酷異亞美:王穎的華裔美國電影

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(1)國立台灣師範大學英語學系碩士論文 Master Thesis Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University. 酷異亞美：王穎的華裔美國電影 Queering Asian America: Selected Chinese American Films by Wayne Wang. 指導教授：李秀娟博士 Advisor: Dr. Hsiu-chuan Lee. 研究生：游羽萱 Yu-xuan You 中華民國 103 年 6 月 June 2014.

(2) 摘要. 本論文探討王穎三部華裔美國電影：《喫一碗茶》、《千年善禱》、《內布拉斯加公主》，從電影中「小孩」的隱喻出發，討論華裔美國人悖離父權傳統的「酷異性」。我主張，「酷異性」讓華裔美國人在幾個特定的歷史過渡期或社群認同發生困難的情況下，探索不同的未來，也因此突顯了華裔美國人主體與時俱變的特質。論文分成五章。第一章為緒論，簡述酷兒理論及其在亞美研究脈絡中的運用。我認為王穎的電影呼應了九〇年代以降亞美研究對亞美社群多元雜匯特質的注意，指出亞美經驗和華裔美國人身份不斷變動的本質。第二章探討《喫一碗茶》中的早期華美社群，指出電影中的人物如何因為對父權價值的彈性理解，而能延續家族與社群的命脈。第三章探討《千年善禱》，主張將影片中呈現的世代衝突，解讀成讓雙方更了解彼此所作的努力。我認為《千年善禱》刻畫華裔美國為一個文化交流和協商的跨國籍空間。第四章探討《內布拉斯加公主》，指出影片將華美社群的離散與分裂，詮釋為華裔美國人與其他族群聯盟的機會。最後，我回顧王穎的電影創作歷程，解釋王穎持續挑戰刻板印象的努力，正好呼應了本論文「酷異性政治」的主題。. 關鍵字：酷異性政治、喫一碗茶、千年善禱、內布拉斯加公主、王穎、亞美研究、電影、華裔美國人.

(3) Abstract This thesis aims to study Wayne Wang’s Chinese American films: Eat a Bowl of Tea, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska. Attention is given to the ways in which the motif of “children” in these films introduces a kind of “queerness” of Chinese Americans that derails from patriarchal lineage. By looking into how this “queerness” propels Chinese Americans toward different futures in times of transition or difficult situations, I argue that Wang’s Chinese American films have foregrounded the changeability and contingency of Chinese American subjectivities. This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One gives a brief review on the intersection between queer theory and Asian American studies. I see Wang’s films as akin to critics’ efforts to identify the shifting nature of Asian American experiences and Chinese American identities. Chapter Two studies Eat a Bowl of Tea. I analyze the ways in which the flexibility of patriarchal values enables the early Chinese American community to survive and live on. Chapter Three studies A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. I propose to read the intergenerational conflicts as constant efforts to improve mutual understanding. I also point out that the desire for generational reconciliation has rendered Chinese America a transnational space for cultural exchange and negotiations. Chapter Four studies The Princess of Nebraska. I suggest that the diluted sense of Chinese American community has been recast in the film as opportunities for individuals to form alliances with people of different ethnic backgrounds. In the concluding chapter, I reflect on Wayne Wang’s filmography and point out a “queer politics” deriving from Wang’s continuous efforts to explore the opportunities for self-invention by breaking away from norms and stereotypes..

(4) Key words: Queer politics, Eat a Bowl of Tea, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The princess of Nebraska, Wayne Wang, Asian American studies, films, Chinese Americans.

(5) Acknowledgements Writing a thesis is a long and painstaking journey, and I am lucky to receive support from many people. My deepest gratitude goes to my advisor, Prof. Hsiu-chuan Lee. Her seminar on Asian American Literature and Films aroused my interest in Asian American studies and inspired my project on Wayne Wang’s films. Prof. Lee is a critical reader of my thesis. She has given me useful guidance and many wonderful insights when I need advice or feel stuck on organizing my thoughts and ideas. I cannot thank her enough for her instruction and patience throughout the process of writing. I also feel gratitude to my committee members, Prof. Guy Beauregard and Prof. Pin-chia Feng. I thank them for reading my thesis and digging out the problematic in my thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my friend Jessie Lin for always being encouraging and helpful. I wish her all the best on her thesis-writing..

(6) Table of Contents. Chapter One___________________________________________________________01 Queering Asian America: Wayne Wang’s Films on Chinese America Chapter Two__________________________________________________________ 17 Eat a Bowl of Tea: The Illegitimate Child and Unpredictable Futures Chapter Three_________________________________________________________ 35 A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Cross-cultural Communication and Negotiations Chapter Four__________________________________________________________ 53 The Princess of Nebraska: Disintegrated Communities and Unexpected Encounters Conclusion____________________________________________________________ 68 Appendix_____________________________________________________________ 72 Work Cited____________________________________________________________ 80.

(7) You. 1. Chapter one Queering Asian America: Wayne Wang’s Films on Chinese America. Wayne Wang is well-known for his Chinese American films like Chan Is Missing (1982), Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), and The Joy Luck Club (1993). After the commercial success of The Joy Luck Club, Wang declares his temporary retreat from Asian American subject matter. In an interview with Bernard Weinraub, Wang says, “I definitely want to step away from the Chinese thing for a while. I’ll eventually go back to it—I’m sure I will—but at the same time, I feel I’m just as American as anyone else. There are stories and characters about America that I want to tell.” In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Wang directed a series of typical “Hollywood” films, such as Smoke (1995), Maid in Manhattan (2002), Because of Winn-Dixie (2005) and Last Holiday (2006), to name a few. This temporary swerve has proved Wayne Wang to be a highly adaptable director who is capable of tackling different subject matters. It was not until A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2007) and The Princess of Nebraska (2007) that Wang returned to Chinese American themes. This thesis intends to study Wayne Wang’s three Chinese American films: Eat a Bowl of Tea, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska. I choose these three films mainly for three reasons. First, they mark the significant transitions or changes in the history of Chinese America. Eat a Bowl of Tea is concerned about the transformation of the early Chinese American community from bachelor society to family society. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers demonstrates how the Cultural Revolution has an impact on one’s Chinese American experiences..

(8) You. 2. The Princess of Nebraska implies the disintegration of the Chinese American community of the twenty-first century and introduces a new generation of Chinese Americans who are born during the time of China’s economic boom. Indeed, reflecting on the shifting history and materiality of Chinese America, these three films are representative of Wang’s continuous efforts to explore different Chinese American experiences. And this is the second reason for me to choose these films as major texts of analysis. Lastly, in proposing to study Wang’s works concerning Chinese American themes, this thesis yet bears no intention to constrain our understanding of Wang within the ethnic ghetto. Instead, I would like to point out, through close analyses of the three chosen texts, Wang’s attempt to foreground the changeability and contingency of Chinese or Chinese American identities in Chinese America through his “queer politics.” And the figure of “children” in these three films helps set forth this “queer politics”—Wang’s endeavors to demonstrate that Chinese or Chinese American identities are not so much tied to national/cultural essentialism or blood genealogy as open to reconfigurations through trans-Pacific cultural exchanges and everyday encounters. In order to justify my attempt to introduce a “queer” perspective on Chinese Americans’ life experience in Chinese America, in this chapter, I would like to give a brief review on the intersection of queer theory and Asian American studies.. Queer Theory and Asian American Studies The term “queer,” originally used in a pejorative sense to refer to something unusual and strange or serve as the colloquial alternative for homosexuals, has been revalued and elaborated since the late 1980s by people who found themselves being.

(9) You. 3. marginalized by the binary identity categories of gender and sexuality advocated by feminists, and gay and lesbian activists respectively. Building upon previous studies of gender and sexuality, queer studies challenge the binaries of gender and sexuality through exploring the divergence and differences of gender roles and sexual orientations. This vigor of deconstructing the traditional understandings of gender and sexuality can be seen in Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Butler’s and Sedgwick’s arguments about gender and sexuality, which emphasize the contructedness and flexibility of sexual identities, lend queer studies a theoretical base. In her works, Butler contests the notion that gender and sexuality are natural givens; she proposes the concept of performativity to contend that gender and sexuality are socially and culturally constructed and situated within power networks. The male-female dyads and the compulsory heterosexuality are rendered normal and natural for the dominant (heterosexuals) to regulate and sustain hierarchy. Also, interrogating the essentialized notion of gender and sexuality, Sedgwick argues that understanding sexual identity according to the gender of one’s sexual preference only reinforces the heteronormative logic. Given that various criteria can be used to define sexuality, it is impossible to exhaust the categories of sexuality (29). Individual differences, Sedgwick claims, also destabilize the assumption of sexuality: “Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people” (25). Starting out as a critique of gender and sexuality, “queer” has been widely used as an eclectic identity for those who do not conform to normative gender roles and heteronormativity. But this limited attention to gender and sexuality rather than other axes of identity is not without problems. Many queer critics of color are critical of the.

(10) You. 4. tendency to assume a universal white subject in queer studies, and thus call for the necessity to look into the interlocking relationship of queer and other aspects of identities. Gloria Anzaldúa cautions against using “queer” as an umbrella term, for it “shovel[s]” all queers of all races, ethnicities, and classes under one single identity, and inevitably veils their differences (Sullivan 44). Based on Michel Foucault’s studies on the regulation of race and sexuality, Nikki Sullivan argues that racism, sexism, and homophobia are integral to heterosexuality; queer critics cannot undermine heterosexual matrix without dealing with the issue of race (58-59). When transplanted to Asian American studies, “queer” may be employed not only to refer to Asian American gays and lesbians whose sexuality challenges the heterosexual imperative. In effect, if one expands the meaning of “queer” to indicate whatever strange, aberrant, and exotic, Asian Americans could be understood as “queer” first because of their historical and cultural disavowed statues as marginal figures and problematic subjects. David L. Eng argues: one does not become queer merely through sex or sexuality. […]. [Our] very epistemological concept of what it is to be queer cannot be understood without a serious consideration of how social differences such as race constitute our cognitive perspective of a queer world, how sexuality and racial difference come into existence only in relation to one another. (Q&A 12) Here “queerness” is derived as much from sexual/gender differences as from racial differences. Eng looks into the inseparable relation of gender, sexuality and race in the formation of Asian American subjects by showing how “Asian American” was historically both gendered and racialized as “queer” others in the first place. Before 1870, American citizenship was only accessible to white men and in 1920 to white.

(11) You. 5. women. In 1870, people of African descent received their citizenship, yet it was not until the repeal acts of 1943-1952 that citizenship was granted to people of Asian descent. In his studies, Eng argues that Asian American males were excluded from not only “the institutional and social definitions of ‘maleness’” but also “the normative conceptions of the masculinity legally defined as ‘white’” (Q&A 5; Racial Castration 16-17). In addition to being ostracized from the normative masculinity for being non-white, the high percentage of Asian American males going to the “feminized” professions (in laundries, restaurants and tailor’s shops) owing to economic reasons also aggravated their effeminization (Racial Castration 17). While Asian American men’s subjectivities were problematized by their feminized and hence “queer” state, Asian American females may be said to suffer from double oppression from both outside and inside the community. The mainstream culture tended to portray Asian American females as either ethnic hyper-feminized or dangerously transgressive: the “sexually charged images of Asian American women as docile and subservient on the one hand and as ruthless Mata-Hari, dragon-lady aggressors on the other” (Takagi 552). Within the Asian American community, Asian American females were further accused by their male fellows of their “treasonous” affiliation with white men and allegedly “fake and Christian” representation of their ethnic cultures (Chin 7). Moreover, the impossibility for Asian Americans to attain one single and unified identity because of their unstable and hybrid constitution also renders Asian Americans problematic subjects and thus “queer.” A great number of Asian immigrants and refugees from South Vietnam, South Korea, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, India and Pakistan have come to join the already-heterogeneous Asian America since the Immigration and Nationality Act of.

(12) You. 6. 1965. This Immigration and Nationality Act also leads to the changing Asian American demography, as the majority of Asian Americans are now Asian-born instead of American natives (Koshy 335). With their diverse ethnicities and “varying trajectories of arrival, departure and return,” the arrival of new immigrants has added on to the multiple formations of Asian Americans (Koshy 335). In addition, the changing relations of the new Asian immigrants to their homelands and the US nation-state have also complicated our imagination of Asian Americans. The development of communication and transportation technology and Asia’s burgeoning economic prosperity significantly diversify the new immigrants’ experiences with their home countries and America. While the early Asian immigrants were forced into a choice between their ethnic cultures and American identification because of the difficulties in forming legal ties with the US and having physical contact with their home countries at the same time, many new immigrants take a flexible attitude toward their national affiliation: they either maintain hybrid connections with both Asian and American cultures or identify with neither of them (Chuh 7). Indeed, although the word “queer” with its negative connotations conventionally refers to Asian Americans’ status of being unassimilable aliens or connotes the failure for Asian American community to achieve one unified identity, as time moves on, the meaning of “queer” as it is associated with Asian Americans diversifies. David Eng, for example, tries to convert the “queerness” of Asian Americans into something positive and open to reconfiguration. He purposes to think of “queer” as a critical methodology in Asian American studies that articulates how racial, sexual and class identifications are interwoven in Asian American subject formations (Racial Castration 219). By studying Asian American queerness in relation to the historical.

(13) You. 7. and social reality, Eng argues that “queer” can bring us to envision a wider spectrum of Asian American identities and concerns in the global context. Despite the fact that apart from David Eng, other critics of Asian American studies do not use the term “queer” to describe Asian Americans, their efforts to emphasize the incommensurable differences among Asian Americans, I argue, are evocative of the attempts of queer theorists to use “queer” not only as a noun or an adjective but also as a verb in order to heighten the intersections of gender and sexuality and other axes of identities (Sullivan 50). As a way to heighten the dynamics of Asian American identities and to bring to the fore the inseparability of race/ethnicity and gender/sexuality, I propose to find, in Asian American critics’ attempt to expand the meaning of “Asian American,” a critical genealogy of what I call the act of “queering Asian America.” For example, in “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences” (1991), Lisa Lowe recognizes the inner-splitting of the term “Asian American.” Though used strategically to indicate the collectivity of Americans of Asian origin in order to “[contest] and [disrupt] the discourses that exclude Asian Americans,” it is also required to encompass plurality of Asian American people (82). Also, like Eng, Lowe regards this inner-splitting of “Asian American” as reflecting the constructedness and constant transformation of Asian American constituency. Lowe cites from Stuart Hall to illustrate her point: the processes that produce such identity [cultural identity, i.e., Asian American] are never complete and always constituted in relation to historical and material differences. […]. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they [cultural identities] are subject to the continuous “play” of history, cultural and power. (64).

(14) You. 8. Here Lowe suggests that the definition of “Asian American” is subjected to the changing history and materiality. In pointing out the temporality of the term “Asian American,” Lowe queers up “Asian American” by seeing it as an index to the shifting conditions of the life of Asian Americans. Kandice Chuh in Imagine Otherwise (2003) also contributes to queering up “Asian American.” Chuh contends to conceive “Asian American” as “a subjectless discourse,” presenting Asian American as a critical tool to “anchor investigation of the ways that the U.S. nation employs racialization as a technology of power” (84). Chuh goes on to argue that employing Asian American as an approach puts us on a vantage point of seeing how the term “Asian American” comes to have meaning through various configurations of power and knowledge (11). Drawing from deconstructionist theory, Chuh argues that Asian American “is/names racism and resistance, citizenship and its denial, subjectivity and subjection—at once the becoming and undoing” (8). In other words, in considering Asian American as subjectless, Chuh views it as offering a distinct perspective from which we look into the mechanics and the structure building of Asian American as a national/racial identity and dismantle them by recognizing the diversities of people of Asian descent. Besides, envisioning Asian American as subjectless is meant to “create the conceptual space to prioritize difference” by making “contingency, irresolution, and nonequivalence in the foreground” (8-9). This open space enables one to imagine “Asian American” outside the ethnic ghetto and to explore different ways to achieve subjectivity. Chuh further notes: Subjectlessness as a discursive ground for Asian American studies can […] help to identify and trace the shifting positionalities and complicated terrains of U.S. American culture and politics articulated to a global frame, by opening up the field to account for practices of subjectivity that might.

(15) You. 9. not be immediately visible within, for example, a nation-based representational grid, or one that emphasizes racialization to the occlusion of other processes of subjectification. (11) Agreeing with Chuh’s attempt to free “Asian American” from rational and cultural essentialism, Christopher Lee nonetheless cautions against the dissolving of Asian American materiality implied in Chuh’s “subjectless discourse.” Refusing to recognize the materiality of the term, as Lee argues, will risk polarizing the referentiality and a nihilistic vision of critique. Lee emphasizes his point by quoting from Iyko Day: there are real-life referents of the term “Asian American,” which include its hard-won role as a state-recognized minority category for civil rights monitoring and its more negative existence in U.S. society as an undifferentiated “foreign” population subject to racial hostilities (“Resistance of Theory” 28; The Semblance of Identity 7). Here, Lee maintains that “Asian American” cannot be reduced to a category of critique and do completely without its referentiality. Conjoining both Chuh’s proposal to explore different Asian American subjectivities and Lee’s advocacy of the referential materiality of “Asian American,” I would like to conceive in this thesis an Asian American queer politics from the everyday materiality and encounters in Wayne Wang’s films. I argue that “queering up” in Wang’s films is not simply a theoretical term; it is grounded on the everyday reality of Asian American experiences. In other words, “to queer” is not only a theoretical gesture that advocates the constructedness and incoherence of Asian American identities, but also to enact the hybrid experiences of Asian Americans’ everyday negotiations for their specific historical, social and cultural positions. In exploring.

(16) You 10. Wang’s rendition of these experiences, I ask: What makes Chinese Americans “queer”? How does Wayne Wang represent this “queerness”? In what way is “being queer” denoting different Chinese Americans’ subjectivities? And how does Wang recast the idea of “queer” and seek in Chinese Americans’ deviation from norms the chances of their development and survival? To illustrate the “queerness” of Chinese American experiences in Wang’s films, I would especially borrow from Lee Edelman’s idea of “reproductive futurism” in the discussions of the chosen texts. Edelman criticizes the “reproductive futurism” in many political campaigns and narratives that privileges heterosexual reproduction and renders “the child” as inseparable from the future. In this thesis, I will look into the ways in which Wang’s films at the same time echo and deviate from this “reproductive futurism.” As “the child” in Wang’s films not only challenges the linear future of patriarchal reproduction but also implies the many possibilities of Asian American futures, I argue that Wang’s films “queer up” Chinese America by turning the “queerness” of Chinese Americans into a strategy of sociopolitical resistance as well as a space of Chinese Americans’ self-invention.. Wayne Wang’s Queer Politics Wayne Wang’s Chinese American films are “queer” partly because they offer unconventional perspectives on imaging Chinese American identity. The existent scholarship on Wayne Wang’s films, which concentrates on Wang’s first feature film Chan Is Missing (1981), has drawn attention to the film’s revision of the stereotypical presentation of Chinese Americans.1 Norman K. Denzin in “Chan is Missing: The Asian Eye Examines Cultural Studies” carefully studies Charlie Chan detective series 1. The contributing scholars include Diana Mark, Jung Xing, Norman K. Denzin, Peter X. Feng, and Te-shing Shan. Basil Tsai in his MA thesis also studies Wang’s Chan Is Missing..

(17) You 11. in contrast to Wang’s Chan Is Missing. He contends that Wang’s film consciously provokes the Charlie Chan convention and undermines it from within, which “undoes Asian stereotypes perpetuated by the Chan character” (64). Peter X. Feng also makes similar observation in “Being Chinese American, Becoming Asian American: Chan is Missing.” He studies how the film revises the Charlie Chan formula in a self-mocking manner. The two main characters Jo and Steve remind one of the typical duo of “Charlie Chan and his Number One Son.” From time to time they are self-reflective about their own “roles,” though both Jo and Steve fail to act out what are prescribed to them (199). When Jo fails to find out Chan Hung’s whereabouts, he signs: “I guess I’m no gourmet Chinese cook, and I’m no Charlie Chan, either, although I did start watching some of his returns for cheap laughs” (200). Steve is far from being obedient to his old man and constantly comes into conflict with Jo. Steve insists that they find the police to help look for Chan Hung, but Jo disagrees and reveals his sympathy for Chan Hung, who comes to American “trying to find himself.” At this, Steve retorts with contempt, “That’s a bunch of bullshit man! That identity shit. That’s old news. Man that happened ten years ago.” Moreover, critics see Wang’s intent to dissolve the essentialism of Chinese American by linking the missing Chan Hung to the missing identity of Chinese American. For Denzin, the complex and inconsistent depiction of Chan Hung deconstructs the presumably unified Chinese American subject and therefore reverses the “America’s version of the Asian other” and reflects on the inner diversity of Chinese American community (79). Feng also argues that the absence of Chan Hung denotes “the contingency of Chinese American subjectivities” and “the fluidity of Chinese American identity” (189; italics in original). During their investigation of Chan Hung’s whereabouts, Jo and Steve gather much yet fragmental and.

(18) You 12. contradictory information about Chan Hung, and the many sides of Chan Hung point to no clear portrait of him. Jo and Steve are unable to piece together where Chan Hung can be found, and Jo even laments that he no longer knows who Chan Hung is. Jo’s frustration of identifying Chan Hung implies the impossibility of designating one single characteristic that fits all Asian American subjects. The diverse Chinese American characters in the film also reflect the hybrid and multiple constitution of Chinese American community. Jo and Chan Hung, for example, stand for the Chinese Americans, who struggle to identity themselves between the American and Chinese cultures. George and Mrs. Chan, by comparison, are more assimilated to the American society. Mrs. Chan once tells Jo that Chan Hung is “too Chinese” to adapt to the life in U.S. Steve and Jenny, on the other hand, represent the younger generation of Chinese Americans, who ally themselves with popular cultures. Characters’ different identities are further complicated by their political inclinations. A conflict over which national flag should be hung in Chinatown’s Chinese New Year’s parade results in a murder case. A Pro-Taiwan man murders his neighbor who is Pro-People’s Republic of China. As Denzin rightly points out, Chan is Missing “offers a virtual dictionary of contemporary Asian American identities” (76). What is especially worth studying is the final sequence of Chan Is Missing. A series of Chinatown street scenes are shown with the background music of “Grant Avenue.” Those street scenes are store signs in Chinese, men and women of Asian descent bustling with their own business, Kung-Fu posters outside the movie theaters, pagoda rooftops, and Chinese and Italian restaurants. The lyrics of “Great Avenue” go around the stereotype of Chinatown.2 While the final sequence seems to reiterate the. 2. The lyrics: They call it Grant Avenue, San Francisco, California, U.S.A./Look for Chinatown. You.

(19) You 13. image of Chinatown as an exotic, racilized and thus “queer” space, it also destabilizes this image by reversing the position of gaze. During the final sequence, an old lady and the martial art star in the poster surprisingly look into the camera. Both Basil Tsai and Norman K. Denzin read the reverse gaze as resisting the western voyeurism on the Asian other (77-79, 37-38). The “looking-back” may also be said to suggest an active look at and an insider perspective to the community. To read the final sequence in this way, the street scenes of Chinatown can be seen not to repeat the stereotype but to offer snapshots of the everyday life of Chinese Americans. In a way to continue and expand existent investigations of Wang’s portrayal of Chinese American identity, my thesis studies Eat A Bowl of Tea and Wang’s two more recent works on Chinese Americans: A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska. Attention will be given to how Wang’s works on Chinese Americans of different periods reflect the changing history and materiality of Asian Americans. In light of the existing scholarship on Wang and the literary criticism on “Asian American,” I also want to explore the Asian American queer politics through Wang’s ways of representing Chinese or Chinese Americans. Given the fact that the three films in question are all adaptations from literary works, I will refer to the original stories in my discussions of the films. However, this thesis bears no intention to strain the reading of Wang’s films by making literal comparisons and contrasts between the novels and the films. Instead, I read the novels alongside the films in order to replenish my understanding of the texts in both forms. This thesis will be divided into five chapters. After this introductory chapter,. travel there in a trolley, up your climb, dong-dong, you’re in Hong Kong, having yourself a time/Sharkfin soup, beancake fish, the girl who serves you your food is a dish, you know you have a Grant Avenue way of living./[…]./A Western street with Eastern manners, tall pagodas with golden banners, you can shop for precious jade, or silk brocade, or see a bold and brassy night club on the most exciting thoroughfare./I know they call it Grant Avenue, San Francisco, U.S.A. (qtd. in Norman K. Denzin)..

(20) You 14. which offers a review on the intersection of queer theory and Asian American studies and propose to read Asian American queer politics in Wayne Wang’s films, in Chapter Two, I study the Chinatown’s bachelor society in Eat a Bowl of Tea as a queer space. The story is set during the first decade following the 1942 repeal act. A Chinatown old-timer, Wah Gay urges his son Ben Loy, a World War II veteran, to bring a war bride Mei Oi from China to the U.S. to marry. The couple has received a lot of pressure from their elderly to produce offspring. But it turns out that Ben Loy is sexually impotent, yet magically retrieves his vitality from a cup of Chinese herbal tea. Mei Oi commits adultery and produces a love child. The “bachelors” are portrayed as engaging in prostituting, gambling, and fighting. They gather in gambling clubs, barbershops and teashops, gossiping and swearing in their Chinese English. These caricature-like portraits of characters in their comic behaviors may seem to reinforce the exotic— hence “queer”—images of early Asian immigrants as social outcasts and deviants. However, the comical treatments of the characters and plots in Wang’s film also show that Chinese American community, instead of collapsing or decaying because of its “queerness,” actually continues or even thrives on its tolerance of Mei Oi’s adultery. Eat a Bowl of Tea turns the “queer space” of the Chinese American bachelor’s society into a space of opportunity and transformation—a space that accepts sexual deviances and differences, and brings them into lines of communal survival. In Chapter Three, I explore the issue of cross-cultural communication and translation in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Both A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska are adapted from Yiyun Li’s short story collection and set in the twenty-first century. Bookmark Magazine commends Li’s book for its rendition of “the rich tapestry of global Chinese life in all its complexity,.

(21) You 15. angst, and comfort.” Wang’s adaptations tackle the complex life of Chinese or Chinese Americans in the global context. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers tells a story of a Chinese father Mr. Shi’s visit to his American-resided daughter Yilan, who is recently divorced. However, Mr. Shi reunion with Yilan is not a happy one because of their misunderstandings about the other. By reading the intergenerational conflict between Yilan and Mr. Shi as their constant efforts to negotiate with each other and improve mutual understanding, I argue that the cultural binary division between China and America is challenged in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Cultural differences here are not so much about one’s nationalities and spoken languages but are complicated by one’s life experience and ultimately, one’s willingness to understand others. As one shall see, the conflicts between Mr. Shi and Yilan derive mainly from their lack of understanding about the life of the other. It is through their conflicts that Mr. Shi and Yilan have the chance to exchange their feelings and thoughts. In particular, I look into the ways in which translation opens up a “queer space” for cross-cultural communication. Both Mr. Shi in the short story and Yilan in the film translate and expand the meaning of the Chinese epigram “Xiu baishi ke tongzhou, Xiu qianshi ke gongzhen” to express their emotions and thoughts. At the end of the film, Mr. Shi decides to return to China and wishes Yilan to visit him some day. With this, I argue that Wang recasts Chinese America as a transnational space where people travel to and fro and have international exchanges. In Chapter Four, I study The Princess of Nebraska. If Eat A Bowl of Tea “queers up” the early Chinese immigrant society by representing it as a space deviating from conventional patriarchal line and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers challenges the bipolarity of Chinese and American cultures, The Princess of Nebraska gives us a glimpse of the twenty-first century Chinese American society, which is “queer” in.

(22) You 16. that ethnic divisions and language barriers seem no longer the concerns of the new generation of Chinese immigrants whereas class distinction now divides Chinese America. The protagonist Sasha is a Chinese college student in Nebraska and seeks an abortion in San Francisco. The story revolves around Sasha’s encounters with Boshen, a homosexual lover of Yang, who is the father of Sasha’s baby, X, a prostitute, the obstetrician in the clinic and many other people while she is in San Francisco. Sasha’s journey sheds light on the completely different lifestyles between Chinese Americans from uptown Chinatown and those from downtown Chinatown. As the Chinese American community presented in the film falls apart, The Princess of Nebraska nonetheless explores the “queer” opportunities for Chinese American individuals to reach to and form alliances with people of different racial backgrounds. Overall, this thesis attempts to offer new visions into the studies of Wayne Wang’s Chinese American films. By studying Wang’s “queer politics,” I argue that Eat a Bowl of Tea, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Princess of Nebraska provide good examples of the changeability and contingency of Chinese or Chinese American subjectivities in Chinese America at different historical moments. In Eat a Bowl of Tea, the Chinatown patriarchs accept Mei Oi’s illegitimate child in order to revive the dying community. In A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Mr. Shi’s desire for patriarchal continuity gives in to the wish for generational reconciliation. In The Princess of Nebraska, before Sasha makes her final decision, she is reminded by X, Boshen, and the obstetrician of the many options for dealing with her child. All these texts in one way or another show deviations from patriarchal linearity and thus probe the “queer” futures of Chinese American existence..

(23) You 17. Chapter Two Eat a Bowl of Tea: The Illegitimate Child and Unpredictable Futures. Despite its vivid depiction of the bachelor society in New York’s late 1940s Chinatown, the novel Eat a Bowl of Tea did not receive popular reception upon its publication in 1961. New York Herald Tribune considered it “frequently tasteless and raw” in language and story development (Field). Library Journal regarded that “neither the character treatment nor the writing” was worthy of purchase (Stucki). Chu’s language in Eat a Bowl of Tea is the chief reason for the negative reception of the novel. In order to enact the mixed yet spirited language used by the early residents in Chinatown, Chu makes the characters speak in the combination of Sze Yup dialect and English, and alludes to many Chinese idioms and sayings in literal-translation, such as “green hat” and “fatty water should not be allowed to flow into another’s rice paddy” (Chu 130, 142, 232; 158, 233). Another reason that may account for the unfavorable review of the novel is the contradictory, yet satiric nature of its characterization. The characters in Chu’s novel tend to have a double life. Take Wah Gay for example. While he inculcates Ben Loy with responsibilities and urges him to start a family, he himself is an absent husband and a patron of brothels. Geoffrey Kain observes that Chu’s treatment of characters has an ironic overtone. For instance, Wah Gay’s carefree lifestyle contradicts the idealized image of an “exiled sojourner in the Golden Mountain” in many personal letters of the early immigrant men to their families in China (190).3 Kain explains: With this stock image of the exiled laborer sending money home to his 3. For the historical records of the letters, please see A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki 218-19..

(24) You 18. suffering family present in the minds of his readers, Chu offers us the characters of Wah Gay and Lee Gong, emigrant fathers seemingly fulfilling the same role of sadly sacrificing home and hearth to work in the foreign land of “Gold Mountain” in order to one day return. In contrast, these two men are gladly living lives of cynical ease in the bachelor Chinese community, not working but earning a living from…gambling…--a perversion similar to Mei Oi’s adultery and Ben Loy’s apparent inability to foster offspring (and, subsequently, his willing acceptance of the illegitimate newborn). (191) However, the novel was revalued and further uplifted by Asian American critics as a classic of Asian American literature in the 1970s. What was seen as “tasteless and raw” or even “queer” by the mainstream critics was viewed by the scholars of Asian American studies as an embodiment of the time of struggle for the Chinese men to establish families in America. Jeffery Chan acclaims Eat a Bowl of Tea for its “faithful” portrayal of “the life and time of Chinese Americans with consistency of language and sensibility” (1). Frank Chin and the other editors in The Big Aiiieeeee acclaim Chu’s novel for its “authentic” representation of Chinatown. They argue, “[Eat a Bowl of Tea] is the first Chinese-American novel set against an unexoticized Chinatown—the kind of Chinatown that has been duplicated wherever large numbers of Chinese emigrants settle” (9). “Authenticity,” Chin and other editors argue, is the non-Christian representation of Asian American customs and fables in literature (xii). However, “authenticity” in Wang’s filmic rendition can also be understood not for getting at the “essence” of Asian American culture or identity but for adding one vivid, yet idiosyncratic and thus diverging facet to the hybrid construction of Asian Americans..

(25) You 19. While the linguistic hybridity of Chinese English may account for the existing criticisms on the language of the novel Eat a Bowl of Tea, Chan argues that the Chinatown English shows the immigrant men’s disconformity to the U.S. cultural hegemony: “The linguistic sensibility that lies behind these Sze Yup curse accurately reflects the combative nature of these bachelors who give no advantage in a land of trial, humiliation, and sacrifice” (2). Wayne Wang’s Eat a Bowl of Tea is adapted from Louis Chu’s 1961 eponymous novel. Oliver Wang recalls that the film is one of his students’ favorites in Asian American cinema classes and commends that Eat a Bowl of Tea is “crafted out of Louis Chu’s literary sophistication and Wang’s cinematic talent” (“Performing under Pressure”). Jun Xing considers the film “offers a realistic portrait of the pathos and conditions of Chinatown” (129). I argue that the film has inherited the genuine depiction of New York’s Chinatown by retaining the uniqueness of language and characterization in Chu’s novel. In this chapter, I will focus on how Wang’s cinematic rendition of Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea underscores the “queer” elements in the novel by adding to it the innovations that foregrounds the transformation of Chinese American community from a bachelor society to a family society. With visual emphases and dramatization, Wang brings out a type of “queerness” of Chinese Americans that bypasses the social norm of patriarchal lineage. Such detour from the patriarchal laws implies not only the hybrid constitutions of Chinese Americans but also communal futures that are free from patriarchal reproduction. The bachelor society arguably marks one of the most “queer” moments in Chinese American history. Suffering from the racist discrimination and violence in the American society, the early Chinese laborers retreated to their ethnic enclaves, known as Chinatowns, for protection. Their social isolated state was often interpreted by the.

(26) You 20. American dominant culture as a result of Chinese immigrants’ peculiarity and unassimilability (David Leiwei Li 198). In order to unify the community in fighting against the discriminatory forces outside, the Chinese immigrants formed different institutions based on clans and occupations. Such institutions were important as they provided immigrants with social and economic helps. The Wang Family Association in Eat A Bowl of Tea is one example. The film has demonstrated the profound power of this self-governing mechanics by presenting its influence on the bachelors’ daily life. In Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s wedding banquet in New York, for example, the president of North American branch of Wang Family Association gives a speech on the historical significance of Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s marriage. When Mei Oi’s affair with Ah Song is revealed, Chuck Ting, the leader of the association, as another example, provides Ben Loy with a job offer in New Jersey so as to help Ben Loy get away from the gossip for a while. The self-regulating bodies in Chinatowns indicate the insulation of the bachelor society from the U.S. mainstream society. Racism still prevailed despite the fact that the U.S. government had repealed the discriminatory laws.4 The bachelors tended to distrust the U.S. governmental legal system, and depended on the community’s self-governing bodies to arbitrate disputes. In the film, the Wang Family Association is trying to intervene in the case of Wah Gay’s assault on Ah Song, and Ah Song’s filing the legal suit against Wah Gay is seen to put a threat to the community order. Chuck Ting reports the incident to other members in a solemn voice: “In fact, it is Ah Song who called the police. We don’t want the police to handle this, but it’s very serious. Very serious.” 4. A brief review on the discriminatory laws against Asian immigrants can be found in later discussions. The lifting of the laws refers to the 1943 repeal acts. The House passed the Magnuson bill on October 21, 1943. Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943 was then put into effect on December 17. The sixty-one years of Chinese Exclusion Law finally ended. For details, please see Remaking Chinese America by Xiaojian Zhao 23-24..

(27) You 21. Despite the bachelors’ confinement in their ethnic ghetto, there was by no means a homogeneous culture in the bachelor societies. In fact, the immigrants in Chinatowns had managed to live between two cultures. While the Chinese immigrants tried to exercise their cultural practice in America, they found that they could not do so without making changes to adapt to the environment. As Xiaojian Zhao observes, The ways in which Chinese Americans practice their traditional culture through arts, language, religion, festivals, and performance… are often reflections of the changing circumstances surrounding them in America. The Chinese did not simply transplant their traditional culture in American soil; they reconstructed or reinvented it constantly. (The New Chinese America 4) Chinese Americans’ flexible attitude toward their traditional culture resulted in the cultural hybridity in the immigrant society. Wang has explored it by highlighting the mixture of Chinese and American cultures in the immigrants’ everyday life. One enactment of this cultural mixture is Chinese English used by the early residents in Chinatown. The characters in the film speak in transliterated Chinese phrases, such as “no can do” and “you dead boy,” and switch to Cantonese from time to time. Besides the linguistic hybridity, the Chinese customs and Chinese-theme décor presented in the film also provide us with examples of cultural hybridity in the immigrant society. In a traditional Taoist funeral depicted in Eat a Bowl of Tea, three Taoist priests in traditional Taoist costume give a Taoist chant with the music made by Chinese instrument. A paper bridge, which is often shown during the Chinese funeral ritual, is put to symbolize the path for the dead to cross to the afterworld. Wah Gay and Ben Loy as well as other funeral attendants, however, appear in formal western suits (fig. 1). In another scene, the modern amenities, the faucet and oven, in the.

(28) You 22. kitchen of Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s New York apartment are juxtaposed with Chinese-styled interior decoration, the ink wash painting and the embroidered quilt with the pattern of children in Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s bedroom. The juxtaposition of the East and the West reprises the cultural hybridity in immigrants’ everyday experience. Before World War II, Chinatowns in America were predominantly male communities, for which scholars have given various explanations.5 Some argue that there was a sojourner mentality among early immigrant men. Since the Chinese men did not plan to stay in the U.S. for long and intended to go back to their families in China eventually, they neither emigrated with their wives nor sent for their wives after arriving in America. Some critics even suggest that by leaving their wives behind in China, the immigrant men assured their families of their loyalty to the families. Others ascribe a small number of female immigrants to the patriarchal cultural values in Chinese society. As married women in the Chinese traditional patriarchal society were expected to take care of their parents-in-law, they were prevented from emigrating. Among the many factors that gave rise to the skewed gender ratio in the Chinese immigrant communities, most scholars point to the discriminatory legislation in the U.S., which prevented families from achieving reunion and Chinese men from getting married. The 1875 Page Law barred any Asian woman who was suspected of prostituting from entering the U.S. Since the criterion for suspicion was highly subjective and biased, many Chinese women were denied their entry. Except for members of certain groups—merchants, students, etc, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Law banned the Chinese from immigration, and the 1924 Immigration Law further. 5. For details, see “Gender and Immigration” in Remaking Chinese America by Xiaojian Zhao..

(29) You 23. excluded immigrants of Asian descent. Statistics showed that among the 30,868 Chinese Americans in 1930, only 10,175 were females (Zhao, Remaking 17). Coupled with the laws and social atmosphere of anti-interracial marriage, the scarcity of females in the community made it extremely difficult for Chinese men to start families. Without new generations to join the communities, the bachelor societies faced the threat of dying out. But the breakout of the World War II has brought significant changes to the decaying Chinese communities in America. China and the U.S. forged alliance in World War II. As a wartime strategy to show goodwill toward China, the U.S. passed the repeal acts in 1943, according to which people of Chinese descent received their citizenship, and Chinese immigrants were admitted to America on an annual quota of 105 (Zhao, Remaking 23). The 1945 War Brides Act also allowed World War II veterans to bring their wives from China to the U.S.6 The bachelor societies of Chinatowns finally saw the hopes of reviving their communities, as the reproduction of the younger generation is often deemed as natural consequences of conjugal marriages. While the story of Eat a Bowl of Tea is mostly fictional, it is made clear at the beginning of the film that the story is set right after World War II. Wah Gay’s voiceover recounts the community’s expectation of having younger generations followed by the change of laws: The second World War changed all that. China became America’s ally. Congress passed new laws. …. And the boys who fought in the U.S. Armed Forces could go back to China, take a wife and bring her to America. So one day we were dying off and the next thing you know…everybody’s talking. 6. For further discussion on the immigrant laws after World War II in American, please see Remaking Chinese America by Xiaojian Zhao 8-28..

(30) You 24. about arranging marriage for their kids and how many grandchildren they are going to have. In the film, the community’s anxiety of having new generations for the communal survival is manifested through the community’s excessive attention to Ben Loy and Mei Oi. The overhead shot of Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s wedding in China speaks of the intense gaze upon the newly-wed couple (fig. 2). In fact, the bachelors’ conversation is always about whether or not Ben Loy and Mei Oi are going to have a baby. However, the immense pressure from the community to produce a child has affected Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s marital life. When Ben Loy and Mei Oi fail to make love at their apartment in New York’s Chinatown, Ben Loy says, “I don’t think I can do this. I just feel like everyone’s watching us.” In fact, the communal anticipation of children is inscribed into Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s household décor, which keep reminding them of their responsibility for reproduction. As one shall see, Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s bedroom is saturated with decorations that represent fertility: the statuette of a child, the quilt with the pattern of three children, the picture of a child playing with fish, and fish in a glass bowl (fig. 3). Each object reminds one of the fundamental purposes of Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s conjugal union—to produce a child who will enable the Chinese community in America to continue. Wah Gay, one patriarch in the community, also embodies the imperative force for reproductive heterosexuality. The recurring shots of Wah Gay’s portrait in Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s bedroom suggest the patriarchal supervision over the new couple’s sexuality (fig. 4). While pressing Ben Loy into procreating, Wah Gay is also exerting the pressure on Ben Loy to continue the patriarchal lineage (fig. 5). Once Wah Gay even grabs his crotch interrogating Ben Loy about his failure of producing a child: Wah Gay: You know what to do with this? It’s for making babies, not.

(31) You 25. just to have fun with….If you don’t feel like having children when you’re young…when will you have them?” Ben Loy: When we feel like it. Wah Gay: Then feel like it NOW! The notion of futurity in Eat a Bowl of Tea is closely associated with the image of children. When Wah Gay and Lee Gong see each other off toward the end of the film, Wah Gay says to Lee Gong, “this could be awhile…. And at our age…who knows….” What Wah Gay trails without making explicit is that they may never get to see each other again. Future is unthinkable for Wah Gay because both he and Lee Gong may not live long enough for future encounter with each other (fig. 6). But the atmosphere of their conversation changes dramatically after Lee Gong speaks to Wah Gay: “You look like a boy.” The comparison of Wah Gay to “a boy” makes Wah Gay cheerful again (fig. 7). Then Wah Gay says to Lee Gong: “See you again, Grandpa.” Addressing each other as “grandpa,” Wah Gay and Lee Gong at the end of this sequence say good-bye to each other with hopes for the future (fig. 8). The connection between children and future in Eat a Bowl of Tea serves as a good example of what Lee Edelman observes in many political campaigns and narratives the cultural fantasy of “reproductive futurism” through the metaphor of children (No Future 2). Edelman argues that the emphasis of children is often shown in “the privileging of reproduction as the after-event of sex – an after-event whose potential, implicit in the ideal, if not always in the reality, of heterogenital coupling, imbues straight sex with its meaning as the agency of historical continuity” (“Ever After” 111). In Eat a Bowl of Tea, the reproduction of a child is also privileged. It means not only to continue the bloodline of Wang family but also to renew the Chinatown community. Mei Oi’s love child is endowed with historical significance of.

(32) You 26. transforming the dying Chinese American community into a community with future. Edelman’s major concern of “reproductive futurism” is that heterosexuality is not treated as sex per se but is endowed with meaning of reproduction. While the production of children is presented as the prerequisite of futurity, reproductive heteronormativity is reinforced to sustain social hierarchy: [Reproductive futurism designates] an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable…the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relation. For politics, …the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future in the form of its inner Child. (No Future 2-3, italic in original) In the case of Eat a Bowl of Tea, a child is constructed as indispensable for the transformation of Chinatown community from a bachelor society to a family society. Through the child, Chinese American community is able to live on with the structure of family society. As Wah Gay asserts his determination of staying in America to Lee Gong who is hesitating whether to return to China, he says, “What counts is our grandchildren are goanna grow up here, right?” Indeed, besides being considered important by Wah Gay and Lee Gong, the automatic linkage of heteronormativity with reproduction is also reflected in the popular Asian American historical writings on bachelor society.7 Jennifer Ting observes that the bachelors’ sexuality was portrayed as “deviant” from “normative According to Ting, these historical writings include Chinese Immigrants (1909) by Mary Coolidge and The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation (1987) by Paul C. P. Siu. 7.

(33) You 27. sexuality” in these writings, because their heterosexuality was non-conjugal and non-reproductive. Eat a Bowl of Tea underscores the “deviancy” of Chinese immigrant men’s sexuality in the sequence wherein Wah Gay visits the prostitute. When Wah Gay is about to leave, he sees a long line of bachelors outside the brothel waiting to be served. Moreover, Ting argues that such an emphasis on heteronormativity has generated particular cultural logics in the Chinese American historiography. For example, based on the content of the Dictionary of Asian American History, Ting argues that the transformation of Chinese community from a bachelor society to a family society was figured as a shift from “deviant” heterosexuality to “normal” heterosexuality.8 As Chinese exclusion laws had been lifted, Chinese war brides and wives came to join their men in America. Chinese men were supposed to convert their “bachelor” heterosexuality into conjugal and reproductive heterosexuality. This conversion to heteronormativity was often put in parallel with the lifting of the exclusion laws, and was therefore conflated with the notion of assimilation. Ting contends: it [Dictionary] contrasts past deviant heterosexuality with present “normal” heterosexuality, and locates the transition from old to new order at the moment when legal impediments to assimilation were removed. …. Like bachelor society, impediments to assimilation are a past condition, rather than a present reality. Thus, deviant heterosexuality marks out a past, an historical oppression now overcome. “Normal” heterosexuality here is not only a marker of assimilation achieved, it is itself a means to assimilation. (278) The imperative of “normative heterosexuality” in Eat a Bowl of Tea is implied in Ben 8. Please see the entry of “Chinese in the U.S.” in Dictionary of Asian American History by Shih-shan Henry Tsai 5..

(34) You 28. Loy and Mei Oi’s matrimony and the anticipation of their next generation. However, just when the couple seems to live up to the standard of heteronormatility, it turns out that Ben Loy is unable to procreate. David Eng contends that Ben Loy’s geographical impotence—he is able to sexually perform outside Chinatown—symbolizes the social emasculation and isolation afflicted by the bachelors in Chinatown both before and after the repeal acts. Eng notes: Alteration of the law does not guarantee a concomitant shift in the social practices against—or the dominant perceptions of—the Chinese male immigrant in realms outside the juridical. Put simply, changes in immigrant law do not necessarily translate into a concomitant easing of alternate forms of everyday exclusion and disfranchisement, material or psychic, which continue to endure. (182) Eng’s point on Ben Loy’s sexual impotence as social impotence of the insulated Chinese communities is underscored in the film. Eat a Bowl of Tea includes basically no white characters except for the Caucasian demimondaine and the police, even though the time of the film is set in 1947 when the repeal acts had come into effect for some time. Chinatown as an emblem of Chinese immigrant men’s social impotence is foregrounded in a particular sequence: Ben Loy is able to make love with Mei Oi in Washington. But once Ben Loy returns to his New York’s apartment, he loses his virility. Chinatown’s bachelor society as a “queer” space that lacks role models of “normative heterosexuality” for Ben Loy to follow is also implied in the film. When the bachelors are discussing the possible reasons for Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s being infertile after marrying for some time, one bachelor jokingly suggests, “Maybe they don’t know how to do it. Back home. They watch the pigs. They get the idea.”.

(35) You 29. As Ben Loy’s impotence indicates the predicament of Chinese American community, Eat a Bowl of Tea depicts the crisis of communal survival confronted by the early Chinese Americans. However, it is obvious that Wang has done more than mourning for the difficulties for Chinese Americans to produce a new generation, and thus a hope for future. In fact, if the film has shown vividly the social and psychological predicament in which Chinese Americans were caught in years after World War II, it also shows that Chinese Americans might possibly work out a “queer” way of survival—that is, a survival not relying on patrilineal reproduction but on a more flexible structure of gender relations and procreative possibilities. Such flexibility enables Mei Oi to maintain her female agency in the patriarchal society and to symbolically “save” the dying Chinese American community with her love child. Before I move on to discuss the specific examples of the change of gender relations in Chinatown, I would like to spend a few pages on the decline of patriarchal authority in the bachelor society as embodied in Wah Gay’s hilarious act of revenge on Ah Song. I argue that instead of presenting the dilution of patriarchal power as an alarming crisis for Chinese American men’s masculinity as contended by Eng in Racial Castration, Wang’s comical treatment of Wah Gay’s attack on Ah Song actually brings the audience to the historical transition of the bachelor society. New social norms and orders were yet to established, and what appeared to the plight of dying out in the Chinese American community actually opened up space for Chinese Americans to reinvent rules in order. While Frank Chin proposes that the remedy to Asian American male’s masculinity is to appeal to Chinese martial arts tradition, the employment of martial arts tradition is meant to ridicule male heroism in Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea. Shu-yan Li observes in Chu’s novel the choreographed juxtaposition of Wah Gay with heroes.

(36) You 30. in traditional Chinese martial art tales. Like any “reckless rough” in martial arts romance, Wah Gay cuts off Ah Song’s ear because of Ah Song’s affair with Mei Oi (Li 105). But instead of taking the responsibility of what he has done like heroes in “wuxia,” Wah Gay goes into hiding and leaves all the problems for Ben Loy and Mei Oi to figure out themselves (Li 105-06). Wah Gay’s seemingly heroic actions become a parody of valor. The ironic elements in the original novel are retained and well demonstrated in the film. In the sequence on Wah Gay’s revenge, the camera generates suspension by tracking Ah Song to Mei Oi and Ben Loy’s previous apartment while Wah Gay secretly follows behind. Then it is farcical for the audience to see the warrior-like revenger Way Gay appear from climbing down from the window. Like in a comic strip, the scene of Ah Song and Wah Gay’s confrontation is split into two columns by the wall, with the unwitting Ah Song in the left and the gloomy Wah Gay holding a kitchen knife in the right (fig. 9). The comic effect is heightened as the process of the attack is silhouetted on the wall, with the laid-back jazz music, which jars with the supposedly scary and violent scene (fig. 10). Besides, there is an inside joke for the audience. The female witness of this attack is played by a famous Hong Kong comedian, Din-Ha Shum. She and the other famous actor Bill Tung played a duo in a series of comedy movies It’s a Mad Mad World.9 The scene in which she and her husband are in bed while Wah Gay creeps into the room certainly reminds the audience of the comedies she played at the time when the movie was released (fig. 11). Implicitly Wang has compared Wah Gay to the comedians, which further ridicules Wah Gay’s heroism. 9. 《富貴逼人系列》(It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World) is a series of comedy movies in Hong Kong during 1987~1992. In the films, Din-Ha Shum and Bill Tung played as a greedy couple, who was constantly in hilarious quarrels. The story depicts the life experiences of working class people in Hong Kong during the 1980s and the 1990s, and reflects social issues. The series of comedy were popular at its time..

(37) You 31. Besides the eroded patriarchal power, the film also demonstrates the change of gender roles in the bachelor society. Eng makes similar points about the gender reversal in Chou’s novel when he argues that Ben Loy and other bachelors’ effeminization is contrasted by the empowerment of female characters. Take Mei Oi for an example. She declares her female desire in first person to Ah Song and Ben Loy. She addresses her affections for Ah Song as “I,” and tells Ben Loy that “I love you very much” (189, italic in original). Eng argues that Mei Oi’s assertion of her sexual desire makes her “assume the symbolic position of desiring subject,” and thus reverses the patriarchal assumption that men are the only subjects of sexual desire (189). Here I want to take Eng’s point further by studying Mei Oi in the film. Despite the fact that Mei Oi in the film is more or less limited by the traditional gender role, Mei Oi does not fit the stereotypical image of “tangshan nu” (Chinese girls) who were usually described as “conservative, too dependent on their husbands” in the Chinese American community after World War II (Zhao, Remaking 150). Instead, Mei Oi’s female subjectivity is manifested in many ways in the film. For example, while Mei Oi in the novel clings to Ben Loy even after her affair is revealed, because she “has no other place to go” and is afraid that her baby “[will] have no one to call father,” Mei Oi in the film is able to move away from Ben Loy after their quarrel about the affair in New Jersey (Chu 211). Near the end of the film, Mei Oi takes the initiative to reconcile with Ben Loy. Seeing Ben Loy has no intention to repair their marriage, Mei Oi walks away as if implying that she is ready to start a new life of her own without Ben Loy. For the communal continuity in America, Ben Loy and other patriarchs accept Mei Oi’s love child as part of the family. This tolerance of an illegitimate child yet.

(38) You 32. disrupts the patriarchal assumption of patrilineality. At the end of the film, Wah Gay and Lee Gong come to join the child’s hair-cut party in San Francisco where Ben Loy and Mei Oi start a new life. With Ben Loy, Mei Oi, who is now pregnant again, and her love child, Wah Gay and Lee Gong take a family photo together. The family photo featuring three generations of Chinese Americans bears only a semblance to the “normal family,” as we know that the child is not produced in line with patriarchal lineage (fig. 12). While the arrival of Mei Oi’s illegitimate child signifies the future of Chinese Americans, the child indicates an unpredictable future of Chinese community in America. Along with the sound of a baby crying, the freeze-framed shot of the Wang family at the end of the film marks the transformation of the Chinese American community into a family society. Indeed, the baby’s crying persists for ten seconds while the screen remains in black for two seconds before going on to the closing credit. One may argue that the baby’s continual crying sound implies Chinese Americans’ future that is to be continued, yet this future, deviating from a strict patrilineality, heralds in unknown possibilities as implied by the black screen (fig. 13). The mutable future of Chinese American community is also connoted in the dispersion of the main characters both in the novel and in the film. In the film, Wah Gay runs away to Havana, Lee Gong goes to Chicago, and Ben Loy and Mei Oi move to San Francisco. This reflects the population movement of Chinese immigrants after World War II, as “the number of families increased and opportunities outside Chinatowns became available” to Chinese Americans (Zhao, Remaking 95). However, given that San Francisco Chinatown is the oldest Chinese immigrants in the U.S. (in Jeffrey Chan’s words, “the city where Chinese-America first began”), some critics read Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s move to San Francisco in the novel as an irony of.

(39) You 33. returning to another ethnic ghetto of traditional patriarchal system (Eng, Racial Castration 192; Hsiao 151-62).10 One has to bear in mind, though, that San Francisco of the post-World War II is by no means the same as where early Chinese immigrants first settled. As implied in the ending scene wherein the Wang family and their friends have a barbecue party in the backyard, San Francisco of the 1950s witnessed the baby boom and economic growth. Ben Loy and Mei Oi in this ending scene seem to enjoy a middle-class family life in a suburban neighborhood rather than being constrained by another Chinatown. Besides, both in the novel and in the film, Ben Loy and Mei Oi’s moving away from their fathers suggests their getaway from patriarchal supervision. Indeed, unlike Ben Loy in the novel who still works as a waiter in San Francisco, Ben Loy in the film works as an operator at a radio station. Ben Loy’s career change may suggest the opportunity of social mobility for Chinese Americans now scattering around Americas. In an interview with Diane Mei Lin Mark, Wang mentions his inclination to retell Chinese American history in order to “[express] what it means to be Chinese American, the frustrations… [and] the need to express what our experiences are, without falling into the trap of being the crybaby” (113-14). And that’s what exactly Wang has achieved in Eat a Bowl of Tea. While the film highlights the early Chinese Americans’ frustrations of assimilation and procreation of the next generation, its comical style redeems the weighty immigrant history and presents Chinese Americans’ “queer” ways of survival. “Chinese America” is presented as a “queer space” where the derailment from the genetic patrilineage not only prevents the Chinese American community from going extinct but also indicates the flexibility of Chinese Americans in adjusting to their sociopolitical surroundings. In the following chapter, I will. 10. Here I would like to thank Professor Pin-chia Feng for drawing my attention to this point..

(40) You 34. continue to look at how Chinese America is explored in Wang’s more recent films..

(41) You 35. Chapter Three A Thousand Years of Good Prayers: Cross-Cultural Communication and Negotiations. In this chapter, I study A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. The story is set in the twenty-first century and features a very different historical and material reality from that of Eat a Bowl of Tea. As the 1943 Chinese Exclusion Law Repeal Act and the 1945 War Bride Act enabled the birth of the younger generation of Chinese Americans, the diplomatic ties between China and the U.S. in 1979 ushered in another significant change of Chinese American demography. The annual immigrant quota for Chinese increased from 20,000 in 1965 to 40,000 in 1987 for Chinese in China and Taiwan and 5,000 for Chinese in Hong Kong. The revision of the immigrant laws also enabled more than 40,000 Chinese immigrants to establish permanent residency in the U.S. (Chang 314). As a result, the Chinese population burgeoned from 436,062 in 1970 to 2,858,219 in 2000 (Zhao, The New Chinese America 20). What is worth noticing is that since the mid-1980s, the U.S. government had developed new measures to attract professionals from around the world to America (Zhao 20). Under these circumstances, many Chinese students with advanced degrees from American universities found jobs and resided in America permanently (Zhao 21). Yilan in the film could be one of them; she moved to America in 1989, studied Library and Information Science, and worked as librarian in a college library.11 For twelve years, she has been living in America.. 11. In response to the 1989 Tiananmen incident in China, the Executive Order 12711 was implemented within the same year to provide protection for PRC students in the U.S. The 1992 Chinese Student Protection Act gave permission of permanent residency to immigrants from the PRC who were in the U.S. before April 1990. The film does not make explicit linkage between these historical events and Yilan’s immigration to the U.S. Whether or not Yilan in the film left China because of the Tiananmen incident is uncertain..