建構批判性的跨(國)文化流動研究---仲介亞/美---跨國時空下的亞美想像(I)

行政院國家科學委員會專題研究計畫 期中進度報告

仲介亞/美：跨國時空下的亞美想像(1/3)

中 華 民 國 93 年 5 月 26 日

行政院國家科學委員會補助專題研究計畫成果報告

(完整報告)

計畫名稱：建構批判性的跨(國)文化流動研究-仲介亞/美：跨國時空

下的亞美想像(1/3)

計畫類別：整合型計畫(建構批判性的跨(國)文化流動研究)之子計畫

計畫編號：NSC92-2411-H-003-022-BI

執行期間：92 年 08 月 01 日至 93 年 07 月 31 日

計畫主持人：李秀娟

執行單位：國立臺灣師範大學英語學系

日期：中華民國 93 年 05 月 26

1. Lee, Hsiu-chuan. The Asia-Pacific in Asian American Transmigration: Lydia Minatoya’s The Strangeness of Beauty. To be delivered in The Fifth International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, The University of Illinois,

Urbana-Champaign, USA. June 25-28, 2004

2. 李秀娟。〈湊谷百合子《美之驚異》中的日裔美國亞太想像〉。已發表於「建

構批判性的跨（國）文化流動」學術研討會，國立交通大學，March 27, 2004。

二、研究論文及摘要全文 (依照上列目錄次序，1-2 篇論文均附參考文獻)

I.

The Asia-Pacific in Asian American Transmigration:

Lydia Minatoya’s The Strangeness of Beauty

by Hsiu-chuan Lee

National Taiwan Normal University Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

Paper Submitted to

The Fifth International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

This paper studies the intermingling of Asia-Pacific imagination and Asian American formation. Taking Lydia Minatoya’s The

Strangeness of Beauty (1999) as the major text of analysis, my reading

first grounds Asian American formation in Asian American individuals’ trans-Pacific routes, extending our understanding of Asian America to its trans-Pacific dimension. Following this, I explore how Asian Americans’ trans-Pacific routes may help constitute an Asia-Pacific that is embedded in the cultural, political, and economic actualities of this area. Precisely,

The Strangeness of Beauty not only presents its protagonist-narrator

Etsuko Sone’s “I-story” as interwoven with her Asia-Pacific experiences of transmigration, but also intervenes into the imagination of

Asia-Pacific, in a sense restoring Asia-Pacific to the concrete, the local, and the Japanese American immigrant actualities. Central to my analysis is how this novel introduces an everyday microscopic constitution of Japanese America and Asia-Pacific out of the spatio-temporal

multiplicities in Japan, America, and the Pacific.

Key Words

Asian America, Japanese American Literature, Asia-Pacific,

transnation, transmigration, the everyday, Lydia Minatoya, The Strangeness of Beauty

There is a myth about immigrants: that we come on the wings of our dreams. For most the tale is too simple, turning convoluted

personal motivations into a kind of cliché. --Lydia Minatoya, The Strangeness of

Beauty 29

The struggle of Asian Americans against homogenization into a hegemonic culture is paradigmatic of Asia-Pacific as a space for cultural production.

--Arif Dirlik, “The Asia-Pacific in Asian American Perspective” 325

American Home, Asian Origins, and Pacific Routes

Arising in alliance with American ethnic movements in the 1960s and 1970s, Asian American cultural movement used to make efforts to ensure Asian Americans’ American identity. Adopting a linear model of immigration and settlement, most Asian Americans are concerned about how to claim America to be their home, with their ultimate goal of establishing a “grounded” community in America. The

America-centered Asian American imagination, however, has been challenged due to the increasingly frequent traffics between Asia and America in the era of trans-Pacific

flows of people, capitals, and culture. The U. S. government’s 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the rise of many Asian countries as global economic powers, the globalized world situation, and the massive demographic change of Asian American population (now with the majority of Asian Americans being Asia-born), force into legibility Asian America’s Asia-Pacific trajectories and transnational connections.1 When more and more Asian Americans maintain connections on both sides of the Pacific and “flexible citizenship”2—usually derived from one’s dual, triple, or

multiple national/ethnic/familial affiliations across the Pacific—becomes privileged in transnational commerce and travel, an “Asia-Pacific” imagination of Asian America emerges to complicate the traditional conception of Asian America as an ethic group inside America.3 Apparent now is, in Arif Dirlik’s words, “the increasing ambiguity in the conceptualization of Asian America of Asian populations as members of grounded communities versus as diasporic ‘Rimpeople’” (“Asians on the Rim” 31).

Tuning into this transnational turn of Asian American studies, this paper yet nourishes no intention to give a simple answer as to the positioning of Asian

Americans either as people (expected to be) “grounded” in America or as the Pacific “Rimpeople” of movement and diaspora. Being aware that any attempt to position (or name) a group runs the risk of rendering abstract the complexities of a community made of individuals of differences and mobility, I am more interested in exploring Asian American individuals’ ambiguities with their “American home,” “Asian origins,” and “Pacific routes.” As one shall see, if the traditional “pan-Asian

** I am grateful to National Science Council, Taiwan, ROC for providing research grant (NSC92-2411-H-003-022-BI) for the completion of this paper.

1 _{Increasing attentions in recent Asian American studies have been devoted to the transnational}

dimensions of Asian American communities. King-Kok Cheung, for example, notes the “shift” of Asian American studies from “seeking to ‘claim America’ to forging a connection between Asia and Asian America” (1). Sau-ling Wong also points to the tripartite process of the Asian American “denationalization”: (1) the easing of cultural nationalist concerns; (2) the growing permeability

between ‘Asian’ and ‘Asian America”; and (3) the shift from a domestic to a diasporic perspective (1-2). Writing with an apparent desire to unfix the border of Asian America, Lisa Lowe further draws the history of Asia into Asian American constitution. She presumes that Asian Americans are not “exclusively determined by their ‘American’ histories of immigration exclusion, racism, proletarianization, and internment”; many of them actually emerge “out of colonialism and neocolonialism in Asia” (“On Contemporary Asian American Projects” 45).

2 _{This term is taken from the title of Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of}

Transnationality (1999).

3 _{Arif Dirlik, for instance, reiterates in his writing the Asia-Pacific constitution of Asian America:}

“Asian America is no longer a location just in the United States but, at the same time, is a location on a metaphorical Rim constituted by diasporas and the movement of individuals” (“Asians on the Rim” 41). David Palumbo-Liu further claims that “[w]ithin this newly invented space of the Asia Pacific, Asian Americans were posited as the Pacific Rim subject par excellence, emissaries of commerce and cultural translators” (343).

American” identity has been faulted for converging people of Asian origin into one reified category of ethnic coalition that fails to attend to their diverse ethnic, national, language, class, and religious backgrounds, it is again not without danger to concede to an Asia-Pacific imagination of Asian America before carefully qualifying the idea (or ideal) of Asia-Pacific.4

For one thing, rather than being a neutral geographical term with a clear physical reference, “Asia-Pacific” is from its inception informed by EuroAmerican

conceptualizations. Dirlik insists that Asia-Pacific has been defined not as much by what happens within the boundaries of the Pacific Ocean as by the economic, political, military, and cultural agendas outside the Pacific.5 Indeed, the formation of the early image of the Pacific was due to the EuroAmerican cartographical and literary efforts that could be traced as early as to the 1271 Marco Polo’s voyage to the Orient. The emergence of the idea of Asia-Pacific itself, moreover, was the product of the U.S. global geo-imaginary during the Cold War years (León W. 18; Connery 30-33). Even with the rise of Asian economic powers since the 1980s, Japan, according to Bruce Cummings, at best serves as “number two,” under the lead of “U.S. hegemony” or “U.S.-British hegemony,” in the international power struggles over the resources of Asia-Pacific (38), not to mention that the rise of Japan in the form of a new capitalist empire, instead of bringing visibility or prosperity to the many long-neglected locales within Asia-Pacific, only deepens the intra-regional unevenness. Here, in view of the fact that Asia-Pacific is “neither a self-contained region nor a community” but “a rim—peripheral and semiperipheral societies oriented toward Tokyo and the U.S. market” (Cummings 41), whose Asia-Pacific are we talking about when launching an Asia-Pacific imagination of Asian America? Instead of considering Asia-Pacific an abstract (utopic) space of equality and capital accumulation, a space that promises Asian America not only a new name but also commercial profits, it is important to restore Asia-Pacific to history, to time, to the concrete, the local, and the everyday. Part of my purpose in writing this paper is thus to intervene into the EuroAmerican “spatial mythology” (Connery 40) of Asia-Pacific with the Asian American actualities

4 _{As Evelyn Hu-DeHart has observed, there are both “the opportunities and the risks, the promises and}

the perils” of reading Asian America not as an ethnic group within the U. S. but as a diasporic group in “the international context of the Pacific Rim” (11).

5 _{In Dirlik’s words: “The Pacific in the end would be a EuroAmerican invention [. . .], that what we}

today regard as the Pacific region was formed by forces that originated outside of the region” (“The Asia-Pacific in Asian-American Perspective” 5).

that take place within this area.

Another point to bear in mind when attempting an Asia-Pacific imagination of Asian America is that one should not over-privilege the liberating power of

transnation. Precisely, an Asia-Pacific imagination is useful for Asian America not in that it substitutes “Asian America,” a term implying national duality, with a category of imaginary unity and coherence or in that the idea of “transnation” dissolves once and for all Asian Americans’ difficulties of landing in America but in that it does justice to the immigrant origins and complicated trans-Pacific trajectories of Asian Americans. In fact, that “Asian America” as a category exceeding Asia/America national dichotomies has a longer history than the rise of the very idea of Asia Pacific in the 1970s. Slowly developing out of the trans-Pacific cultural, military, economic, and population flows since the nineteenth century, Asian America has been deeply rooted in the concrete socio-political transactions taking place over the Pacific. For example, the introduction of the large number of Japanese laborers into North America and Hawai’i in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was at least partly due to the U.S. 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The distinct age gaps between Issei, Nisei, and Sansei could be attributed to the U. S. government’s 1907

Gentleman’s Agreement and 1924 National Origins Act, both working to reduce the number of new Japanese immigrants into the U.S. Besides, the collective frenzy propelling the post-World War II Japanese Americans to relinquish their Japanese connection and prove their “Americanness” was actually a product of the wartime logic that prescribed the U.S.-Japan incompatibility. The trend of “going back to Japan” arising since the 1980s among Japanese Americans, again, could not be understood apart from the rise of Japan as an economic power in Asia. All these show that Asian American experiences are from their beginning interwoven with the

trans-Pacific power relations. To Study Asian America in light of the Asia-Pacific formation therefore is not to deem unimportant (or out-of-date) the problems of Asian American home-search in America but to investigate the Asian American (both grounding and diasporic) experiences as bound up with the conflicts between nations, capital, and labor in a broader context of the Asia-Pacific region.

Given the fact that Asia-Pacific formation is integral to Asian American

formation, it is understandable that an Asia-Pacific context is “unavoidably implicit in much of the writing on Asian Americans” (Dirlik, “The Asia-Pacific in

as the “product” of the Asia-Pacific regional transaction is how Asian American individuals act as subjects that intervene into our conceptualizations of Asia, American, and Asia-Pacific. The intermingling of Asian American and Asia-Pacific histories actually should be studied for more than one purposes: in addition to extending the spatio-temporality of Asian America beyond any strictly defined national territory or history, one may move a step further to (1) oblige America to reconsider its Asian (American) components, and (2) to fill Asia-Pacific with its Asian (American) contents. David Palumbo-Liu reminds us of the “double movement” in the America-Asia transaction: “we must note that these crossings, both physical and mental, were not only undertaken in a westerly direction by America: as America cross over to Asia, Asians came to the United States” (2). For him, to grant Asian Americans agency is to take seriously “the modern introjection of Asia into the American imaginary” and the constitution of “a particular facet of Asian America” in “American bodies, psyches, and spaces” (17-18). Moreover, by revealing the uneven power relations between Asian American members of different Asian national origins, one could disrupt the mythic vision of Asia-Pacific as a utopic space of postnational unity and communal integration. Here, contrary to conceiving Asian Americans as passive figures driven by the larger-than-life forces of capital and politics across the Asia-Pacific region, one may imagine an Asia-Pacific as constituted by the concrete everyday experiences of Asian Americans, which, as argued by Rob Wilson, will reveal “[u]neven and unjust, the memory of immigration and war” as “a traumatic Asian-Pacific ‘kernel’” (237).

In what follows, I take The Strangeness of Beauty (1999), the second

book-length work written by the Japanese American Sansei writer Lydia Minatoya (1950-- ), as an example to study the intermingling of Asian America and

Asia-Pacific in an Asian American literary text. One of the reasons for me to choose

The Strangeness of Beauty as a major text of analysis is that it represents a piece of

Japanese American experience that took place in-between Japan, the U.S. and the Pacific before the Japan-American Pacific War. While Talking to High Monks in the

Snow: An Asian American Odyssey (1992), an earlier work written by Minatoya, also

deals with Japanese American transnational travel and movement, it is mostly written in line with what Traise Yamamoto recognizes as the “going back to Japan” trend in recent Japanese American literature. Taking as its central concern Japanese

cultural movement and tourism.6 The Strangeness of Beauty nonetheless restores the construction of Japanese America to its trans-Pacific backgrounds. Not only does it provide a rare view to the early Japanese Americans’ dual connections with Japan and the U.S., but it also reveals that Asia-Pacific trajectories, though long neglected, have always already been essential to the constitution of Japanese America.

At this point I agree with Rachel Lee that many Asian American literary texts, “far from landing behind, actually anticipate global frameworks, enunciating precisely the formation of hybrid Asian cultures in scattered sites across the Pacific due to labor migrations, colonial invasions, the flow of transnational capital, and the hyperlinks of satellite communications” (233). Lee takes Karen Yamashita’s Through the Art of the

Rain Forest (1990) as an example, explaining Asian Americans’ “grounding

experience” has always already been implicated in the Asia-Pacific “multinoded cultural intermingling,” inseparable from “the compilation of heterogeneous national, racial, and cultural components all in one site” (239). Similarly, one may argue that the Japanese American experiences in The Strangeness of Beauty antedate the Asia-Pacific turn of Asian American critical discourses. Portraying the Japanese American experience in the first three decades of the twentieth century, The

Strangeness of Beauty not only presents its protagonist-narrator Etsuko Sone’s

“I-story” as interwoven with her Asia-Pacific experiences of transmigration, but also intervenes into the imagination of Asia-Pacific, in a sense restoring Asia-Pacific to the concrete, the local, and the Japanese American actualities. Essential to my analysis is therefore how this novel attempts an everyday microscopic constitution of Japanese America and Asia-Pacific out of the spatio-temporal multiplicities in Japan, America, and the Pacific.

I-Story, Inter-Subjective Story, and the Story of Transmigration

Set between 1910s and 1930s, The Strangeness of Beauty is primarily about the trans-Pacific experiences of its protagonist-narrator Etsuko Sone. Born and growing up in Kobe, Etsuko and her husband Tadao moved to Seattle in 1916, in pursuit of Tadao’s career as an aircraft engineer. After an accidental death of Tadao, Etsuko remained in Seattle, working as a cook. In 1928, under the arrangement of Akira, i.e.,

6 _{Please refer to Yamamoto 81-92 for more details about the development of “going back to Japan” as}

a theme in recent Japanese American literature. Important works in this group include Dorinne Kondo,

Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (1990); David

Mura, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (1991); and Lydia Minatoya, Talking to High Monks in

her brother-in-law and Hanae’s father, she brought the six-year-old Hanae, the daughter of her late sister Naomi, back to Kobe. The obvious double movement of Etsuko across the Pacific made hers not a simple immigrant story that moved linearly from departure (from one’s Asian origin) to settlement (in America). Moreover, Akira sent Hanae back to Japan out of his desire to free Hanae from racial discrimination. Himself a dentist and a Japanese/Japanese American three-cushion champion, Akira meant to make use of his connections on both sides of the Pacific to help Hanae grow up in “a few critical years” of her life not as a member of an inferior race in the U.S. (52). “My little girl,” Akira declared, “will grow up with every advantage” (45). Hanae was anticipated to grow up a Kibei, the Japanese Americans born in America but grew up in Japan. Indeed, the large number of Kibei and other Japanese American members who stayed in Japan either for accompanying these Kibei or for personal educational or employment reasons testified strongly to the transnational background of pre-World War II Japanese American communities.7

This transnational background, however, does not free the characters in The

Strangeness of Beauty from their desire to “land.” Instead of solving once and for all

an individual’s identity problems, the experiences of trans-Pacific movement and dual national connections complicate the issues of “where to land,” “how to land,” or “what it means to land” when there is no singular and stable place to which the individual in question belongs. Etsuko declared that the goal of writing an “I-story” (shi-shosetsu) is to “try and discern where you are” (319). Yet, if a discerning of “where one is” predicates the establishment of a territorially-based and

temporally-bounded self-identity in traditional autobiographies, for Etsuko the efforts to discern where she was ended up in the deferral of her self-image in different times and places. As one shall see, though written when Etsuko was in Seattle, the first 56 pages of The Strangeness of Beauty contains passages that hark back to Etsuko’s life in Japan—the Taisho Industrial Show, the internationalism that dominated Kobe in 1910s, and her love affair with Tadao. Likewise, after Etsuko moved to Japan, the image of America was never wiped clean from her everyday life. On the one hand, she “felt grateful to have traveled back home [i.e., Japan]”; on the other hand, she

7 _{The statistics show that more than 18,000 Nisei lived in Japan as of 1933; on the eve of Pearl Harbor,}

moreover, there were about 20,000 Nisei in Japan (Ichioka viii). For a historical portrayal of Japanese Americans who stayed in Japan between 1931 and 1934, see Amerasia Journal’s special issue (vol. 23 no. 3) on “Beyond National Boundaries: The Complexity of Japanese-American History.” One may notice that the narrator’s mother In Talking to High Monks in the Snow is also a Kibei.

kept thinking about that “the America [she] called home seems to have brutally changed” during her absence. Receiving Seattle Times regularly from Akira, she read about and felt “concerned” for the American financial depression (77). Shifting back and forth between her Kobe and Seattle connections, Etsuko suffered from the feeling of belonging “neither here nor there” (77).

In a sense, it was due to this lack of a singular place for her to identify with that Etsuko undertook her “I-story” writing project. First, the act of writing itself presumes the existence of a unified self who writes. Moreover, the narrative recounting of one’s life a self-narrative is conventionally expected to stage a teleological process of self-maturation. At least one may expect to counteract the sense of self-uncertainty and spatial instability with some kind of textual mooring derived from

autobiographical writing. Etsuko explained in the first entry of her “I-story” that the “frenzy” to write “I-stories” in modern Japan could be attributed to social upheavals and cultural conflicts Japan experienced through its process of modernization: if it was the collision of “modernism” with “the tradition of reticence” that created “a people just roiling with confessional angst” (11), one of the possible goals of writing an “I-story” was to dissolve this “confessional angst” by bringing about a new synthesized self.

What is intriguing is that The Strangeness of Beauty does not generate any clear synthesized self. Though assuming the appearance of an autobiographical “I-story,” it is less about presenting Etsuko as a monolithic person with a continuous identity and unified personality than about tracing the meanderings of her self and life that exceed the totalized form of a Western autobiography. Although Etsuko might have started her writing project with a desire to consolidate her identity, her writing, generated from changing spatialities and sprawling into different times, could not help lapsing into the discontinuities and deferrals of her everyday experiences. The discontinuous dates placed at the beginning of each of her narrative entries most obviously expose the gaps in her writing: between her first and second entries, for example, is a

“five-year lapse”; after her return from Seattle to Kobe, her “I-story” “stalled for four years” (75). During the time she was involved in the “dissident ladies’ group” to work again Japanese imperialism, moreover, Etsuko ceased writing because she was so much “engaged in life’s essence,” feeling “too righteous and busy” to write (238).

In one significant episode, Etsuko drew an analogy between her “I-story” and the photographs of Viktor, an exiled Jewish photographer she encountered on her

trans-Pacific passage from the U.S. to Japan. As Viktor recorded his life by capturing “a series of disparate moments” in his photographs, Etsuko recorded her experiences at the different moments of her life in each entry of her “I-story.” Viktor’s

photographs lacked “a coherent story” yet held “the threads of his life” (75); likewise, Etsuko wrote her “I-story” not to create an illusion of the continuity of her life but to restore the abstract idea of “life” to its concrete details and multiple “threads.” More importantly, both Etsuko’s “I-story” and Viktor’s photographs render their selves contextual and relational. Viktor’s photographs consisted mostly of the images of other people and other places that he saw and interacted with through his experience of exile. Present in these photos was everything but Viktor’s image: the “streets, gardens, synagogue, slyly comical portraits of family occasions” in Munich;

“[g]ypsies outside of Paris, a woman of indeterminate age and emotion [. . .] eating a piece of bread in the rain; “[a] proud-looking porter at New York’s grand Central Station” and “a skinny American boy at his family’s farm auction—his shoulders bent like an old man” (74-75). In a similar manner, Etsuko’s writing kept moving from her self to others. For example, starting her “I-story” not with her own birth but with Hanae’s birth, Etsuko narrated Hanae’s birth twice—first from Akira’s perspective and then from her own perspective—before she uttered anything about herself: “When Hanae was born, I was a twenty-four-year-old widow” (22). And even at this moment of drawing attention to herself, Etsuko paved her way, by introducing herself as a widow, to proceed with the story of her late husband Tadao. Etsuko admitted at one point of her writing that “there is less and less I in this I-story”: once she adopted Hanae’s viewpoint to approach the character of her real mother Chie (97); she also tried to let Chie speak for herself in an entry titled “How I Imagine Chie Would See It” (270); most frequently, she felt herself “disappear” in the presence of Chie, “a woman who acts” (173).

Indeed, The Strangeness of Beauty is written in a way that one knows Etsuko mostly in contexts and through her relationship with other characters. This, however, does not mean that an authentic and unified image of Etsuko will eventually be excavated from under the text if we are careful enough to sort out each textual detail about her. It is like doing a jigsaw puzzle to fit all the pieces of Etsuko in the novel together, only to find that some of these pieces are hard to come together and some are even in contradiction with each other. More importantly, the “contradiction” here cannot be explained away simply by referring to the seeming incompatibility between

her Japanese and American connections. The national identificatory duality might contributes somewhat to Etsuko’s identity problem but it provides too simple a model to account for all the complexities of Etsuko’s self and life. Hardly did Etsuko

describe herself as either a Japanese or an American. She played throughout her “I-story” complicated roles in shifting contexts and inter-subjective relationships, roles including, to mention only the most obvious, a westernized elevator girl at Kobe’s Daimaru, a racial minority of Japanese origin in Seattle, the offspring of an ancient Japanese family of samurai, the surrogate mother for Hanae the Kibei, a Japanese American dwelling in Japan, a backward “buffoon” sticking to the codes of samurai next to the brave and resourceful Chie (253), a “dowdy, thirty-seven-year-old housewife” turned an indispensable member in the anti-war and anti-imperialist movement during the time of Sino-Japanese war (229). These roles were not reducible to the national division between Japan and the U.S.; nor did they come together to form a line of Etsuko’s development into a unified self or to any specific telo. As we shall see, even toward the end of her “I-story,” Etsuko was still in the (endless) process of redefining who she was and what she could become: she fell in love with a man who attended her anti-war meetings and realized how much she was like Chie (358). Overall, life for her was still “random and heartless,” providing no specific premise or promise (370). Etsuko remained entangled with the complicated bits and pieces that constituted her everyday experience.

The deviation of Etsuko’s “I-story” from the traditional Western biography is thus obvious. Nor should The Strangeness of Beauty be understood in the tradition of Asian American women’s autobiography, which usually stages a teleological process of the protagonist’s assimilation into America.8 And of course Etsuko’s writing is not a simple repetition of the Japanese traditional shi-shosetsu. Although the term

“I-story” is derived from the Japanese shi-shosetsu and Etsuko confessed at one point of her writing that she liked shi-shosetsu in that it is written in and through life (rather than out of life),9 she regarded traditional shi-shosetsu as too much self-absorbed and its author “spend[ing] too much time indoors, alone” (135). Etsuko’s relentless

engagements with the external world differentiated hers from a traditional

8 _{See Frank Chin 11-12. Chin considers most early Asian American autobiographies as descending}

from the write Christian confessions; by writing autobiographies Asian American biographers actually subordinate their Asian American sensibility to the Western racial and cultural authority.

9 _{For Etsuko, the answer to the question, “why does everyone in Japan want to write one}

shi-shosetsu.

Here, instead of reading The Strangeness of Beauty as continuously pulled between the autobiographical writing of different national traditions, I would resort to the model of “transmigration” Akhil Gupta introduces in his essay, “Reincarnating Immigrant Biography” to tease out the significance of the temporal gaps, spatial changes, and self-irruption as shown in Etsuko’s “I-story.” Meaning both “to pass from one place to another” and “to pass from one state of existence of the other,” the word “transmigration” correlates the idea of spatial movement and bodily

reincarnation. It implies that the movement from one place to another predicates the disruption of the moving self, as if the moving self has gone through a process of reincarnation. Certainly, underlying this idea of “transmigration” is a re-thinking of human body “not merely as a biological vessel but as a located entity”: since the body’s identity is derived form “being situated in historical memory and constructed tradition,” immigration, migration, or exile brings about not only “displacement and detemporalization” but also “out-of-body experiences” (178). Gupta’s theory of “transmigration” is significant in two ways. First, it sheds new light on immigrant life narratives by bringing to the fore its inevitable “digression and fragmentation” (171). As an immigrant’s sense of self is “shaken” every time he/she is inserted into “new relations with land, family, community, and nation,” the continuity privileged in traditional (auto)biographies is cast into question. Secondly, calling attentions to the cultural landscape and historical actualities inhabited and traversed by individual subjects, the idea of “transmigration” contextualizes the experiences of immigrants, migrants, refugees, travelers, etc. Gupta seeks in “transmigration” a subtler model than the framework of national duality to explain an immigrant’s complicated experiences of movement across time and space:

Many phenomenon, such as immigration, which had been put into a straitjacket by dualistic and nationalist conceptual frameworks divided, for example, into “sending” nations and “receiving” nations or motivated by “push” factors or “pull” factors, can now be reconsidered from perspectives that themselves historicize the nation-state, position immigration within a field of global capitalist relations [. . .]. (170)

Gupta suggests to read immigrant experiences beyond the nationalist framework. To him, an immigrant self’s identity is defined neither by “its place or origin” nor by “its place of settlement” (180). It is rather embedded in the self’s complicated trajectories

across the social, economic and cultural flows taking places through and beyond the confinement of nation-states.

The idea of “transmigration” as such not only accounts for the

identity-discontinuity and self-irruption characteristic of Etsuko’s writing but also restore our understanding of The Strangeness of Beauty to the grounds of the

trans-Pacific cultural landscape out of which Etsuko’s self and life emerged. Read as a story of transmigration, Etsuko’s “I-story” is not merely concerned about “I” or that of an isolated individual. She intentionally blurred her and other characters’ perspectives, approaching her story inter-subjectively and inter-textually with the others’. More importantly, “what she was” remained inspired, cultivated, and propelled by the larger contexts she inhabited. From this critical perspective, Etsuko was quite right when she claimed that she did not volunteer to play all the different, even contradictory, roles in her life. “[M]y entire life,” Etsuko asserted, “had been somebody’s else’s idea”: “America was Tadao’s dream. Hanae is Naomi’s child. Coming back to Japan was Akira’s decision,” and joining the dissident ladies’ group was “through a departing friend’s urging” (247). For sure it could not be fair to dismiss once and for all Etsuko’s subjective power vis-à-vis the external world. She was more than a passive figure driven forward by other’s desire. Still, it is crucial to note that Etsuko did not live outside her socio-historical contexts. Her life and self were from their beginnings embedded in specific times and spaces. To know more about Etsuko actually paves our way to know more about the trans-Pacific complexities from the perspective of an individual subject’s everyday actualities.

The Modernized Kobe, the Third World Seattle, and the Asia-Pacific Everyday

By far I have laid bare the trans-Pacific background of Etsuko’s “I-story.” Instead of being pulled and pushed between a Japanese and an American national identifications, Etsuko negotiated in her writing her transmigrant trajectories. One point of my analysis is to ground Asian American formation in Asian American

individuals’ trans-Pacific routes, hence extending our understanding of Asian America to its trans-Pacific dimension. Another point—which I would elaborate further in this current section—is then how Asian Americans’ trans-Pacific routes may help

constitute an Asia-Pacific from within its cultural, political, and economic actualities. As has been pointed out earlier, Asian Americans are more than passive subjects in the intermingling of the Asian American formation and the Asia-Pacific construction.

Their movements across the Pacific and their engagement in the military, economic, and cultural struggles taking place in-between nations in the region constitute the historical materiality of Asia-Pacific. With the same importance to recognize the presence of Asian Americans in the space of Asia-Pacific is to imagine Asia-Pacific from an Asian American perspective. An Asian American imagination of Asia-Pacific not only retrieves the cultural signifier of “Asia-Pacific” from EuroAmerican

hegemony but also helps build an Asia-Pacific from the “bottom-up.” It restores Asia-Pacific to its historical materiality.

Briefly, The Strangeness of Beauty both evokes the idealized image of the Pacific and exposes its inadequacy to encompass the complexities of Asian American

actualities. Etsuko owned a photo, taken by Viktor during her passage from Seattle to Kobe. Though taken at a period of time when Etsuko felt most disturbed by her dual national connections, being aware that she was “no longer the Japanese woman who had sailed the opposite way across the Pacific” and “just as clear” that she would “never be viewed as American” (74), this photo presented an Etsuko absorbed in the sight of flying fish on the Pacific. There was no sign of self-splitting or incompletion in the photo, featuring in a sense Etsuko’s idealized mirror counterpart. Moreover, remembered after her “I-story” had “stalled” for four years since her return to Kobe, the moment when Etsuko was most uncertain about who she was and where she belonged, this photo in a way introduced to Etsuko the Pacific as a new space of self-identification. Taken out of living contexts, the Pacific inside the photo provided an identificatory category independent of national confrontations and spatial

differences.

The photo in a sense singled out from Etsuko’s everyday life a “hope-filled” moment free from time, historicity, spatial constraints, and, of course, her

identificatory uncertainty. It is ironical, though, that only through the photo—more precisely only through the illusion created by the photo—can an idealized imagination of Asia-Pacific as a liberating space of transnation become available in The

Strangeness of Beauty. When taken out of time and situated within the frame of a

picture, Asia-Pacific seemed to be able to cohere the differences of Etsuko’s everyday experiences into a photographic “Gestalt” of unity and completeness. When placed back into time, however, this photo only captured one moment out of “a serried of disparate moments” of Etsuko’s life that yielded no “coherent story” (75). Etsuko admitted that although “[t]hose rare times—when clocks stop, bodies blend, and

boundaries all disappear—are meant to be conserved, [. . .] there are other moments, every day” (137). When projecting for Etsuko the seeming possibility of acquiring an idealized Asia-Pacific identity, the photo also called Etsuko’s attention to her

disrupted self situated outside the photo.

An interesting comparison and contrast can be attempted between Etsuko’s totalized photographical image and the image of Etsuko’s luggage carried on the same trans-Pacific passage. Whereas the photo captured Etsuko in the utopic oneness and completion of a mirror image, the luggage provided something like a “heterotopia,” the Foucauldian sedimented “other” space, that allowed in incompatible spaces and disruptive temporalities.10 If Etsuko’s photo image was exclusive in nature,

configuring itself as historically amnesic and spatially autonomous, the luggage was so inclusive that it served as the repository of Etsuko’s memories accumulated from her life on both sides of the Pacific. Etsuko forced all her belongings and mementos that reflected her complicated transnational trajectories into her luggage: the pictures of her foster parents (who died in Japan), the pictures of her husband Tadao and her younger sister Naomi (who died in the U. S.), “the six wedding kimonos” she received from her grandma in Japan after moving to Seattle, “an old sweater that Tadao used to wear,” the “old underwear that Naomi has sewn” for her daughter Hanae, and even Naomi’s wedding mirror (121-122). Featuring a miniatured version of global “time-space compression,” the luggage brought apparent spatial and temporal differences into one locality. It juxtaposed layers of Etsuko’s experiences, embodying not a self-confined space but a space pointing to various times and spaces.

One way to understand Etsuko’s “I-story” is actually to read it as constituted by the bits and pieces of Etsuko’s Asia-Pacific experiences that sprawl out of her luggage into a narrative flow. The Strangeness of Beauty envisages an Asia-Pacific embedded in the specificities of Etsuko’s experiences. Besides situating the image of the Pacific in the temporal deferral of Etsuko’s everyday existence, the novel further challenges the images of Japan and America as unified nations of homogeneous spaces and times. One obvious example is that, contrary to most people’s belief that the U.S., viewed as the source of Asian modernity, must be more advanced than Asia on the temporal

10 _{Please refer to Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” for elaborations of the idea of “heterotopia.” My reading}

of Etsuko’s luggage as providing a space of heterotopia is inspired by Lisa Lowe’s reading of the China town image in Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone (1993); see Lowe, “Decolonization, Displacement,

ladder of modernization, Kobe in the 1910s was more modernized than Seattle from Etsuko’s perspective:

For, coming from a Kobe filled with Italian opera, French fashion, and British banks, we had envisioned America as not too distant from home, we weren’t thinking geographically, of course, but we’d expected Seattle to have a kind of international dynamism: brimming with libraries and museums, humming with immigrant energy, hopping with social mobility. As we left Seattle’s Immigration Building and then the store, located directly at the exit of Immigration, where we traded my kimono for American clothes, we were startled [. . .] to see the eroding hills stubbled with severed tree trunks, the fish offal in the harbor—the mud and guts that were much of Seattle. (31)

It may not be too surprising that the world in the early twentieth century was not evenly developed and that Etsuko’s dream of a global village—that Seattle was not “too distant” from Kobe in terms of its “international dynamism”—was proven

unrealistic. What is surprising is that Etsuko’s cultural shock was not derived from the fact that Seattle was far more modernized than what she had imagined but due to an observation that the Seattle in front of her was more backward than what she knew about Kobe. One may certainly argue that Etsuko had compared Kobe to the wrong side of Seattle. Seattle appeared “Third World” only because Etsuko did not have the chance to explore beyond the Japantown in Seattle. This argument nevertheless teases out forcefully an important yet frequently neglected fact. That is, there are multiple times and histories within one single nation. A. H. Richmond is right in pointing out the importance “to recognize the polyethnic and culturally diversified character of both sending and receiving countries” when studying an immigrant experience; he asserts that

[t]here is no single “American way of life” into which immigrants arriving the United States must eventually be assimilated. The United States is ethnically stratified, culturally pluralistic and exhibits a diversity of life-styles” (qtd. in Fawcett and Cariňo 7).

Here, as if echoing Richmond’s opinion, Etsuko’s experience bore witness to the temporal disjunction and spatial differences inside the U.S.11 The Strangeness of

Beauty re-envisions a U.S. that not simply descended from Western civilization but

was also defined by its ethnic slums and minoritized communities. If there was one side of America in which “a smart girl has many choices for college,” there was “another side of America: the racial slurs, the restrictive laws” (9). In one vivid passage, Etsuko described the existence of an “American frontier” that diverged from the norm of the Western civilization:

Before we sailed for America, Tadao and I thought we should learn everything we could about the West: etiquette, architecture, language, literature. In order to prepare for our new lives, we spent many pleasurable hours in the reference room of Osaka University.

We made one mistake, however. As we scanned the library’s card catalog, we paused at the topic Civilization, Western and became so engaged by it and its cross-references—See also Europe: Art, History, and

Society—that we never realized the existence of an entirely different

category. West: American frontier.

Etsuko decomposed the Eurocentric imagination of America. From Etsuko’s trans-Pacific perspective, one could not really know America without knowing its frontier, a frontier, as we know, formulated in a large part by the Asian American presence.

When Etsuko moved from Kobe to Seattle, obviously she did not simply

immigrate from her native country to a foreign one but journeyed across differentiated historical temporalities that were not divided neatly along national borders. Deriving its source from the Asia-Pacific background of transnational cultural flow, Etsuko’s everyday experience had always already sprawled beyond Japan-America national or cultural dichotomies. Before her immigration, Etsuko lived in an internationalized Kobe marked by its “chaotic vitality” (59):

Internationalism carried the day. In girls’ upper level, I had studied

democracy, Marxism, and existentialism. Universities all overflowed. Within the next three years, Albert Einstein and Margaret Sanger would have wildly successful speaking tours. (24)

Working at Daimaru, Etsuko was granted even more accesses to the global side of

literature. Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) perhaps most dramatically demonstrates how the America one experiences as an ethnic and racial minority is different from the America described in books and imagined in one’s dreams.

Kobe:

I could speak some English—indeed I had been hired to narrate the contents of various floors to affluent American and European female shoppers. I had browsed through German bakeries and peeked into galleries featuring the latest in modern French art. (24)

This internationalization of Kobe in the 1910s was due largely to the Japanese

nationalist project to westernize and modernize Japan since the late nineteenth century. This, however, does not mean Kobe was nothing but a lesser version of a modern EuroAmerican city. A city usually develops into a more complicated shape than is designated by the governmental power and so was Kobe. Under the banner of westernization, the 1910s Kobe was actually not as much an Asian simulacrum of Western cities as a cultural hybrid at the level of every day:

Into every orderly artery of Kobe’s commercial life spill a thousand

undisciplined veins—a happy helter-skelter of alleyways crammed with tiny, irregularly shaped lots, each erupting with its own vision of promise. Thus a four-stool bar is crammed next to a wedding photography shop, which in turn is lodged between a temple, a typing school, and a brothel. (59) The old was intermingled with the new; the imported stood side by side with the traditional. Kobe did not develop into a simple mimicry of any modern Western city. Rather, “a foundation of tradition” endured (59), creating a cultural scene that, though unavoidably international, was also uniquely local.

And if Kobe in the 1910s was more than a Westernized version of Japan, the Kobe in the 1930s featured an every day that overflowed the increasingly

tightened-up national boundary of Japan. The rise of Japanese imperialism, the

increasing antagonism between Japan and Western countries, the fall of world markets in the late 1920s and 1930s all contributed to Japan’s withdrawal from

internationalism. As the Japanese nationalist spirit was re-advocated in opposition to the Western powers, it was predictable that Kobe grew parochial: the formerly European neighborhood were “becoming Japanese” (224); people with international background or connections were relegated to the status of an “outcast” (287); the translation of Tolstoy, “seized at the dock and impounded,” was not allowed to be imported into Japan (284); school curriculum diminished to include little more than the propaganda of nationalism and jingoism; “citizens began shouting ‘Banzai’” (287); “democracy disappeared” (287); “small business owners started selling miniature

flags” (287), and the “standard-sized” flag of Japan in Hanae’s high school grew “enormous” overnight (237). Etsuko described in one passage how the change of national policy transformed the appearance of Kobe in a short time:

[. . .] outside the [Kobe train] station the streets and sidewalks were jammed, Women selling horoscopes, children selling flowers, and old men selling snacks of sweet potatoes and chestnuts wheeled their pushcarts wherever the population looked most dense. Buddhist monks with black robes and brass begging bowls, uniformed university students, and street musicians playing ancient Japanese lutes wove their way through the crowds.

Though nowhere in observable proximity, the special Higher Police—a recent manifestation of lifestyle-and-thought control—constituted a felt presence. Only a few months ago the street musicians would have been billing themselves by name such as Maru Shiba Rie or Beigu Kasubei—for Maurice Chevalier and Bing Crosby—and would have been performing zany comedy while singing popular Western songs. (258-259)

Under the supervision of the “special Higher Police,” the Japanese frenzy for the EuroAmerican pop culture seemed to disappear in a few months’ time. The everyday here loyally followed the political change.

Yet what one saw during the daytime around the Kobe train station could not speak for all of Kobe. If the everyday serves to some extent as a faithful mirror to the national politics,12 there is another side of the everyday that persists in its own terms despite the rise of nationalism. For one thing, it was impossible to rid Japan

“overnight” of all the traces of the West. Aya Ito’s house, where the members of the anti-war movement gathered, for example, was introduced as with “four fireplace chimneys jutting from the traditional Japanese tiled roof” that “announced that at least part of the house was built Western style” (224). Moreover, as Chie clearly pointed out, “[t]he Ministry of Defense can’t get rid of all Western influence,” especially those on every small things such as “baseball, movies, fashion” (216). One of the best examples to illustrate Chie’s assertion is that the Japanese government was not

12 _{Everyday is actually not merely a mirror for the larger reality; it sometimes provides visions, from}

which one can predict what is going to happen. The predicting power of the everyday in The

Strangeness of Beauty is best illustrated in an episode titled “The Telltale Squid”: that nothing but squid

was available at the fish market signified to Etsuko that Japan was going to fight on the Pacific. For details, see 351-353.

successful in getting rid of the English words that had become part of the everyday Japanese expressions:

When ordered to replace with Japanese phrases, baseball terms like “strike,” “run,” and “out” [. . .], games froze with self-conscious confusion as plays stumbled to recall the new words. A demand to eliminate the practice of calling one’s parents Mama and Papa was similarly quickly abandoned. (288)

Another example is the large movie audience in Le Cinema Grand Oriental despite “a dozen members of the Women’s Patriotic League—dressed in worn brown farmer’s pants to signify willingness to forgo luxury in support of Japan’s higher need—were picking against foreign diversions” near the ticket booth (220). The small things from which one’s everyday pleasure was derived thus continuously resisted the national governing power. They kept connecting the everyday to a transnational context.

Indeed, the transnational context preserved in the everyday is significant in The

Strangeness of Beauty not only in that it kept one from the self-constraining ideology

of nationalism and jingoism but also in that it provided an alternative space for the anti-war movement to gain momentum. First, although the Japanese government censored all anti-war messages and reports in Japanese, it ignored the power of foreign languages that had infiltrated into the everyday of those who understood these languages. Etsuko joined the anti-war women’s group because Miss Langley, an American who taught English in Etsuko’s community, passed her an anti-war

ad—“Women opposing military aggression. Come join in discussion” (223). Slightly to Etsuko’s surprise, this ad “kept appearing in the English-language edition of the

Kobe News” for “almost two months” (223). The Japanese government simply

ignored message in foreign languages: “International newspapers can provide piercing analyses about Japanese governmental actions and it is assumed their audience will be too small [. . .] for its publication matter” (223). And this naivety of the government yielded an excellent space for individuals’ underground maneuver. Besides this, again in a context larger than the national, “the dissident ladies’ group” undertook its anti-imperialist project under the guise an everyday triviality. They uncovered international reports and information about Japanese imperialist expansion from international women’s magazines:

This was our plan. In these ladies’ magazines (still not banned because of their perceived triviality), buried beneath tips for curing colic and getting

along with your mother-in-law, were facts about current events. When we uncovered some piece of censored news—through seemingly impromptu gatherings and apparently accidental meetings, in our innocuous, babbling way—we distributed the information. (276)

Although these women were under the government’s surveillance, they evaded suspicion because from the perspective of the authority they were “a gossipy group of harmless hotheaded women” (276). As long as the women acted in the semblance of passing around “recipes from ladies’ magazines” (282), the government could hardly imagine that they were revolutionary. As demonstrated by Etsuko’s brilliant remark that the “little etiquette slips have led to breaches far greater” (198), the gossips and what Etsuko claimed to be women’s “home-economics” (274) circulated in the space of every day’s insurgence against the Japanese official and the national discursive regimes.

To conclude, when viewed from the perspective of the everyday, Asia-Pacific is not an empty signifier or an idealized geographical space that allows a utopic vision of transnation; nor should it be simplified into a space marked by the dual

confrontation between the East and the West, Asia and America, or Japan and the U.S. This discussion above demonstrates that the materiality of Asia-Pacific is embedded in the shifting roles and disparate temporalities one experiences through the

complicated process of her/his transmigration. Moreover, the trans-Pacific everyday actualities enable Asian American individuals to query into the singularity of a nation; Traversing the national division between Japan and America, Asian Americans seek in the Asia-Pacific international cultural flows ideas and spaces to challenge constraining nationalist regimes. The Strangeness of Beauty not only restores Asian American experiences to its Asia-Pacific background but also introduces a trans-Pacific perspective and international connections of Asian Americans that complicate both American and Japanese nationalist politics. It reveals to us the possibility and significance of imagining an Asia-Pacific grounded not on national divisions but on the Asian American everyday cultural transmissions.

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Companion to Asian American Literature. Ed. King-Kok Cheung. New York:

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Connery, Christopher L. “Pacific Rim Discourse: The U.S. Global Imaginary in the Late Cold War Years.” Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Ed. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. 30-56.

Cummings, Bruce. “Rimspeak; or, the Discourse of the ‘Pacific Rim.’” What Is in a

Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. Ed. Arif Dirlik. Boulder:

Westview, 1993. 29-47.

Dirlik, Arif. “The Asia-Pacific in Asian-American Perspective.” What Is in a Rim?:

Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea. Ed. Arif Dirlik. Boulder:

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1999. 29-60.

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Islands. Ed. James T. Fawcett and Benjamin V. Cariňo. Staten Island, NY:

Center for Migration Studies, 1987. 3-25.

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II.

湊谷百合子《美之驚異》中的日裔美國亞太想像

李秀娟

國立台灣師範大學英語系

對大多數人來說，這個故事都太簡單了，將蜿蜒 曲折的個人動機化約為陳腔濫調。 -- 湊 谷 百 合 子 (Lydia Minatoya), 《美之驚異》(The Strangeness of Beauty) 29 亞美社群拒絕被任何霸權文化收束為一的努 力，為作為文化生產空間的亞太立下典範。 --艾瑞夫．戴力克 (Arif Dirlik), “The Asia-Pacific in Asian American Perspective” 325

亞美視角的亞太想像

從亞太地區政治、經濟、與文化流動，甚至從全球化的視角來閱讀亞美文學

與文化發展，近幾年來已經在亞美學界掀起熱烈討論。眾所周知

，

代崛起的的亞美運動（Asian American movement）和美國境內其他少數族裔與弱 勢族群反美國內部殖民的民權運動互倚共生，奠立了早期亞美想像以立足美國為 職志的基礎。亞美族群作為移民社群，首要考量在於爭取對美國政、經與領土的 所有權—唯有「落地」（to be grounded）才能創造新的家園，也才能獲得明確的 國族身份。不過，這樣爭取亞美社群成為美國境內「落地社群」（grounded people） 的視角，在晚近的亞美研究中卻開始鬆動。隨著一九六五年之後美國對亞洲移民 的開放政策、亞太新經濟勢力的興起、全球化的情境、與亞美族群人口結構的改 變（尤其是出生於亞洲的亞美人數比例驟增），亞美族群對於亞洲聯繫不但不再 避之唯恐不及，更有亞美成員視國族二元（甚或多元）聯繫為跨國行動資產，以 亞太跨國流動場域為亞美新興空間，使亞太地區跨國文化的形成（Asia-Pacific Formation）與亞美社群想像漸行漸近，也更進一步尖銳化亞美社群究竟是在美 國落地生根的移民社群(grounded communities)或是散布在「亞太周緣之離散社 群」（diasporic “Rimpeople”）的爭辯（Dirlik, “Asians on the Rim” 31）。

當然，一般在討論如何定義（或定位）亞美社群時，考慮較多的往往不是亞 美在個人日常生活中的微觀形構 (the everyday microscopic constitution)，而是一 個作為抽象概念的亞美整體在歷史宏觀視野中生存發展，在政、經、文化等層面 上的利益問題。早期亞美名號的建立，是將來自亞洲各國說不同語言、擁有不同

文化背景、宗教信仰、因為不同歷史因素或個人利益考量而遷徙到美洲大陸的個 人籠統擺入「亞美」框架之下，它的目的是在於建立一個「泛亞美」(Pan-Asian American)的策略性結盟，結合眾人力量挑戰亞洲移民在美洲廣泛的被壓迫經 驗，以確立亞洲移民在美洲之公民權力；然而，由於國際局勢改變，近二十年來， 亞-美聯繫或者成為亞美中上階級政治權力斡旋與資本累積捷徑，享有雙重甚或 多元「彈性公民權」(flexible citizenship)的可能更使得跨國身份的價值水漲船高， 於是促成亞美屬性去領土化(deterritorialization)、去國化(de-nationalization)的呼 聲。問題是，早期的亞美運動視亞美為單一、統一的美國少數族裔之一，明顯地 忽視了亞美社群本身駁雜的組成與多樣的跨國移民歷史脈絡，而如今以「亞太」 為亞美擺脫國族拘絆的(資本與權力累積)理想空間，則不免有架空亞美「落地」 歷史，過度淡化、簡化亞美個人不斷斡旋於亞太區域中權力不均衡(unevenness) 與文化矛盾(contradiction)的實際生活面相。 本文正視亞美社群發展的歷史脈絡，關注亞美社群自我定位近年來的轉向， 但卻無意界定亞美究竟是「落地美洲」的亞美或是「亞太離散」的亞美。在提出 以亞美個人日常生活為立論基礎的亞美亞太想像之前，我要強調兩個論述重點。 第一、亞美研究中的「落地美洲」和「亞太離散」理論並不必然互相對峙、互為 排斥，更不認亞美歷史是直線式的由「美國落地」發展到「亞太跨國」。由較長 遠的歷史來看，亞美社群毫無疑問的早就是是亞太平洋地區政、經、軍事與文化 流動之下緩慢生成的駁雜綜合體。以日美社群為例，十九世紀末日本勞工大量進 入北美大陸與夏威夷，和美國一八八二年排華條款(Chinese Exclusion Act)有顯著 的關係；日美社群裡之所以會有明顯的一世(Issei)、二世(Nisei)、三世(Sansei)的 世代分野，其實歸因於美國與日本政府於一九０七年簽立「君子協定」（The Gentleman’s Agreement）與一九二四年移民條款對日本移民限制所造成的日本移 民斷層；更明顯的是，大多數日美成員在二次戰後汲汲擺脫日本聯繫、以融入美 國主流社會為職志，追根究底是日、美太平洋戰爭所造成的日、美認同勢不兩立 的結果；循著這樣的方向思考，八０年代以後的日美社群再度正視自己的日本聯 繫，日本經濟勢力的興起勢必扮演極重要的角色。整個日美社群的發展史因此植

基於十九世紀後版期以來亞太政經文化流動中的國與國之間錯綜複雜關係；不從 瞭解亞太政經文化流動的複雜入手，便無法確切說明亞美社群如何形成、為何追 求落地、在何處落地、又以怎樣的形貌在全球文化的流動中現身。 無庸置疑，亞美社群的構成可以說是亞太政經文化流動的結果，但這樣的看 法充其量只說明了亞美構成與亞太區域形塑關係糾葛中的一面。在討論亞美的亞 太想像時，必須強調的另一個重點是，在亞太政經文化流動的脈絡中，亞美個人 或群體不應該被瞭解為僅僅是受政經勢力所驅策的被動個體；換句話說，我們應 該要正視亞美論述積極參與、複雜化一般對亞太想像的潛力。艾瑞夫．戴力克 (Arif Dirlik)鼓吹由亞美視角閱讀亞太情境，他所持的理由可以被歸納為三點： 一、亞美歷史幫助我們看見美洲歷史發展的亞太緣起，扭轉美洲歷史書寫中的歐 洲中心傾向；二、研究不同時期亞美社群在美洲所受的不同待遇、亞美社群對亞 洲聯繫之或者鄙棄或者歡迎，可以讓我們瞭解亞太地區東西兩岸不均衡勢力的消 長；三、探討亞美構成的駁雜、不同亞美族群之間複雜的敵友關係可以揭示亞洲 各國之間的政治矛盾，暴露隱藏在「亞太」區域和諧表像之下，各國/各族群在 政、經、文化的方面的暗底角力(“The Asia-Pacific in Asian-American Perspective” 305-306)。戴力克還指出，亞太研究一般著重對資本、商品、政治、與軍事交流 的分析，反而忽視了「人」的流動對區域形塑所帶來的影響力。羅伯．威爾森（Rob Wilson）則更進一步主張在亞太經濟實體中進行文化研究，由文學和文化文本出 發建立「批判性的區域主義」（“critical regionalism”；394），探討亞太區域中各 個在地勢力的權力角逐、不同地方之不同族群對空間與認同的矛盾衝突、以暴露 亞太區域內部的他者、找尋亞太發展的另種方向。無論如何，或穿梭或游離於亞 太地區的亞美成員不應放棄他們成為亞太建構主體的位置。若說「亞太」名號最 早乃是亞太區域以外的歐美發明，亞美書寫與論述則可以給予「亞太」如假包換 的亞洲內容，提供了重新開啟「亞太」名號框架為多變文化符碼(cultural signifier) 的機會。 日美遷徙的亞太空間

這一篇論文以日裔美籍作家湊谷百合子一九九九年出版的小說《美之驚異》 為主要文本，一方面說明亞美作品中擺脫不了的亞太背景，另一方面要分析這部 小說如何「仲介」亞太想像，彰顯亞美個人做為亞太日常生活主體的可能。除此 之外，我還將特別強調《美之驚異》中以瑣屑日常生活取代宏觀(但卻經常是過 度簡化了的)移民論述的主題，試著在這一篇論文裏將亞美想像落實到亞美個人 日常生活的微觀形構。 我選擇《美之驚異》作為主要討論亞美亞太想像的例子，不只是因為這部小 說呈現清楚的亞太視角，更因為它將我們的注意力轉移到二次大戰發生之前日美 社群的亞太生活背景。無庸諱言，現存的大部分日美經典都以討論日美族群在美 國的生活經驗為中心，當然到了八０年代以後亞美成員赴日旅行、探親、或在日 本停留的經驗已經發展成為一個新的重要寫作題材，13但無論如何書寫日美成員 二次大戰以前在日本長期居住經驗的作品仍然十分罕見。若說湊谷在她稍早的一 部自傳小說《話予雪地高僧》(Talking to High Monks in the Snow: An Asian

American Odyssey)裡描述的亞洲旅行可以被看做是是當今亞太經濟與文化流動

的具體呈現，《美之驚異》則饒附意義的讓我們看見亞太經驗與跨國視角對於亞

美社群其實並不新，絕對不是冷戰時代結束之後才有的，更不足以被用來解決(或 擺脫)亞美一直以來面對的「落地」問題。正如李蕾潔(Rachel Lee)在〈亞太視野 的亞美文化生產〉(“Asian American Cultural Production in Asian-Pacific Perspective) 一文中所提示的，亞太視野不該被理解為亞美經驗的未來願景；同樣的，亞美的 「落地」訴求也從未過時。李蕾潔指出，早在亞美文學的亞太理論崛起之前，亞 美文本早就「諭示全球結構，明確呈現因勞工遷徙、殖民侵略、跨國資本流動、 以及衛星傳輸超連結，在太平洋周緣各地散落成長的駁雜亞洲文化」(233)。李 蕾潔緊接著舉出山下凱倫(Karen Yamashita)的作品(Through the Arc of the Rain

Forest, 1990)為例說明亞美在美洲的「落地」經驗早就蘊含對亞太與跨國資本、

13 _{關於「going back to Japan」的主題在晚進日美文學中的發展，參見 Yamamoto 81-92。重要的}

日美「going back to Japan」文本包括 Dorinne Kondo, Crafting Seves: Power, Gender, and Discourses

of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (1990); David Mura, Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei