National Sun Yat-sen University Institutional Repository:Item 987654321/28081

族裔美國文學中的差異表演: 階級與扮演焦慮 (1/2)

中 華 民 國 93 年 5 月 3 日

Fu-jen Chen 4/28/2004

Class and Performing Differences in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land

Today’s postmodern-global-capitalist regime favors a new mode of subjectivity, one characterized by an accusation of essentialist fixation and a demise of totalizing identification. The new politics of subjectivity celebrates multiple shifting

identifications and free choice to identify with a proliferation of differences. The postmodern subject experiences him- or herself as an agent caught in a contingent particular context but incessantly involved in an activity of hybrid identities without constraint. Interestingly, as one asserts one’s fluid identities and shifting

identification, one at the same time promotes one’s particular difference(s) to indicate one’s proper place within this given field. While liberating diversification is thriving and more differences are produced in late-capitalist society, one is increasingly

pre-occupied with differences of gender, race, culture, religion, nationality, ethnicity, and sexual orientation—various particulars and diverse lifestyles. Identity becomes performatively enacted and open to endless play of substitution: one performs and moves freely between difference(s). Yet, with no firm predetermined difference(s), one also experiences oneself as radically unsure since all identifications or

performances may be re-enacted. In the background of late-capitalist globalization that produces and promotes difference(s), our free choice incessantly to perform particular difference(s) aims for recognition and tolerance. In fact, our demands for recognition and tolerance have been always already assumed by the nexus of

postmodernism, global capitalism, and multiculturalism. Especially, a multicultural society appeals to our demands: endlessly divided subgroups coexist, no one is excluded, all differences are tolerated, and we are all (mis)recognized.

While recognition and tolerance of multiplication of differences ground multiculturalism politics of identity, it is assumed that all differences are equal and each carries the same weight. Inasmuch as none of the differences is privileged, class difference becomes at best one species of proliferation of new political subjectivities. Once promoted in the Marxist tradition as the determinant of social reality and human subjectivity, the politics of class difference has been referred to as essentialism and class struggle can no longer overdetermine the complexity of the social reality and multiplicity of subjectivity. Today, the politics of class difference has become less fashionable and “progressively decentred by an increasing pre-occupation with . . . gender, race, ethnicity, [and] sexuality” (Milner 7). Even class consciousness is denied because to draw a clear class distinctions becomes impossible or impracticable

in today’s “classless” society in which we are all “middle class” or “working class.” The suspension or displacement of class analysis by other markers of difference is clearly shown in Asian-American writing in which Asian Americans are often seen as a monolithic socioeconomic group. Under the legitimacy of pan-Asian coalitions, Asian-American writing downplays internal class distinctions and stresses race or ethnicity as their organizing principle. In today’s postmodern-multicultural context, it is not class but gender, generation, religion, sexuality, and other markers that emerge in Asian-American literature and criticism to critique or challenge such a “race-based” literary representation and study. Thus, the investment in the resistance against racism is partly shared by other social antagonisms including sexism,

homophobia, or ageism. In any case, class antagonism has hardly been put in the spotlight. Few Asian-American critics or creative writers devote their attention to intra-class distinctions within Asian-American communities or even inter-class

relationships with other minorities. Gish Jen is one of the few, not only participating the current trend of postmodernism but also exploring the politics of class.

Though having long dealt with cultural representation, generation gaps, parent-child conflicts, and East-West binary oppositions, Asian-American literary works shift toward investigating the possibility of a fluid, de-centered identity in a postmodern era in which the very notion of a stable identity of sexuality, gender, and ethnicity is already challenged. Even in the Asian-American critical field, new tendencies can be also observed: the lessening of cultural nationalism, the increasing feminist and deconstructivist mode, and the embrace of a post-modern subjectivity opened up to multiplicity and free play.1 The anti-essentialist convictions are apparent in Gish Jen’s stories, and on the occasion of many interviews, Jen herself advocates the concept of identity in flux, an identity performatively enacted.2 Besides her anti-essentialist position and highlighting the notion of performativity, Jen

distinguishes herself from most Asian-American writers by her particular interest in the issue of class.

The issue of class in Jen’s stories is not obscured by such multiculturalism concerns about ethnic rights, inequality, racism, representation, intolerance, or immigration. Instead, her writing explores the problematic of class stratification among racial groups and “ethclasses”(Espiritu 308) in our current

postmodern-global-capitalist regime. Her novels--Typical American (1991) and Mona

in the Promised Land (1996)--and her collection of short stories, Who’s Irish? (1999),

though dealing with immigrant experiences, actually focus at heart on class. Indeed, while the titles of her three works all carry connotations of race or ethnicity, these signifiers merely circle around the real cause–class. These works all attempt to examine the multicultural-capitalist-postmodern context where the characters in her

stories, including “typical” Americans, Jews, Chinese, Blacks, and Irish, are all driven by the politics of class. In her stories, everyone is a “typical American,” living in “the promised land,” or, rather, a late-capitalist world, and the question of “Who’s Irish?” is better understood as an inquiry about class—“which class?” It is class that concerns them most, sets their desires in motion, and drives them to act with or without their acknowledgment. In her writing, Jen investigates intra-class and inter-class relationships within the Asian-American community and among ethnic minority communities.

In this essay, through examining Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land, I shall question the new mode of subjectivity in the postmodern-global-capitalist era with respect to performing differences and the disavowal of class. We should ask what the concept of performativity offers us and how Asian Americans perform their differences and face the anxiety generated by a proliferation of new modes of

subjectivity. In addition, we should ask why class, the most artificial and contingent of modes of identification, is obscured in today’s celebration of the liberating effect of diversification and multiple shifting identifications—why, in short, class difference is much less important in an existing “classless” world or why disavowal of class, on the contrary, suggests that class secretly overdetermines other differences in political identity and that class antagonism still predominates over others in the struggle for hegemony. These questions are approached in the light of Lacanian theory by examining how the various responses of major characters to the issue of class and today’s mode of subjectivity as performativity. My final discussion shall focus on the ending scene of Mona in the Promised Land, exploring its political limit as a mode of resistance and subversion.

* * * * *

The Cartesian notion of the subject suggests an agent of rational self-legislation and a unified being of disparate parts, mind and body, each with its own attributes. Distinguished by their opposition to the above epistemological term, postmodern theories of subjectivity highlight a subject’s inability to remain either stabilized or unified, thereby featuring a liberating proliferation of multiple forms of subjectivity. The radical uncertainty of any subjective position conditions the postmodern subject to experience identity as a matter of choice and an act of performance and thus to float from one to another contingent identification and temporary embodiment. The endless open practices of displacement are illuminated by Judith Butler’s theory of gender performatives or performativity in which all gender and sexual configurations are performed through a process of recycling and mimicking societal markers of

gender, sexuality, and desire. Because performativity, for Butler, serves as the basis of gender constitution, gender identity, not innate or self-evident, can only be

understood as a fiction in which all members of a culture tacitly agree to act, to repeat, to perform. Accordingly, gender identity is not a noun but a verb, not a being, but an action, not what one is, but what one does.3 As gender becomes an interpellated performative, so also might race or ethnicity work in a similar vein: Butler’s “racialization of gender norms” (Matter 182) affirms de Beauvoir’s statement that “one is not born [as] but rather one becomes woman (black/white/Asian American).” Asian American as an identity performatively enacted is vividly shown in Mona in the

Promised Land. There, Mona, the female protagonist, and most other characters are

characterized less by how Butler theorizes identity as a performative construct than though a simplified version of it as something more like “performance.”4

In the novel, almost all characters engage in the free play of the identity “switch” or identity “switching,” words appearing repeatedly throughout the novel. Opposite to having one consistent and given identity, identity switching suggests that identity is merely performative and opens up the very possibility of crossing. Identity

switching is extensively explored by the title character, Mona Chang, by her sister, Callie, by their parents, the Changs, and by Jewish characters of a fictional suburb in New York, Scarshill, in the late 1960s. In that time of optimism and enthusiasm found in the late 60’s, teenaged Mona and her family moved to that upscale, mainly Jewish suburb, modeled upon a real-life New York suburb, the Scarsdale of Gish Jen’s youth. Opening with the Changs’ relocation from Chinatown to that affluent

neighborhood having few other Chinese-American residents, the novel first pictures the fulfillment of the American dream in the economic success of the Changs, a newly prosperous immigrant family who own thriving pancake houses. Seen in Scarshill as “the New Jews,” they represent “a model minority and Great American Success” in their promised land or, rather, community (3). Growing up in Scarshill’s Jewish milieu, the Chang’s younger daughter, Mona, contentedly immerses herself in the Yiddish neighborhood as an adolescent and enjoys performing an identity at will. At first, in the eighth grade Mona, like a “permanent exchange student” (6), indulges in performing stereotyped, exotic, and mythic Chinese, ones who are credited with “get[ting] pregnant with tea” (5), having no body smell (6), eating living monkey brains (8), and inventing scalpels, tomatoes, noodles (8). Boasting about her performative “Chineseness,” Mona was once urged by her friend to “make a career out of it” (8). Through her adolescence to adulthood, Mona furthers her

identity-switching from Chinese or Catholic to WASP or Jew. Embracing the idea that “American means being whatever you want” (40) and identity performing and

Judaism in the process of studying Jewish history, attending Jewish rituals and ceremonies, befriending Yiddish youths, and ultimately marrying a Jew. Mona’s performative act as a Jew is culminated at the end of the novel in her decision to change her surname from Chang to Changowitz (303). In her becoming “Mona Changowitz,” her act of renaming inaugurates a new mode of subjectivity, one no longer consistent or essential, but performative and shifting.

Not only Mona but also other family members are obsessed with identity switching and performing. Though once sick of being Chinese in the eyes of Mona (167), her elder sister, Callie, becomes aware in college of the term “Asian American” coined in the late 1960s. Exploring attributes of this new subject position, Callie devotedly acts out “Chineseness” to such an extent that she practices Tai Qi, eats shee-veh instead of muffin, speaks a Chinese dialect foreign to her parents’ ears, wears padded Chinese jackets and cloth shoes already obsolete in China, and finally, like Mona, switches her name to—“Kailan”—that sounds to herself more original and authentic. Baffled by Mona’s switch to Jewishness and Callie’s too much

“Chineseness,” their parents, however, are as “performative” as any. An overseas Chinese in Jen’s first novel, Typical American, Ralph in the second novel has become a typical American. His performative “Americaness”(Changkee is his word) is well demonstrated by his economic expansion and life motto. An owner of three pancake restaurants, Ralph believes that “[t]here is no sure thing. I still believe make sure” (210): he worries that “even our restaurant, standing there so nice, can fall down, good-bye. Forget about sure thing”(210). His identity as an American (or, rather, a WASP) is performatively enacted on the basis of capital. Similarly, Ralph’s wife, Helen, also clings to a subject position based on performance of class. Arranging a WASP environment for her daughters, Helen always asks them to act “properly,” like WASPS, especially “in a place where people might look down on you” (280). How to stand, how to sit, how to walk, and how not to drag the feet—“it’s all a matter of manners,” she claims (53). Her own mannerisms are more obsessive: in public she always firmly holds her pocketbook and once cried just because her shoes did not match it (280; 300).

Besides the Changs, many other characters are also engaged in performing multiple identities. Mona’s best friend, Barbara Gugelstein, first endeavors to be a typical American teenager, one characterized by being cool (judging Mona as too polite) and being popular (that is, for having big boobs and using a Lord and Taylor Charge card). Then she abruptly announces that she is “Jewish” (30) and begins to attend Jewish youth activities, to join the Temple Youth Group, and to bury herself in Jewish rituals and traditions. She even claims that “being Jewish is great” and “there’s something special about being Jewish she wouldn’t want to give up” (135).

Yet, before long, she turns to fixing her “Jewish” nose and switches back to being an American or, rather, a WASP because “a little Jewish is fine, but [. . .] too much is too much,” as she explains to Mona (222). Likewise, Eloise Ingle, half Jewish,

performatively wavers between being a Jew and a WASP; yet, her father, a rich and successful businessman, firmly performs what he believes—“You’ve got to know how the game is played,” he insists (italics original; 177) and it is “the great lesson of life” that he always teaches his children (177). In the novel, the person most skilled at performing and switching is not Mona, but her boyfriend and, later, husband—Seth Mandel. Ironically, Seth is also one who insists on absolute genuineness throughout the novel, saying that “between the inside person and the outside person there should be no difference” (121). Nominally Jewish, with antibourgeois values, Seth

performs and switches identities among Jew, Japanese, Chinese, Hippie, Black, WASP, and Native American: he lives in a tepee, uses chopsticks, does yoga, sleeps on tatami mat, wears dashikis (a black fashion), displays exquisite zen-like melancholy, believes in a possible previous life of his being Japanese, and endeavors to behave as “an authentic inauthentic Jew” (112). At the end of the novel, Seth, nevertheless, remains a WASP, a professor on tenure track.

Identity as performatively enacted by characters in Mona in the Promised Land presumes certain facts: first, it assumes that one, denying the split within

consciousness, can be fully conscious of his or her performance. Second, identity relies on one’s successful performance of differences. Third, no intra-contradiction exists within a difference and inter-relations among differences are smoothly and completely signified in language. In the novel, characters presuppose the existence of a doer who is one-hundred percent conscious of what he or she is doing prior to choosing an identity to perform (whether Chinese or WASP or black) that is

effectively constituted by their successful performance. The most skilled performer, Seth insists on being fully conscious of his deed and endeavors to maintain a radical uniformity “between the inside person and the outside person,” as he claims (121). Yet, staying one-hundred percent conscious is impossible (though the paranoiac may claim so), and, moreover, the subject, as Zizek maintains, is “nothing but the failure of symbolization, of its own symbolic representation” and “nothing ‘beyond’ this

failure” (italics original; Contingency 120). That is, identity (or, rather, subjectivity) is based not on a successful performance but its failure, not on the chain’s meaning but its disruption; in other words, one’s identity emerges not when identification (or dis-identification) is made but when it fails to be made.5 One always performs more or less because one’s destined failure to perform results from a sense of loss in mastering an excess of signification. An insistence on accurate performance ridicules its performer (as, for example, with Callie and Rabbi). Thus, being

Chinese is not constituted by a successful performance but by the inevitable impossibility of exactly performing Chinese. Nevertheless, in the novel, being Chinese, black, Jew, or WASP appears as an ethnic difference that can be totally translated into a repetition of acts or a set of predetermined representations so that it can be adequately performed. But a difference without any intra-contradiction simply serves as a type, a totalized and completely rhetoricalized form that excludes a nonmimetic account of identification based on Lacan’s concept of Real. Though the subject can be signified in language, it is not purely linguistic. While a subjective position with no intra-contradiction merely functions as a representative type, to arrange differences smoothly among subjective positions orients identity to

one-to-one relations (for instance, white versus black), idealizes the dominant norm, and reinforces peripheral differences. The subject is thus reduced to identification with projective models and, unable to develop into an individual being, thereby remains trapped within an essentially prescriptive discourse.

Extricating us from the now-sterile debate over essentialism versus

constructionism, nature versus nurture, in neither of which can one avoid being either passively essentialized or constructed, Judith Butler’s notion of gender performatives advocates a more active mode of gender identity. In it, it is only after a body “does” or performs certain acts consistently that it acquires a gender. Because she sees gender as a “doing” rather than something one simply “is” or “is made of,” Butler proposes a political action for gender as performative: “A political genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender” (Gender 33). Butler’s theory of gender performatives may be elaborated further in the area of race into what she terms “the racialization of gender norms” (Matter 182). The racialization of performative identity is exemplified by characters I examined above. Carrie, for example, does not practice Tai Qi, wear padded jackets, and cloth shoes because she is Chinese; on the contrary, she is Chinese because she practices Tai Qi, wears padded jackets, and cloth shoes.

Repeatedly drawing a distinction between performance and performative, Butler refuses to simplify performative as performance, a notion that presupposes the

existence of a doer prior to acts of performances and thus popularizes gender

performative as “identity wardrobe.” “Identity wardrobe” is demonstrated in Mona

in the Promised Land in which characters as pre-existing agents choose their identity

outfits from a wardrobe of clothes. Yet, Butler suggests that the gendered body as performative “has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality” (Matter 136); that is, it is through “the repeated stylization of the body, a

set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame,” acts that “congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Gender 33). In other words, gender identity results from “repeated stylization” or “a set of

repeated acts”—the doing or performance. Though Butler stresses a disparity between performance and performative, both performance (with a pre-existing performer) and performativity (without it) assume, according to Zizek, that

“identifications exist before the vicissitudes which lead to their formation” (italics original; Kay 98). At this point, Butler fails to recognize that sexual difference (between maleness and femaleness) is not “the already established symbolic difference (heterosexual normativity),” but is a “real/impossible ‘rock of

impossibility,’” as Zizek maintains (Ticklish 271; Contingency 309). What’s more, though Butler argues that no doer exists behind or before the deed, that there is no subject—“I”—who is “doing” gender, her gender performative always already assumes a conscious “ego,” (Ticklish 307), one that knows its desire (or, rather, need) and is conscious of its acts of identification (with a gestalt—the totalized and

complete image of maleness or femaleness). Because the subject is reduced to ego, desire to need,6politically Butler grounds resistance to symbolic law in the imaginary order. Thus, because identity as performative is not quite as distinct from one as performance as Butler claims theoretically, many readers have been led to confuse performativity with performance.

While performative is not distinguished from performance, identity may amount to a set of performances; identity as performance is especially validated by the

teenaged characters in Mona the Promised Land. On the threshold of the Symbolic, the order of language and the realm of culture, they strive to differentiate themselves from one another and to seek after an identity through performing a proliferation of differences. They are eager to identify differences and anxiously perform one

difference after another. Yet, it is not difference that “produces great anxiety,” as Jane Gallop states (93); instead, performing differences eases their anxiety, anxiety about how little difference there really is, anxiety about “not being exposed to the Other’s gaze, ” and anxiety about the Other itself as “lacking” and “impotent” in today’s world as Zizek frequently asserts (Totalitarianism 249-50; Contingency 255-56). The novel precisely exposes one’s anxiety in a postmodern world of diminishing Symbolic efficiency, a world in which Symbolic authority is disintegrating and an ultimately fixed socio-symbolic identity is suspended.7 In the face of the demise of the big Other, one has to freely and endlessly experience one’s life as a shifting, always on-going pursuit of one’s particular life-style and has to freely and endlessly reshape one’s fluid multiple identities through performing a proliferation of

has retreated, the ego ideal, which used to be the “bearer of symbolic authority” and the ontological guarantee of one’s existence, is reduced to an ideal ego, “imaginary competitors,” like the father with whom, one, into his forties, may still continue to compete and thereby “remain [an] ‘immature’ adolescent” (Zizek, Ticklish 334). Or the ego ideal is replaced by ones elevated into the position of the Lacanian “Subject Supposed to Know” in such various “guides” as books or TV programs devoted to marriage, sex, diet, meditation, God, child-raising, and many other topics. In Jen’s novel, the big Other withers and the ego deal is suspended: teenaged characters seek one after another for an ideal image or a “subject supposed to know,” one who

operates somewhat to guarantee their choices and performing (dis)identifications with idealized or stereotyped images. In the novel, it is Rabbi Horowitz and Naomi who especially occupy the position of the one who is presumed (particularly by Mona) to know.

Traditionally a religious leader, a rabbi is the representative of the social order, teaching Judaism and imposing the LAW. Nevertheless, to Mona and other teenaged characters, Rabbi Horowitz does not occupy this position: he does not provide Lacan’s “point de capiton” through which their endless performances of differences can be temporarily halted. Nor does he help them establish a cluster of master signifiers as the ego ideal to reassure their desire to be recognized by the Other. Rather, he serves as an ideal ego—a rebel against the Establishment—for Mona’s “adolescent rebellion” (34). Or he acts as the agent in Lacan’s hysterical discourse in which the hysteric pushes the master—incarnated in any figure of authority—to the point where the impossibility of desire is foregrounded.8 Through Mona’s eyes, he looks like a “Hasid turned rock star,” wearing long black hair and an untrimmed beard, listening to Crosby, Stills and Nash (33). In Mona’s words, he is praised for advising “everyone to ask, ask, instead of just obey, obey,” for insisting that “people are

supposed to be their own rabbi and do their business directly with G-d,” and asking “people to make a pain in the neck of themselves” (34). Rabbi Horowitz’s

Emersonian teaching echoes the postmodern mode of identity: he urges Mona to ask, to challenge, to perform, and to assert her fluid identities. Nevertheless, Mona’s belief in her act is undermined when Rabbi Horowitz is dismissed because he performed a marriage service for a Christian couple and afterward left for Boston, there marrying a gentile. At the end of the novel, he is even disqualified from being an ideal ego and “the subject supposed to know.” When Mona urges Callie to

consult with Horowitz about her decision to go to medical school, Callie answers, “He was the sub-in freshman adviser last year. The first one had a nervous breakdown. By the way, Horowitz isn’t even a rabbi anymore. Now he’s a grad student. I have no interest in talking to him. Plus I’m not a freshman” (234).

Like Rabbi Horowitz, Naomi also serves for a time as and ideal ego and “the subject supposed to know” to Mona and Callie. Worshiped by both sisters, Naomi awakens a racial consciousness and inculcates in their mind a resistance to colonial oppression. An African American, Naomi teaches them how to be Chinese by her living example—Naomi practices daily meditation and Yoga, chanting and drinking tea, cooking “an authentic tea-smoked duck,” and even speaking a clear Chinese much better than either sister’s. Through Naomi, Callie understands “what is meant to be Chinese” (168) and through Naomi, Mona recognizes herself as a “colored folk” (170). Further, their frequent quotations from Naomi—the many times they say “Naomi says”—authoritatively expose a hidden connotation of colonial oppression even out of the ordinary. About a Christmas tree, “Naomi says it’s a symbol of oppression,” says Callie, asking her parents not to buy one for Christmas. Likewise, Callie tells her parents, “Naomi says we should hate them [Christmas trees] just as much as you hate Panasonic radios” (41; emphasis mine). Moreover, Callie corrects her mother on her impression of French missionaries who ran a convent school the mother went in Shanghai. Callie accuses them of being “imperialists.” Callie says to her mother, “That’s what Naomi says. They were bent on taking China and saving the heathen. [But, y]ou were civilized” (42; emphasis mine). The union of Naomi, Callie, and Mona triumphs in the moment of their exclamation: “They are the oppressors” and “We are the expressers” (184).9

Though Naomi is worshiped by Callie and Mona, the latter even “striv[ing] to think the way Naomi thinks” (170), Naomi’s identity as performance and choice is perceived as problematic. First, while Naomi encourages Callie to “be in touch with her ancestry,” Naomi commands—“Forget your parents” (129; italics original):

“But aren’t my parents my ancestors?” says Callie.

“Only if you so choose.” Naomi herself claims for her ancestors a number of people not related to her—for example, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. (129)

Next, to Mona’s query about her own racial identity, Naomi answers, “You are yellow. A yellow person, a yellow girl” (170; italics original), Naomi’s definite answer

puzzling Mona since Mona’s “summertime color is most definitely brown, and the rest of the year she is not exactly a textbook primary” (170). Besides, Naomi herself is not black either (170). While Naomi highlights identity as performance as free choice, she at the same time essentializes and simplifies racial identity in terms of color. Moreover, Naomi’s identity as performance is assessed by Mona as much less subversive and in some sense it even turns out to be submissive to the Other. For example, while working in Scottish dress as waitresses in Rhode Island, Naomi and Callie usually respond in subversive tone to people’s inquiry—“What part of Scotland

are you from”— by claiming that one is from “deepest, darkest Wales” and the other from “the Far Eastern part” (170). They proudly perform their identities in a manner seemingly ready to confront and challenge authority. Soon, on an occasion when Naomi serves the Ingles and Mona at the dinner table, Naomi is asked the same question by Mr. Ingle:

“I’m not from Scotland,” says Naomi, and winks at Mona.

Mona looks down.

“Oh, really,” says Mr. Ingle.

And that is when, to Mona’s profound surprise, Naomi looks down too. She does not say she’s from deepest, darkest Wales. She looks at though she has never seen Mona before in her life. (178)

Further, Naomi’s avoidance of eye contact surprises Mona: “Mona tries to

catch her eye, but Naomi will not look at her; if anything, her chin seems to jut out even farther than usual as she leans over Mona’s shoulder. Mona stares at its underside, thinking how this is an aspect of Naomi that she literally has not seen before” (179). Indeed, there is “an aspect of Naomi” that surprises, or, rather, disappoints Mona because Naomi does not hold firmly to her own political strategy. Naomi’s performance or statement loses its subversive potential and, even worse, turns into a joke. When also facing Mrs. Ingle’s next question, “Where are you from?” Mona appropriates Naomi’s subversive statement, but Mona’s answer—“from deepest, darkest China”—only evokes laughter and a follow-up inquiry:

“Is that a joke?”

“Yes,” Mona says. (181)

Finally, Mona recognizes that Naomi and Callie’s performance is not necessarily subversive. Naomi and Callie’s “project” may even work in the service of existing order and endorse its reproduction of power relations without posing any threat to it. Their project, later published as a book to Naomi’s credit only, is encouraged by the editor to be more “personal” and even just “one person’s”—namely, Naomi’s (270). Callie explains to Mona that “We’re not book material. Naomi’s experience has an import ours just doesn’t. After all, blacks are the majority minority. Also they’ve been slaves and everything” (270). Yet Callie also takes some comfort from the editor’s encouragement that she has “a book in [her] too,” because “people are interested in China,” and, more importantly, she is proud of being “a natural

ambassador” (270). Mona wonders what’s the point, however, since “you’ve never been to China” (270). Their performing identity as a resistance has been absorbed into the capitalist marketplace. At the end of the novel, Callie’s “straight A life”—be a doctor, have “two beautiful children and the big-success husband” (302)—is proved also to be merely submissive to traditional authority. Moreover, Callie’s showing off

her ability to choose--“I’m my own person” and “I made my own choice” (302)—is merely a pseudo individuality supported by a given field, by a late-capitalist-global society.

* * * * *

The postmodern politics of contingent performances—freely floating from one to another temporary embodiment—is only possible against the terrain of the Capital.10 In the novel, as I examined above, Callie’s submissive or resistant performance relies on this background, her free choices supported by a father as a owner of three pancake restaurants, her performances valid only on the condition of her secure financial/social status. Even Callie’s part-time job at Rhode Island is not a regular waitress but as Mona explains, only those who “go to Harvard or Yale or Brown” can quality for the job (173). Moreover, Mona’s and Seth’s rebellion against the parental authority or the capitalist framework are also endorsed by the Capital. Mona’s act to leave home is supported by Bea’s “charitable contribution” (259) so that Mona, after her fight against the Mother to defend her right to free performance, can continue, in Bea’s words, her “rebellion in peace” (257). Seth best represents the one who is privileged to have “a rebellion in peace” within the background of the Capital: though calling his stepmother a hypocrite, whose “do-gooding,” in his eyes, “is just a way of maintaining [her] social status,” Seth finds a safe and comfortable way to protest by dropping out of school and sleeping in a tepee on his parents’ lawn but still enjoying household facility. The Capital creates the underlying field in which one’s

performances can thrive.

In this field of Capital, the performers in the novel, however, try to disavow class antagonism in their performing identity of differences. Mona’s arguments with her mother on her performing a Jew beat around the bush, avoiding aiming at the

unspeakable thing—class antagonism:

“That right,” Mona says [. . .] “You are the one who brought us up to speak English. You said you would bend like bamboo instead of acting like you were planted by Bell Telephone. You said we weren’t pure Chinese we anymore, the parents had to accept we would be something else.”

“American, not Jewish[,]” [Helen says.]

“Jewish is American,” Mona says. “American means being whatever you want, and I happened to pick being Jewish.”

“[. . .] Who knows? Tomorrow you’ll come home and tell me you want to be black.”

“How can I turn black? That’s a race not a religion.”

a boy instead of a girl.”

“Blood, Mom,” points out Mona.

“And after that you are going to come home and tell me you want to be a tree[,” says Helen.] (49; emphasis mine)

From being an American, a Jew, a black, a boy and finally to a tree—their arguments consciously or unconsciously skip the very anxiety of performance: class. What worries Helen is not Mona’s turning into a Jew, a black, a boy or even a tree but a downward movement in class.11 Interestingly, the very anxiety about class also inflicts other mothers in the novel. Barbara’s mother warns her daughter that if Barbara insists on being Jewish like Rabbi Horowitz, she can “move to the Lower East Side” (222); personally Barbara’s mother even refuses speaking Yiddish or having a vacation in Florida to be identified as a Jew. She is quoted by her daughter as saying: “they spent their whole lives getting out of the ghetto, why should they go back for vacation?” (125). Again, more directly and clearly Seth’s mother claims that “Better to feel guilty than to feel nothing” (258).

What is disavowed—class antagonism—under the name of performance and free choice returns in the novel as the embodiment of the underclass, represented by Alfred as well as other African Americans, Cedric (an illegal immigrant), Fernando (an unemployed), and a female homeless. As the exclusion or the excess from the Symbolic, the underclass sustains those performers’ thriving identity of full contingency and endless substitution. In the face of performers, the underclass,

Alfred and Cedric, are objectively observed and compared. Which one is more poor? A tragedy is worth a study to those privileged performers, who debate and

contemplate: “which is worse—not speaking English and having no visa and leaving [his] family behind to be forced to drink their own piss or having a black face and living in a project and having a great-grandmother who was a slave?” (139) For the case of Alfred, Barbara and Mona try to educate him the meaning of performance. They preach to him that Judaism is “to ask, ask, instead of just obey, obey,” and

performing a Jew will learn a way to have “a big house and a four-bay garage and a gardener” (137). That is, identity performance facilitates and aims at an upward movement in class. Responding to their teaching, Alfred simply answers:

“We’re asking and asking, but there ain’t nobody answering. And nobody is calling us Wasp, man, and nobody is forgetting we’re a minority, and if we don’t mind our manners, we’re like as not to end up doing time in a concrete hotel. We’re black, see. We’re Negroes.”(137; italics original) Alfred’s reply points out the problem of identity performance. No matter how hard they ask, express, or perform, they receive no answer from the Other; instead, they are always asked to perform an other for the Other. If identity, as Mona and Barbara

claim, amounts to a matter of performance and a free choice of lifestyle, the

underclass in the novel should be responsible for their own social status due to their incompetence to perform and weak mind to make a choice. Thus, class antagonism dissolves—the antagonism between classes is simply imputed to those “green-eyed” and “incompetent” underclass who, however, do not have the same luxury of

performance and free choice.

In the novel, the underclass are not only incapable of performance but also uninterested in or incompetent for doing any harm. First, the female vagrant, Mona ran into in Grand Central Station, is “harmless”(255), deeply sleeping with a leg in Mona’s lap and in turn Mona “clasps her hands on [the woman’s ] slim ankles” (256) and also falls into a doze until Mona is rescued by Bea. Besides, Fernando, a cook fired by Ralph, is said to stalk Mona, sexually molest her, and reappears as a thief in Barbara’s house where Mona and Seth stay. In both cases, he is either too

scrupulous or too drunk to do harm. But the antagonism did break out once at “Camp Gugelstein” when Mr. Gugelstein’s flask disappears. Originally

experimented and fantasized by Seth, Mona, and Barbara as a utopia where people can be integrated without racial and class boundaries, Camp Gugelstein falls apart immediately after Alfred and other blacks are questioned by Barbara about the missing valuable piece of silver. To protest the racist accusation by those who patronize them by offering shelter and food, Alfred and his black brothers at best quit, call them “racist bastards,” and assert their “black power” valiantly but

harmlessly. Alfred even drops the lawsuit against Mona’s father for racist policies. In the novel the underclass—the unemployed, the homeless, the thief, and the racial minority—have done no harm. Ultimately the world for privileged performers is anyway secure.

While in the novel class antagonism represented by the underclass is excluded, Seth, however, names class struggle all the time, or, rather, he tirelessly addresses various forms of antagonism or isms including racism, capitalism, sadism, voyeurism, onanism, and so on (111). Obsessed with antagonism, Seth accuses Mona’s father and his mother of being a “capitalist oppressor” (159; 116) and insists that anything has everything to do with either class or race (195)--a key is totally “bourgeois” (94) and ownership of love (to claim “My Boyfriend”) is a “capitalistic impulse” (190). To Seth, the Symbolic becomes a network of conspiracy mainly on the basis of class and racial antagonism. Trapped in a world of antagonism, Seth, like a paranoiac, is obsessed with idea, denying “the split within consciousness,” and refusing “thoughts to slide away from conscious control” (Burns 152). Called by Barbara and Mona “Him and his Big Idea” or “a man of isms” (74), Seth sees Sherman not as a person but an “idea” and claims that “Everyone’s first love is an idea” (113). Seth insists on

Idea and full consciousness, thereby suspending a difference between the inside person and the outside person (121) and denying a division between a public face and a private face (208). Ironically, Seth, who demands absolute genuineness, is best skilled at identity performing and switching. The gap between his belief and his performance shows Seth’s uncanny anxiety to see the impotence and inconsistency of the Other. That is why Seth, though seeing himself “victimized” by the

overwhelming network of conspiracy, accuses the Other of its impotence and failure. Accordingly, Seth retreats to the Imaginary, a realm of wholeness, completeness, and similarity: conflict, inconsistence, and antagonism dissolve within the harmonious status. He envisions Camp Gugelstein as a house with no walls between the rooms (208) where, he believes, anxiety about racial antagonism can be easily is released by chanting hand in hand in a circle with eyes closed (202). Interestingly, it is

immediately after the harmonious scene that anxiety breaks out and antagonism is no longer contained—“A flask is missing” (203).

CODA

In the epilogue of the novel, Gish Jen accounts for the latest developments of major characters: Seth is now a professor and “generally noble type” (298); Mona, who married Seth, is a mother of one-year-old baby; Barbara has married Andy twice and will come to visit Mona to be her bridesmaid; Eloise Ingle, “charmed” and “matronly,” works successfully despite her two sets of twins; Naomi is a productive author and her “main man” is a producer (297); Rabbi Horowitz marries another Rabbi Horowitz, a “learned, exuberant, voluminous woman” (297); Callie, a pediatrician, a wife of a “big-success husband” and a mother of “two beautiful children,” leads “a straight A life” (302). The novel ends with the youth’s final entries into or, rather, submission to the Symbolic, the realm of Law. Yet, in the epilogue, Alfred’s brothers in Camp Gugelstein, including Professor Estimator, Ray, and Big Benson, are totally neglected. The exclusion of the underclass serves to sustain the consistency of the Symbolic--the excess is kept outside at a distance.

As performers are finally assumed into the Social, and proper desire is again regulated in the Symbolic, at the end of the novel Gish Jen creates a new, promising subject: Io. Fathered by Seth and mothered by Mona, Io, a Chinese-Jewish American, signifies much to its parents and Grandmother, Helen. To Seth, Io is simply created by Jen to reward his acceptance of inconsistence of the Other and his submission to it. To Mona, Io embodies a pure Difference and its embodiment suggests the culmination of performative identity because being Io is a doing without performance, namely, to act out a difference “naturally.” Thus, the creation of Io dissolves the anxiety evoked by a fundamental aspect of performance inaccessible to

Mona’s and others’ experiences, regardless of their performative adventurousness. Interestingly, to Mona’s mother, Helen, what Io concerns her most is not the anxiety of performative or the emergence of a new racial category, but the class—which class will Io belong to? Helen’s hesitance to reconcile with her daughter is resulted not so much from Mona’s “misbehave” as Helen’s own anxiety and puzzle about Io’s class.

After all, how effectively in the novel does Gish Jen ground her subversion to the existing Symbolic in performing identity and performing resistance? Hardly aiming at re-signification of the Symbolic, the practice of performing identity in the novel merely explores static differences horizontally—namely, to arrange differences

smoothly with no antagonism within each other. Far from effectively threatening the predominant ideological regime, performing a proliferation of contingent differences merely makes life more livable, each difference more recognizable, and the semblance of the world more concordant. The practice of performing identity promises a consistent and non-antagonistic Symbolic. In the novel exists a non-antagonistic world—enough room for all differences. Antagonism of class, gender, and race differences is reduced to the generational conflicts at the end of the novel and even the mother-daughter conflicts dissolve in the wedding ceremony and the birth of Io.12 Beside performing identity, the practice of performing resistance (like Seth’s always “counterconventional” acts) aims at the racist, sexist, or imperialist others, but it hardly subverts the very terrain of production of antagonism. Though the subject like Seth always complaints the Other for its failure and impotence to uphold justice, he actually asserts his dependence on it. Of “the culture of complaint” Zizek says, “Is not the ‘culture of complaint’ therefore today’s version of hysteria, of the

hysterical impossible demand addressed to the Other, a demand that actually wants to

be rejected, since the subject grounds his/her existence in his/her complaint” (italics

original; Ticklish 361). Indeed, Seth’s performing resistance to symbolization is already a symbolic gesture; that is, his transgressions is already taken into account within in the Symbolic, the Capital Other—his wending ceremony, an act of submission to the Other, is actually arranged for money. In short, here exists the Symbolic, the Capital Other that remained unchallenged until the end of the novel.13

NOTES

1

For a detailed discussion, see Wong, Necessity 1-12, Cheung 1-2, and also Gonzalez 225-42.

2

See Shan, Satz, Matsukawa, Lee, and Lee.

3

Bulter in Gender Trouble argues that “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political

genealogy of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender”(33).

4

For a discussion of performative, see Salih; for a reading of Mona in the Promised

Land through Butler’s concept of perfromative, see Lin.

5

In a similar vein, Tim Dean argues about desire (200-05).

6

For a further discussion of Butler’s reduction of Lacanian theory, see Dean.

7

For a detailed discussion of the phenomenon of the postmodern world, see Zizek’s “Whither Oedipus” in The Ticklish Subject (313-99).

8

For a detailed discussion of hysterics, see Verhaeghe 17-34, Fink 129-46, and Bracher 53-80.

9

In an interview, Gish Jen sees “endless expression” as a sign of “the Grandiose self” and She says, “I can remember how much trouble there was during the gas shortages. We believe in endless expansion and endless expression of our will. The grandiose self” (Satz 134).

10

The notion has been extensively examined by Zizek in his recent works, including

The Ticklish Subject (1999), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000), Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism (2001), and On Belief (2001).

11

A similar observation has been made by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong in “But What in the World Is an Asian American? Culture, Class and Invented Traditions in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land.”

12

Lisa Lowe argues that the reduction of ethnic discourse to “struggle between first and second generations” simply “displaces (and privatizes) inter-community

differences into a familial opposition” (26). For the further discussion of the mother-daughter plot in Mona in the Promised Land, see Feng.

13

Sau-ling Cynthia Wong argues that Gish Jen does not really mean to subvert the WASP value and the social represented in the novel is very conservative (663); likewise, Shakuntala Jayaswal criticizes the novel for its lack of criticism of the “epitome of a shallow capitalist society” (598).