as it helped “to cope with the looming heterogeneity of its peoplehood and contain the
‘impurity’ of its citizenry” that were likely to undermine the foundation of the nation’s self-identity (3). But if America’s unity is defined through the exclusion of the racially
“repulsive,” it then exemplifies the subjective dependence on the object of its hatred;
Asian in this sense must thus be legally constructed as the most visible, most
menacing kind of difference, as the Other to the European American self, and as the
“object of national prohibition.” As Li observes,
…the acts of exclusion at once secured the national space of the United States by repelling its putative Asian invaders… The historical construction of the “Oriental” as the perpetual figure of xenos, as both antithetical and antagonistic to the United States, therefore reveals not only the spectral centrality of the Asian in the determination of a formative European American ethnos, but also ways in which the historical consanguinity between racial essence and national legitimacy has been cemented. (4, my emphasis)
FIGURE III.2. Miss Columbia expels a Chinese student from her school. Judge, circa
1893.
Figure III.2 shows a representative lithograph from the 1890s explicitly
visualizes the significance of racial exclusion in the making of an American (national) identity by metaphorically presenting the nineteenth-century U.S. in a form of a school wherein Miss Columbia is the teacher to a class of multi-racial students.
Despite the ethnic and cultural aspects are the main elements in the production of the caricature’s meaning—including the characters’ identities—what further set them apart is their disproportional statures as the pupils are illustrated as diminutive in size whereas Miss Columbia is depicted as relatively taller than the rests. Here, the
representation of the students not only renders them as the “lesser men” who are unworthy of citizen status but their grotesque forms, in turn, also bring out Miss Columbia’s distinctiveness as the idealistic “American (citizen).” In associating racial and cultural traits with heights, the political cartoon marks the outer edges of an
American identity by emphatically declaring “American” is not Irish,28 Native-Indian, Arabian, African, Hispanic, and certainly not the Chinese student who is being driven out of the premise by Miss Columbia.29 As America personified, Miss Columbia epitomizes the nation’s unity—a collective Anglo-Saxon selfhood—whose identity and subjectivity is defined against the exaggerated representation of racial difference.
Despite the national space is kept intact by the legitimatization of ethnic and
28 As represented by the student who stands adjacent to Miss Columbia, though being regarded as an ethnic other (figure II.1), the “’Irish’ became inclusively ‘white’” to complete the dichotomous racialized discourse of white/non-white (Li 8).
29 Despite Chinese immigrants were welcome as a source of cheap labor during the mid-nineteenth century, they were soon scapegoated as the main reason who were responsible for the whites’ and other immigrants’ joblessness during economic depression. Towards the end of nineteenth century, Chinese were depicted as “the worst of the worst” among immigrants. Being delineated as a corrupted race prone to violence, anarchy, vice, and illegalities—such as gambling and opium smoking (as
exemplified by the opium pipe in the Chinese expellee’s arm), they must be excluded at once from the United States (hence the propaganda “the Chinese must go”). Illustrated at the height of anti-Sinicism, figure III.2 suggests that a unity must be formed between the whites and other immigrants in securing their common interest. That being said, the immigrants’ midget statures still signifies them as a radiant source of alterity and may be the next to go should any of them imperil the white’s benefit.
cultural homogeneity, such an Atlantic republican practice of citizenship nevertheless turns “the ascriptive characteristics of one’s birth into the requisite of national
legitimacy,” thereby cementing what Li calls the “consanguinity between racial essence and national legitimacy” (3-4). An evident sense of racism is thus embedded in the legislation of the nation’s admission practice and the creation of the (national) identity alike, as evinced by figure III.2 which presents ethnic and cultural
characteristics as determining features of national identity. Whilst Miss Columbia’s (distinctive) statures is evidently tied to her ethnicity, her position as the teacher farther renders her as the dominating figure who has absolute authority in deciding her students’ “residency” in the classroom—a connotation indicating the
Anglo-Saxon’s subjectification within the nation’s domain. By accentuating Miss Columbia’s whiteness, the nineteenth-century lithograph suggests that the
Anglo-Saxon is the “authentic” citizen of the country whilst simultaneously depicts the students as mere sojourners of the States who will never be qualified for
immigration nor naturalization. The boundaries of citizen and alien in this sense are made explicit through the racial distinction of white/non-white; identity is thus reduced to the stark contrast of such Manichean dichotomy—either he is white (citizen) or non-white (alien).
Before and After 1965: from Miss Columbia’s School to Mayflower Elementary Interestingly, Jin Wang’s first day at school bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Miss Columbia’s School despite the two events took place in an interval of a century time. “[A] deliberate reference to the English pilgrim settlement in Massachusetts in 1620” according to Lan Dong (238), the fictional Mayflower Elementary is likewise a figurative portrayal of the United States, not to mention Jin
is an outcast akin to his caricature counterpart as he is greeted with a sense of resentment by his teacher and classmates alike. The difference between American Born Chinese and the foregoing editorial cartoon however is the schoolteachers’
handlings of the students in question. Whereas Miss Columbia’s violent motion to force her Chinese student out of the premise explicitly highlights his alterity, Miss Greeder’s slip of tongue otherwise illustrates a more subtle and implicit articulation of Jin’s identity as the (ethnic) other. In both instances, the evident shift in their attitudes mirrors the dominant representations of the Asian subjects in their corresponding periods. If the Chinese expellee in the ethnic caricature is a personification of the aforementioned “object of prohibition” whose rights and existence are repudiated by the nation, Gene Luen Yang’s protagonist then emblematizes what David Leiwei Li addresses as the “Asian abject.” To paraphrase Li,
… the Asian American has been turned into an “abject,” into that which is neither radical enough for institutional enjoinment of the kind [before 1965]
nor competent enough to enjoy the subject status of citizens in a registered and recognized participation of American democracy (6).
For Li, the two figures of representation are intricately tied to the U.S.’s modes of production and its forms of political culture. Prior to 1965, America’s movement of national consolidation was contradicted by its monopoly capital and imperial ventures which brought about the massive influx of foreign laborers into the country; to secure its national space, Asian was legally constructed as the perpetual figure of xenos—an racial, civilization, geopolitical entity opposed to the national (white) subject.
However, the fundamental shift in the nation’s mode of capital during the 1960s has again revolutionized the U.S.’s form of citizenship and civil rights law. With the increasing availability of transnational structures, the need of maintaining American
hegemony in the “free world” has resulted in the removal of former structural barriers (the restrictive laws in citizenship, for example), hence catalyzing the categorical birth of “Asian American.”
Yet, the ethnic category of “Asian American” is marked by its own paradox as Li sees the inclusion of the Asian subject is more of a “strategy of the dominant culture to maintain its continuing ‘positional superiority’ by reforming alliances and
managing ethnic consent” than a recognition of the Asian subject (8). By arguing that
“a nation is composed of both the institutional and the imaginary, the political that regulates the juridical and territorial boundaries, and the cultural that defines origins and continuities, affiliations and belongings,” Li further ascribes the paradox that renders “Asian American” as neither the total alien nor the full-fledged citizen of the nation to an “unprecedented clash” between law and culture; the institutional and the collective imaginary (6-7). Whereas law complicit with culture to secure the nation’s
“a nation is composed of both the institutional and the imaginary, the political that regulates the juridical and territorial boundaries, and the cultural that defines origins and continuities, affiliations and belongings,” Li further ascribes the paradox that renders “Asian American” as neither the total alien nor the full-fledged citizen of the nation to an “unprecedented clash” between law and culture; the institutional and the collective imaginary (6-7). Whereas law complicit with culture to secure the nation’s