Global Imaginaries and Global Capital

GLOBAL IMAGINARIES ideas of cultural difference through AND GLOBAL CAPITAL: Balibar’s notion of “neo-racism,” and Žižek ’s conception of multiculturalism. LAWRENCE CHUA’S GOLD Gold by the Inch illuminates how spaces BY THE INCH AND SPACES of global capitalism manage and OF GLOBAL BELONGING appropriate the desire to belong as a means of producing surplus labor 1 populations and consumer subjects. Christopher Patterson Introduction Abstract THE STRAITS TIMES, The unnamed narrator in Lawrence SINGAPORE, April 28, 1990— Chua’s novel Gold by the Inch is multiply Wijit Potha, a 28-year-old queered. He appears to the reader as a migrant worker from Thailand, gay Thai/Malay migrant of Chinese was found dead this morning by descent living in the United States. As a fellow workers who shared his traveler, his encounters with episodes of spare living quarters near a sexual desire lead him to different notions construction site at Tanjong of belonging as his race, class, and Pagar. (Chua 1998: 3) sexuality travel with him, marking him as an outsider from one space to another. These opening lines of Laurence Chua’s Likewise, every instance of mobility Gold by the Inch cite the daily broadsheet challenges his identity, allowing him to newspaper, The Strait Times . They provide bear witness to unique forms of structural evidence for an underclass of migrant violence relative to whichever locality he workers, coded within a language of happens to be in. In short, Chua’s superstition and commerce. The article narrator is faced with oppressions based reveals that “18 Thais, nearly all of them on radical assumptions by the outside construction workers with no previous world that utilize his race, gender, symptoms of illness, have died in their sexuality, and American cultural identity sleep in Singapore” (Chua 1998: 3). These as indicators for an insurmountable “nightmare deaths” are attributed to the cultural attitude. belief in Phi Krasue , widow spirits who search for husbands to drag into the In this paper I explore the promise of underworld. The Thai migrant workers belonging as an ideological tool that react to these spirits by painting their valorizes participation within a global fingernails red and disguising themselves community in order to reinforce capitalist as women in order to “dupe” the forms of labor and consumption. Using a murderous widow ghosts. Unable to Marxist framework, I seek to examine how explain these deaths, The Strait Times socio-economic forces and global defers to the supernatural, claiming that infrastructure induce the desire to belong these spirits have followed the Thai to a global imaginary. I will also explore workers from their villages. This narrative rewrites the migrant Thai laborer as 1 Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, culturally effeminate, supernatural and University of Washington. transsexual. As migrant workers, these

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Thais are depicted not as enlightened, Thong only laughs at him and says “This traveling subjects, but as foreign bodies is just a vacation for you, isn’t it?” (Chua who bring the supernatural and transsexual 1998: 201). By refusing to accept the with them as smuggled ghosts. “Asian American” narrator as a fellow Thai, Thong casts him as another foreign This representation of the Thai migrant sex-tourist, “just an American darker than worker allows new ways of thinking about the rest.” The “Asian Americanness” of a global underclass defined through the narrator is thus an irreversible mark, economic migrancy and an ethnicity that one that excludes him from Thai cannot be “overcome.” Published in 1998, belonging and consigns him only to the Lawrence Chua’s novel Gold by the Inch consumable, smiling surface of the Thai follows a twenty-three year old gay locals. Southeast Asian American unnamed narrator who travels to Southeast Asia While the narrator’s desire to belong after a failed love affair in New York City. primarily manifests itself through acts of Throwing himself into episodes of sexual prostitution, his estranged cousin, Martina, desire, from gogo bars to brothels and in the free trade zone of George Town in massage parlors, the narrator seeks out Penang, Malaysia, acts upon a desire to romance, love, sex and belonging through belong within a superficial, televised monetary transactions, deluding himself global imaginary. This desire is produced that the affects he experiences are by the factory, which is marked as a somehow outside a system of barter and distinct space where locals imagine an exchange. The novel itself works idealized global imaginary formed by the episodically, and like a travel narrative it secular apparatus of the factory floor, but seems unsettled and wayward, tracking its also coded as “spiritually” significant. As narrator’s mobility from Paris to New a member of the Chinese diaspora living in York to Thailand to Penang, thrusting the Malaysia, Martina idealizes a vision of reader back and forth in time as well as “the global” that, unlike the nation, holds space, jumping from romance to romance, no normative racial, ethnic or sexual its unfocused form reflecting the unsettled identity, but offers variegated ways of life identity of the narrator as each location he within a capitalist hierarchy. Though visits inspires a new performed identity. Martina’s status and location differ greatly Holding the narrative together is the from the narrator, they both desire to narrator’s main object of desire, Thong, a belong to imagined communities that are young Thai prostitute with “the kind of structured by regimes of global capital. body you don’t see in porn videos…The Chua’s narrator, a racialized U.S. citizen, kind of body that feels good in your hand” seeks belonging in Southeast Asia by (Chua 1998: 21). As the narrator’s traveling from the United States and infatuation with Thong turns into a desire engaging in sex tourism as both to know Thong’s thoughts and to be his commodity and consumer, while his equal as a fellow “Thai,” his desire to cousin Martina, a third world worker belong with Thong becomes obsessive. In dominated by multinational industry, seeks the end, Thong makes it clear that he has belonging in a globalized culture by been interested only in the narrator’s working in the microchip factory that has money. After the narrator catches Thong come to Penang. For both of them, the in bed with his “replacement,” a woman, longing to belong to a “local” identity or a

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“global” identity is always motivated by stance towards capital,” for “even as he an effort to escape their own abject status, criticizes Bangkok for being overly and to pursue a spiritually significant, commercialized, he nonetheless engages in transcendent mode of belonging. sex tourism” (Sohn 2006: 117). For Sohn, the narrator embodies the “fragmented In Stephen Sohn’s essay on Gold by the subject” of a “queer Asian American male Inch , “‘Valuing’ Transnational Queerness,” who has been objectified as a commodity Sohn identifies the narrator’s desire to in the United States” (Sohn 2006: 117), belong to Thong as a disguised attempt at but who, upon traveling in Southeast Asia, claiming his own innocence, and also becomes “a figure for the Western implicitly, denying his own complicity as bourgeoisie who participates in sex a sex tourist. That the narrator is himself tourism in Bangkok.” The narrator thus of Southeast Asian descent adds to occupies a constantly shifting, unstable disguise his exploitative tactics by identity that fluctuates between the identifying with the locals. The narrator “global” identity of the exploiter and thus fluctuates between powerlessness and tourist, and the “local” identity, objectified privilege through his multiple positions as by the Western bourgeoisie. a Thai and an Asian American. For Sohn, this fluctuation is brought to its logical Sohn’s reading of Gold by the Inch as a extreme when the narrator criticizes the narrative tracking tensions of complicity Thai people for their “complicity in the allows us to rethink notions of identity as development of a late capitalist economy” not only fragmented, but as shifting from while at the same time he participates in it one space to another. I intend to build on as a sex tourist (Sohn 2006: 118). Sohn’s work by insisting that the novel Likewise, the novel seems to end with no itself does in fact attempt to settle the moral prescriptions, but only “offers a moral issues it brings to the foreground, replicating narrative of the process of not only by tracking these shifts in identity, sexual exploitation and hedonism that but by working to stabilize unstable overpowers the efficacy of political and identities through the desire to belong to a historical knowledge” (Sohn 2006: 107). global community, one defined not by the Sohn’s explanation for this moral commodities of superficial Americana, of ambiguity is that it reflects the narrator’s “bourgeoisie” and exploiter, but by its ambiguous relationship to power. In the “abject” members who do not fit into United States, the narrator does not hold stratified ethnic identities, and are thus the power that would enable immediate more difficult to manage into the structure ethical choices, but is always powerless and organization of global capital. I will due to his multiplicity of abjectness: he is argue that the novel attempts to rethink queer, an immigrant, Asian, and lower- belonging by producing a transnational class. His sudden obtainment of social community of abject individuals, who power due to his Americanness in inhabit transcultural or “transitive” Thailand and Malaysia puts the narrator in cultural forms. It does this first by a sudden position of privilege that is never acknowledging that this desire to belong to clearly visible, and he cannot see himself a global community is embedded in the as complicit with oppressive forces even production and consumption processes of as he enacts dominance over others. The global capitalism. For Chua’s characters narrator thus possesses an “ambiguous who seek such belonging, this is due not

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only to the hegemonic role of neo-liberal By “global,” I do not mean to identify a policies in the third world, but through the type of global culture spread through gaze of the Western foreigner, who advertising and consumer products. Often assesses the value of locals and their place such a conception of “global culture” is a in the global hierarchy. Second, Chua’s euphemism for “Americanism,” and is novel rethinks this desire to belong by complicit in identifying American culture focusing primarily on three distinct spaces: as “global” and thus neutral, or non- the factory, which inhabits the export- ideological. I take Alys Weinbaum and processing zones of the third world; the Brent Hayes Edwards seriously in their air-conditioned mall, which makes up call “to articulate ‘globality’ as an third world metropoles; and the airport, expression of the dominant particular,” to which provides visual stimulus for keep “track of the contradictions inherent disinterested global subjects. In Chua’s in the notion of the ‘global,’” and to novel, these three spaces function as develop “a method for understanding subject-factories, producing particular globalization as it impacts on ‘culture’” global imaginaries with distinctly different (Weinbaum 2000: 263). I thus conceive of defining features. It is these idealized the “global” through forms of racial and spaces that in turn expose the limits of class hierarchization that are posited as belonging within the infrastructure of global, and to track the contradictions global capital. Finally, Chua’s novel within these forms. To do this, I will also raises the question whether forms of build on the work of social anthropologist unstable identities, like the global spaces Kaushik Sunder Rajan, who reconstitutes from which they manifest, can invoke “the global” as feelings of a shared cultural belonging. An American free market imaginary, The term “global imaginary” I take to one that has retained value systems mean a collectivizing force where its historically but is itself at stake, members, as with Benedict Anderson’s emergent, and inflected with notion of an imagined community, “will salvationary and messianic never know most of their fellow-members, overtones. It is the articulation of meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the particular imaginaries as global minds of each lives the image of their that makes American-style free communication” (Anderson 1991: 6). market innovation an object of “Imaginary” first because its affect is to desire in places like India, but also create new desires and produce “free” makes it an ambivalent object of subjects, positing itself as the “common desire. (Rajan 2006: 232) destination” for all people, and second, “imaginary” in the sense that the global To Rajan, the “American free market imaginary relies not solely on print capital, imaginary” is not so much a cultural, literature and communications technology, homogenizing phenomenon of globalization, but also on direct participation within the but an “ambivalent object of desire” that spaces of this imaginary—the factory, the attracts third world subjects through the mall, the airport—wherein individuals unreachable desire to fully belong within a become subject to subtle affective regimes global community by articulating of intimacy and belonging. “particular imaginaries as global.” To Rajan the emergence of the global free

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market is historically tied to an American Chinese, Tamils and Malays may already system of values; it is therefore not to be conceive of themselves as “global,” and to perceived as apolitical and acultural. He themselves may already be placed in a uses the concept of the “American free global imaginary within multicultural market imaginary” to explain the influence Malaysia. More importantly, the very of entrepreneurial and neo-liberal values rituals and traditions seen as “authentic” in on the Hydrabad region in India, and to the temple are themselves flexible and point out a fashioning of the worker as “a inclusive of the same company as the fast- mimetic American self-fashioning…in the food restaurant. As Aihwa Ong shows in image of the American Other that already Flexible Citizenship , products of exists” (Rajan 2006: 230). While Rajan globalization like Coke and McDonald’s wants to emphasize the American origins restaurants “have had the effect of greatly of the free market imaginary, I use the increasing cultural diversity because of the term “global imaginary” to mean an ways in which they are interpreted and the ambivalent object of desire that originates way they acquire new meanings in local in Western and American values, but is reception or because the proliferation of “perceived” as an autonomous culture of cultural difference is superbly consonant the globe that cannot be isolated into with marketing designs for profit making” North and South or core and periphery, but (Ong 2006: 10). For Chua’s narrator, the can be traced in terms of participation juxtaposition of temple and fast-food is within certain spaces. not to symbolize authenticity and Americanization, but to show how both Finally, I find the term “global imaginary” the temple, where he mimics worship, and useful in comparison to “globalization,” the fast-food restaurant, where he cannot as it separates the effects of global help but criticize the locals, are both capitalism from a western theory of places that Malays participate in daily. production, finance and trade, focusing Though he descends from a multicultural rather on subjective desires, affect, and the Malaysia, his family still treats him as an longing to belong, which arise alongside outsider, “as if I were some fucking and are constitutive of global capitalism. tourist” (Chua 1998: 63). To illustrate, in Gold by the Inch , the narrator, visiting his family in Georgetown, To eat at McDonald’s for Chua’s narrator Penang, moves seamlessly from Chinese would not be to betray Malay culture, but temples, where he mimics his aunt’s to belong to it by participating in its burning of joss sticks, to McDonald’s everyday practice, where “whole families restaurants, where “full-grown men” dress devour greasy hamburger patties, air-filled in life-size costumes and “angry pockets of bread [and] french fries” (Chua fluorescent lights illuminate scenes of 1998: 63). As an American, I might immaculate debauchery” (Chua 1998: 63). conceive of this particular fast-food chain For members of an American audience, it as distinctly American, but to families who is tempting to read this juxtaposition of participate in its consumption, the scents, temple and fast-food as depicting the symbols and sounds of this chain may invasion of western values into the offer comfort and a sense of belonging authentic and pre-modern habits of Malay when inhabiting its space. As Rajan says, culture. However, such a reading would “in spite of its [the American free market miss out on the fact that the diasporic imaginary’s] absolute particularity, it

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exists everywhere; the world is built in its community as scientists and professors. image” (Rajan 2006: 286). As an imagined Due to her exhausting work hours, she community built upon desires of foreign realizes that her belonging in such a sphere imports, the global imaginary is an demands that she begin at the very bottom autonomous social force represented of a structural hierarchy, that her body be through fast-food chains, factories, malls, instrumentalized as a disposable woman, airports and other multinational to be cast off once her labor power has apparatuses. Yet it is not necessarily been exhausted. The factory here thus opposed to “the local,” and therefore must produces the idea of a community be radically distinguished from American constituted as global, and offers inclusion and western culture. At the same time, the only through beginning on the bottom global imaginary cannot be understood as rung of a new hierarchy. acultural and apolitical; rather, it is formed by participation within common rituals, This “bottom rung” is defined not only by myths and values that are simply not Martina’s position as an ulu , or village isolated within a “people,” a language or a woman, but by her relation to both the region. modernity of the microscope and the supernatural forces that she brings along The factory with her to the factory. As Aihwa Ong shows in her first book, Spirits of Just into his intense relationship with Resistance and Capitalist Discipline , Thong, the narrator leaves him temporarily “peasant adherence to [a] noncapitalist for the island of Penang to visit his distant worldview has been used to advantage by family, whom he can only remember capitalist enterprises both to enhance through photos and postcards. It is in this control and disguise commodity relations” episode that the reader meets Martina, the (Ong 2006: 202). For Ong and Chua, narrator’s cousin, who works for the multinational factories in Malaysia multinational microchip factory located in manipulate ethnic myths to sustain the Penang. She describes that she was “awed worker’s foreignness and keep her docile, and intrigued by the equipment she had to while still producing the desire to belong. use” in the factory, equipment such as a Perhaps to provide an alternative to this microscope, which “she had only seen seamless connection between the scientists and professors use on television” supernatural and the global, Chua repeats (Chua 1998: 93). Martina’s awe for the the journalistic form of the novel’s machine quickly turns into the desire to opening: “smash it”: “We work three shifts sometimes. By the time the midnight shift August 10, 1990—A Penang-based comes, we are tired. Still, we have to use American microelectronics factory that microscope. It feels like we’ve been had to be shut down for the third day tricked, you know. Sometimes we scratch in a row today due to women words onto the microchips…Bad words” claiming they were possessed by (Chua 1998: 93). Martina describes her spirits. Some girls started sobbing petty resistance as a reaction to being and screaming hysterically, and manipulated—not so much by the when it seemed like it was spreading management in her factory, but by her the other workers in the production own desire to belong within the same line were immediately ushered

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out…One morning one of the inhabitants of the land,” latah is operators was found unconscious in rearticulated as an instance of the the women’s bathroom. When she supernatural that distances the workers came to, she told of how she had from the modern and scientific apparatus seen a demon with a three-foot of the factory, while at the same time tongue licking sanitary napkins in forces the worker to act mechanically the bathroom. (Chua 1998: 97) through myths of possession (Chua 1998: 95). Latah thus solidifies a membership This passage portrays the official narrative within the apparatus of the factory, that of supernatural forces as something that is place of “dense, hard muscle, a solid not only carried along with the worker, but chunk of meat with no suggestion of is directly antagonistic to global capital. It interior life.” While the factory appears as refers to the spirits of the factory only as sanitary and modern, latah codes the an explanation for the halting of native as supernatural, and functions as the production lines. The demon empties out very means through which the worker is the factory, and licks “sanitary napkins,” kept in her place, on the “bottom rung” items that allude to the medicinal, modern (Chua 1998: 95). powers of the microscope. Martina admits to the narrator that “the factory is The ambiguous position that latah holds possessed” and describes the possession as can also be applied to the reactive violence a mental disease, a mythological remnant of the Islamic community directly across called latah , where any shock to a from the factory, symbolized in a mosque diseased subject can “bring on the that the narrator calls one of “the affliction, in which subjects [are] unable to monuments to Malaysia’s official culture” realize their own identity” (Chua 1998: (Chua 1998: 96). This ambiguity is 92). The workers are thus “shocked out” marked by differences in time, where the of an identity and put into a state of total mosque’s chants mark “the movement of mimicry, where “anyone bold enough to time,” but to the factory owners “the most attract the attention of someone suffering productive time is a territory, a schedule, a from latah can make them do anything by mere dimension to portion and track” simply feigning it” (Chua 1998: 92). (Chua 1998: 96). The mosque here acts Though the presence of latah may first both as the “official culture” of Islamic appear detrimental to the production of the Malay, where the factory is lifeless; and, factory, Chua makes it clear that latah can as an official time keeper, its chants mark easily be appropriated by the management different phases in the workday, reminding as a disciplinary instrument, since it “can Martina daily that her “time is now a make [the workers] do anything by simply splinter in the machinery of the nation” feigning it,” rendering them “unable to (Chua 1998: 96). These supernatural and realize their own identity.” Through the religious forces of Malay culture hold an reinforcement of this ethnic myth, female ambiguous relation to capital; they are workers are put under the total control of directly opposed to global capital, while the managers. Latah is thus redefined as a simultaneously easily incorporated into it. potential instrument of capitalist incorporation, and is presented here in an The incorporation of ethnic myth into ambiguous relation to the forces of capital. factories in export processing zones As one of the “spirits of the original (EPZs) shows a level of tolerance and

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flexibility on the factory floor. In the long brazenly biased against women’s factory, the “local culture” is not left chances in life” (Sachs 2005: 13). Thus the behind in the kampungs of Malaysia, but is moral indictments by Muslim clerics are brought with the worker into spaces of seen here as alienating to the working global capital where they participate, women, who may find a global imaginary rather than assimilate. The incentives to as the only viable alternative to a pre- take part in the multinational factory modern, patriarchal society. should not be reduced to merely the wages, but should include the benefits of As a symbol of belonging to a global belonging to an imagined global imaginary, the factory serves to keep the community, one that is based on a working subject progressing ever closer to liberalist notion of freedom and “local” the ideal of full belonging, an ideal made tradition. For Malaysian female workers, unreachable by numerous forces of often the ideological incentives to structural violence and new collectivities participate in such work happen to derive that limit the worker’s agency within from Western feminism, where “state EPZs. I mean to use Paul Farmer’s development policies have filled industrial definition of “structural violence” as “a zones, campuses and cities with young broad rubric that includes a host of Muslim women drawn mainly from offensives against human dignity: extreme villages dominated by Islamic clerics and and relative poverty, social inequalities teachers” (Ong 2006: 34). Aihwa Ong sees ranging from racism to gender equality, the employment of women in these and the more spectacular forms of regions as a “challenge to male authority violence” (Farmer 2003: 8). I mean the and economic dominance,” as a form of term here as the structural preconditions erotic aggression that undermines morality for exploitative violence, preconditions (Ong 2006: 34, 40). In Gold by the Inch , such as poverty and patriarchy which these Islamic communities produce a enable the global imaginary to be seen as a binary opposition between themselves and utopic, multicultural alternative. Often it is the factory by ostracizing women workers, multinational corporations themselves who claiming that they “try to copy men” and reinforce or create these conditions. that “they forget their sex” (Chua 1998: According to Ong, corporations operating 92). Yet this tactic, when seen by workers within EPZs are given semi-autonomous through the liberal feminism of a more reign over industrial parks and other areas global culture, is seen not as an Islamic of high foreign direct investment. With article of faith, but as an example of pre- state support, these companies aim at areas modern women’s oppression within a with a surplus population of rural poor, patriarchal society. In contrast, the factory seeking workers who can supply offers the promise of belonging to a global extremely low labor costs. Ong points out imagined community, where women can that “in the initial decades of export- obtain agency through “free labor.” industrialization, EPZs were given a free Notions of female liberation and hand to exploit abundant low-wage development within a global culture have workers, most of whom were female” been popularized by economists like (Ong 2006: 103). In rural EPZs, young Jeffrey Sachs, who sees development as females living in villages very often have “raising the consciousness and power of few years between childhood and child- women in a [third world] society that was bearing in which to work, and rural

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factories often offer exhausting work with valued subject who participates within the a one to two year turn-over rate. 2 By global imaginary through her very own supplanting themselves in zones of rural exploitation. As Marx says in Capital , the poor, multinationals not only utilize free worker becomes free in a double- already existing structural violence to sense, “that as a free individual he can produce a population of low-wage factory dispose of his labor-power as his own laborers, but have a heavy hand in commodity, and that, on the other hand, he intensifying these regimes within their has no other commodity for sale” (Marx operative spaces. 1998: 273). This supposedly “free worker” becomes unfree in her total dependence As Chua’s novel shows, the working upon wage-labor. 3 Martina’s humanity, as subject in the Fordist factories of Penang a free-worker belonging in a global is encouraged to belong to a global community of free-workers, is reinforced imaginary insofar as that desire remains by wage-labor, rather than contradicted by suspended by her alignment with the it. She opines to the narrator, “I don’t love supernatural. The factory of Penang then this job, but that paycheck makes me feel not only produces microchips, but more human,” and, after a sigh, adds “but productive subjects, produced through the what is human these days, anyway?” desire to belong. To Martina, the motivation (Chua 1998: 98). For Martina, to belong to for factory labor is not only in its a global community of free workers, she economic benefit, but also in the promise must identify her own body as a resource of belonging within a global community, as for another. It is this very identification as Chua’s narrator sarcastically tells us: a foreign worker, as a human recognized by other humans within a global imaginary, Only by participating in the that is the sine qua non for her exploitation. inhumanity of the workday will the native earn her humanity. If the creation of new desires—to belong Labor allows her to know within a global imaginary—manifests by herself, to know subjugation and participating in global production, then alienation. Without labor, the latah and the Islamic community have the native is just an unprofitable effect of marking the worker as both element in the fabric of the supernatural Other and as one who empire, incapable of developing belongs to the global imaginary, but only the colonies’ resources. (Chua as pure mechanism. As Marx says in The 1998: 97) German Ideology , “the ruling class” is compelled “to present its interest as the The desire for a global imaginary thus common interest of all the members of begins by becoming a “free worker”—a society…it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only 2 According to Wright, “the desire for a two year turn-over rate reveals the belief that 3 For Marx, “in the ordinary run of things, the unskilled workers operate on a trajectory of worker can be left to the ‘natural laws of diminishing returns. At some point (in this production’, i.e. it is possible to rely on his case, within two years), the replacement of dependence on capital, which springs from the these workers is regarded as more valuable to conditions of production themselves, and is the company than their continued guaranteed in perpetuity by them” (Marx 1998: employment” (2006: 28). 899).

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rational, valid ones” (Marx 1998: 68). constant repetition in Fordist-style Martina’s encounter with the microscope factories. But for the Malays’ participating can be seen as a face-to-face encounter in the McDonald’s restaurant, global with a modern analytical device that is belonging is produced through the universally valid to the global community. consumption of manufactured products. The answer to her question then, “what is Though the worker and consumer in these human?” is answered implicitly by the examples might be separated by class, race device and the space of the factory, an and region, to thinkers such as Grace apparatus where the scents, images, and Hong, it is the combination of being both embodiment of the self as a free worker, worker and consumer that produces a contribute to one’s “form of universality.” greater sense of connectivity to a global In Chua’s novel, ethnic Malays are far imagined community. As Hong puts it, the from being represented as “pre-capitalist” modes of production in the third world or “not yet” capitalists, resigned to the factory “privilege[d] a particular kind of waiting room of history; rather they are worker: the producer as consumer” (Hong seen as belonging to a global imaginary 2006: 73). The consumption of foreign within varying degrees. The space of the imports thus distracts the worker from the factory is simply the “bottom rung” of a monotony of Fordist factories. The ladder of belonging—a narrative towards multinational mall thus produces a worker an ideal, global imaginary. that is, on the one hand, abstracted through participating in export manufacturing, and The shopping mall on the other, self-differentiated through participating in import consumption. Hong Neo-liberal economists like Jeffrey Sachs goes on to say that consumerism becomes use the metaphor of the ladder of “a form of agency, albeit a limited one, in development to legitimize the financial an area when Taylorized modes of and productive development of dependent industrial production were systematically regions and states. To Sachs, it is the duty snipping agency in the workplace by of the West to “help [the underdeveloped] deskilling labor” (Hong 2006: 89). Where onto the ladder of development, at least to the worker is devoid of self and identity in gain a foothold on the bottom rung, from the workplace, as a consumer she acts as a which they can then proceed to climb on self-defining agent, one thrust into “an their own” (Sachs 2005: 15). In order to unquenchable commerce” (Hong 2006: read neo-liberal discourse against itself, I 89), belonging to a global community of will argue that this concept of a consumers of shared fashion, shared developmental ladder must be seen as notions of aesthetic beauty, and shared inseparable from a “cultural ladder” of fetishization of imports. By participating belonging, where identifying as a wage in a global market, the worker is given the laborer in the factory can be called the first “privilege” of progressing further into a “rung” of full belonging. The second global imaginary. “rung” I will name as identifying as a consumer of products produced by the In Chua’s third world metropolis, the mall wage labor of another. In Gold by the Inch , is a haven from the public space of the Martina is able to belong to the global urban streets, the detritus and human imaginary through participating in poverty, the mercantile thoroughfares. As rudimentary, unskilled tasks that require Chua states in his preface to the anthology

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Muæ 2: Collapsing New Buildings , this “the poverty that spawned her seems even consumer-oriented public space makes it more remote than she is. We are growing, “impossible to walk anywhere in the city far above her, tiny, vanishing figure. Soon without a commercial transaction” (Chua she would mean nothing. We were 1997: 8). The middle class refuge from the growing so fast and we needed a respite disparate poor is sanctioned within the air- from people like her, from the fried locusts conditioned walls of the shopping mall, and crumbling sidewalks outside the mall” where returning to the streets of a public (Chua 1998: 35). This direct juxtaposition space that is constantly under erasure is of the “little girl” with the security of the only meant to intensify the tourist gaze, as shopping mall implies a hierarchy of a way to “ogle like tourists at the “cultural development,” in which the mall dispossessed, then take their asses back to functions as a symbol of achievement that the cushions of safety…in the gleaming enables the narrator to “rise above [the white halls of the shopping mall” (Chua girl]’s tiny, vanishing figure” (Chua 1998: 1997: 8). In Gold by the Inch , this 35). participation is delineated by the narrator’s simultaneous participation in, and critical This ascension, however, is not to be analysis of, the third world shopping mall. understood as simply an ascension to the It is in the mall that the subject attains West, for the narrator’s purpose in the agency in a ritual of consumption and mall is to access an authentic Thai identity. participates in the demand for further His ‘gateway’ to this identity is his lover imports. While the global imaginary Thong, whom he takes to the mall to buy presents itself to the third world laborer in “a gold ring,” and whom, on the escalators, the form of the factory and microscope, to the narrator idealizes as a “young and the consumer-subject, it arrives in the form perfect” local that can speak Thai “like he of consumer culture. As Chua’s narrator owns it” (Chua 1998: 36). This states upon entering a mall in Thailand: idealization of Thong as an authentic Thai is not simply to mark Thong’s body as a Now I know what development highly valued consumable object, but to means: air-conditioning. With mark him as an ego-ideal that the narrator air-conditioning, we can have seeks to attain. As the narrator says, “he’s civilization, which exists only in fluent in a language I learned only as temperate climates…The only chastisement or in the breathing of safety is in the private ammonia- confidences. But there is always his voice, scented corridors of the mall stripped and serious, or teasing, more than like this one. Here we can anything we ever say. I love the way he surrender lives that are too talks so much I often forget what he’s complex to be lived any longer. saying” (Chua 1998: 36). Only after first Here we can find happiness and describing his own linguistic lack, which security under the oppression of keeps him from belonging fully as a Thai, the senses. (Chua 1998: 35) is the narrator able to see Thong, who “owns the language,” as not just a Chua juxtaposes the security of the mall consumable object, but as the embodiment with a panhandling “little girl” who circles of the narrator’s own ideal of full its entrance. When he sees her, the narrator belonging. The exchange-relationship that states that he feels no pity for her, and that provides the sub-text for all of his

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activities with Thong belies the narrator’s “surrender lives that are too complex to be belonging to him, and it is in the mall lived any longer” (Chua 1998: 35). He where he first directly asks Thong: “Why describes looking at jewelry as a way of are you doing this? Is it the money?” and “shed[ding] one of your cumbersome hears the ambiguous, never quite presences.” This language of “surrender” satisfactory answer: “No, it’s not the and “shedding” as one walks through the money. But yeah, it’s that too” (Chua mall’s corridors, is akin to that of 1998: 36). microchips being processed through the assembly line. It is through direct Ironically, it is the golden ring, purchased participation in the mall that subjects are in the shopping mall, that the narrator later “processed” into consumer-subjects, that finds on Thong’s bed, next to the they “ascend” the street urchins. The mall narrator’s “replacement”: a woman thus plays a role similar to that of a factory, “crumpled” beside Thong (Chua 1998: where the ammonia-scented, air- 198). Thong’s ability to keep the narrator’s conditioned simulacrum of public space desire always on the cusp is symbolized in produces not material commodities such as the golden ring—an item that time and microchips, but subjects who desire again reminds the narrator that his belonging to a global imaginary. relationship with Thong is always one of exchange. The same can be said for the By analogizing the mall with the factory, I way Chua depicts the mall itself, as a place do not mean to depict the individual as a where “we can have civilization,” but only machine without agency, or, as Kwame after passing through the urban poor and Anthony Appiah puts it, as a “tabulae young panhandlers. Consumerism is thus rasae on which global capitalism’s moving put into a narrative that, like Thong, keeps finger writes its message” (Appiah 2006: its participants always on the cusp of full 113). Similar to the utilization of latah and belonging, of climbing ever higher upon a Islam by the managers in the factory, the cultural ladder. While Southeast Asian shopping mall does not erase cultural marketplaces have narrow mazes, difference, but redefines and reifies it inescapable heat, screaming market through the sale of cultural styles and dwellers, noisome smells and items that interests. In “The Mass Public and the must be bartered for again and again, the Mass Subject,” Michael Warner maps the shopping mall is a place with a single crossovers of consumerism and the public smell (ammonia-scented), a “temperate sphere through identities based on climate,” set prices and wide hallways. difference. According to Warner, Like the fast-food restaurant and factory, participation within consumer-culture is a the shopping mall is globally recognizable; means of access to an abstract community, its smells and sights bring the same where “consumer capitalism makes comfort at home as they do around the available an endlessly differentiable globe: the comfort of familiarity, of subject” (Warner 1992: 384). Consumer participation within a communal act by capitalism thus appropriates a politics of marking the body, through fashion and multiculturalism that allows “ethnicity” ownership, into a highly valued and “difference” to be performed through commodity. In Chua’s description, the the consumption of products, brands and people in the mall are processed through cultural icons (Warner 1992: 385). We an “oppression of the senses,” to cannot then interpret the shopping mall’s

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production of subjects as a homogeneous bars. In the light of day. I lie force that is always opposed to the ethnic, under the sun, hoping it will cultural or national identity of its subjects. bake the answer into my skin. Rather, because mass consumerism Bake my belonging. But it’s not “makes available an endlessly me that’s lying back this differentiable subject,” Chua’s unnamed afternoon, it’s just my skin. narrator is able to simultaneously (Chua 1998: 121) participate in the consumerism of the shopping mall and to assess Thong as his For Martina, the desire to belong to a own ego-ideal of Thai belonging within global imaginary creates a hierarchy of that mall. To climb the ladder of belonging identities, but she is kept from “full to a global imaginary, in other words, is to belonging” through markers of difference. incorporate one’s own cultural differences The narrator, on the other hand, inhabits into a system of consumer-based an unstable identity that keeps him from differentiation enabled by consumer ‘fitting in,’ but also allows him to reveal participation. the different stratifications within a global imaginary. This unstable subject should be If the mall in Chua’s novel functions as a understood as transcultural or “transitive,” means of producing consumer-subjects and is similar to Robert Park’s “Marginal upon a ladder of cultural development, Man,” who “lives in two worlds, in both of then the final ego-ideal of belonging to a which he is more or less of a stranger” global imaginary must always be invoked (Park 1950: 356). As one who struggles to by an ambivalent object of desire— belong within any ethnic or cultural group, “ambivalent” because it is always shifting, “the marginal man” is rather seen as always “on the cusp” of being fully marginal to both (Park 1950: 356). realized. In the next section, I argue that Through a cultural identity that appears this stratification from the “bottom rung” arbitrary and cast upon him by others, of unskilled wage laborers up to an ideal, Chua’s narrator shows how forces of “full belonging” within global capital—the global capitalism utilize the desire to place perhaps of the “flexible citizen”— belong as a means of reproducing class produces an ambivalent, unreachable relations. As a traveler and nomad, he object of desire invoked by spaces of cannot be hailed into an identity that fits global belonging—an end to the ladder. easily into the structure of the global Apparatuses of a global capitalism, such as imaginary, but must categorize himself the mall, offer not only the ability to into a type of non-belonging. This self- belong as a consumer-subject, but also the categorizing articulates a shared social possibility of ‘full belonging’ within a stigmatization that works to expose the global imaginary. contradictions inherent within an ideological structure. In transit The unnamed narrator’s unstable identity Where are you from? The reveals structures of stratified ethnicities suspicion always cuts like a knife. most often when its “unstableness” keeps Where do you want me to be the narrator from belonging within a from? The same question on both particular space. As a Southeast Asian sides of the tropic. In smoky American in the West, he must continually

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be given value by his white partner, Jim. “full belonging” to workers in Malaysia’s In a French subway, the narrator is EPZs, then, for Chua, a similar type of harassed by “ten men in black paramilitary exclusion also keeps racialized citizens uniforms who threw me violently against a from fully belonging in the West. wall” (Chua 1998: 56). Once the policemen realize that he is American, The social theorist Etienne Balibar called they pat him on the back, just as his white such Western racism “neo-racism.” He boyfriend, Jim, returns from the toilet. names it a racism that utilizes biological Only after the incident does the narrator hereditary as a signifier of cultural realize that during the attack, his skin difference, exposes thresholds to tolerance, became "an act of resistance” (Chua 1998: and demands that minorities keep within 58): “Jim gave me the appearance of respective cultural boundaries (Balibar belonging,” the narrator says, “to a place, 1991: 26). To Balibar, “neo-racists” see to a time, to him. As decoration, I wasn’t cultural differences, not biological ones, as always able to articulate my value, but Jim essential and static, and it is simply color knew it intrinsically” (Chua 1998: 57). that acts as a signifier for this stagnation. The very skin that Chua’s narrator “Neo-racist” is one way of understanding embodies, that of a Southeast Asian the racial stratification that occurs in unknown, necessitates Jim’s presence to Chua’s novel, both in the export protect him from racial profiling simply by processing zones, where Malayan workers being alongside him as a constant symbol are subjected to restrictions by their own warranting his social value to belong. As cultural “stagnation,” and in the French an Asian living in the West, the narrator subway, where the policemen racially must continually re-obtain his own value profile the narrator to assess his belonging. through Jim’s gaze. This need is later used To Balibar, this racism is based on a to break their relationship completely sociological cultural difference according when, in a heated argument, Jim makes a to which “aptitudes and dispositions which distress call to the police, and upon their a battery of cognitive, sociopsychological arrival, he refuses to identify the narrator and statistical sciences…[strike] a balance as his housemate: “He told them I was between hereditary and environmental trespassing. That they should arrest me. I factors” (Balibar 1991: 26). Though some begged them to let me call our next door may see culture as fluid, within an ever- neighbor, who could vouch for my changing hybridity, to “neo-racists,” identity” (Chua 1998: 59). The belonging cultural difference is static, and this that the narrator feels as an American is justifies the division of labor. As Hardt only recognized by others insofar as he and Negri say in their analysis of neo- maintains the value given to him by his racism, “from the perspective of imperial partner Jim. “But,” as the narrator says, “it race theory…there are rigid limits to the was the value I now knew was less than flexibility and compatibility of cultures. the worth of my skin. Skin the color of Differences between cultures and decay. Another layer crumbling in the traditions are, in the final analysis, rinse” (Chua 1998: 60). Here, the tendency insurmountable” (Hardt 2000: 192). towards racial stratification is not simply Rather than essentializing skin color limited to the Malaysian factory. If outright, the neo-racist uses skin-color to racialization is the process through which “suspect” cultural difference, and looks for the global imaginary excludes the ideal of signs that might determine the subject’s

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cultural position as one who belongs. to identify the narrator as one who When there is no such sign, he invokes an legitimately belongs. “insurmountable cultural difference” to legitimate racist treatment. Neo-racism In Slajov Žižek’s analysis of neo-racism, then carries the presumption that all Žižek finds that the presumptions of racialized subjects act their race. culture onto racialized subjects can be seen as a means of ascribing different In Chua’s novel, this neo-racism does not ideologies, all of which imply a normative seem confined to the geography of the first ‘multiculturalist’—one who is able to world, but is present in the scenes in the place racialized subjects as subjects subway, the racialized labor in factory, ‘stuck’ in an ideology or cultural way of and in the spaces of the mall. As in the thinking. To Žižek, ideology itself “is case between Chua’s narrator and Jim, always self-referential, that is, it always neo-racism operates through a system of defines itself through a distance towards referrals that classify subjects as either an other dismissed and denounced as valued or devalued, or, as Lisa Marie ideological” (Žižek 1994: 37). The Cacho calls it, the “deviant” or the placement of this dismissal onto the “respected” (Cacho 2007: 12). To Cacho, racialized subject implies, by the privilege the deviant racial minority is seen as a of presuming the ideology of others, a subject in excess of “ideological codes” normative, “gazing” subject of neo-racism. that are “used for deciding which human Žižek identifies this subject not as a lives are valuable and which ones are “normative white,” but as “the worthless” (Cacho 2007: 186). In the multiculturalist” who defines himself as a United States, Jim does the work of cosmopolitan by referring to other “ideological coding” when he assesses the ideological ethnicities. As Žižek says, value of the narrator, allowing the narrator “contemporary ‘postmodern’ racism is the to be recognized as one who belongs. symptom of multiculturalist late capitalism, Similarly in Penang, the ideological code bringing to light the inherent contradiction of the microscope allows Martina to of the liberal-democratic ideological belong as a “free worker.” Finally, in the project” (Žižek 1994: 37). Seeing mall, commodities such as the gold ring ethnicities—or cultural ways of life—as differentiate between the “deviant” Thai— “ideologies” thus allows the “non-ethnic” a poor street girl on the mall steps—and white to presuppose superiority, since they those “respected” who belong. These themselves are not required to prove that ideological codes allow the racialized they are not “stuck in ideology”—that they subject to belong as “respected” subjects, are, in fact, “ethnic-free.” but always “in spite” of their race. It is also no minor thing that the “de-valued” in The desire to become “ethnic-free” is a Chua’s novel are often women, and even common theme in Gold by the Inch , in the female street urchin is identified as both the narrator’s extreme cynicism of “lower” than Thong. The very necessity of the everyday Malay culture, and in these codes suggests a presumed Martina’s fascination with the microchip devaluation of the subject due to their rather than the nearby mosque. To be marks of race, gender or queerness, since “ethnic-free,” in this sense, and by not Jim, as we see in the apartment, can refuse belonging or refusing to belong to an ethnicity, one implicitly belongs within a

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global community, one of Chua’s novel maps out the racial logics of “multiculturalism” or “cosmopolitanism.” a global community that explores the ways The ambivalent ideal of the global in which multiculturalism has taken on imaginary—the top of the cultural forms of neo-racism by presuming an ladder—can now be seen as being “ethnic ideologically trapped “other” in the free,” or for lack of a better word, racialized subject. “cosmopolitan.” The cosmopolitan ideal is similar to that of an ideal liberalism In the same way that neo-racism appears posited by the political philosopher to be anti-racist, but invokes race as a sign Charles Taylor, as a politics that “must of cultural insurmountability, so the global remain neutral on the good life” (Taylor imaginary appears to be “ethnic-free,” but 1992: 57). To Taylor, the liberal ideal is invokes ethnicity through continual acts of that each individual be free to choose or referring to “ethnics” as “stuck in an not choose an identity through “neutral ideology.” The global imaginary can then institutions” like the University, the mall, be seen as a “way out” of a single ethnicity, and perhaps even multinational fast-food appearing as an all-inclusive antithesis to restaurants. Chua’s novel shows us, modern notions of exclusion, patriarchy however, that neutral institutions, such as and traditionalism. Hardt and Negri make the factory and the mall, are in fact this very argument in Empire : “The cultural institutions of both the local and ideology of the world market has always the global, and this ideal of “neutrality” is been the anti-foundational and anti- in fact a “way of thinking” in itself, essentialist discourse par excellence ” containing values and myths. As Balibar (Hardt 2000:150). They continue: “the old tells us: modernist forms of racist and sexist theory are the explicit enemies of this new the cultures supposed implicity corporate culture” (Hardt 2000: 153). superior are those which appreciate Hardt and Negri identify the world market and promote ‘individual’ enterprise, itself as an ideology, one where market social and political individualism, as goods are seen as “anti-essentialist,” but against those which inhibit these that organize cultural differences in the things. These are said to be the interests of marketing and profit “by the cultures whose ‘spirit of community’ imposition of new hierarchies…by a is constituted by individualism. constant process of hierarchization” (Hardt (Balibar 1991: 25) 2000: 155). Once a structural hierarchy is articulated and fully recognized, the Individualism, to Western eyes, may market ideology becomes always “the way appear as a universal, “non-ethnic” way of out” of that hierarchy, while the old thinking. Such is the ruse of global hierarchies are seen as ethnic, cultural, or belonging. As with the myths of latah , mere ideology. Here we can identify the “individualism” does not exhaust the global imaginary itself as no less cultural attitudes of “the global,” since ideological than a “nation” or an ethnicity, cultural difference is also utilized by which all must utilize ideologies and global capitalism to sustain itself. Through cultural “ways of thinking” onto the Other juxtaposing the experiences of third world to hide its own “dominant particular” (Hall workers in factories with the narrator’s 1997: 67). The global imaginary thus experience in shopping malls and subways, utilizes the “ideology of the world market”

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to create normative members who fully like that never happen when we are belong by being “ethnic free,” and Others together” (Chua 1998: 57). who are members but are not “proper subjects,” or who are “too ethnic.” This The narrator’s disillusion with the West as conception of “the global” as a construct a global imaginary invokes his desire to of “non-ethnicity” suggests that there is travel to Southeast Asia, yet as he travels, not one global imaginary, but many global so his skin, his queerness, his language imaginar ies , each offering incentives of and his American cultural practices travel ethnic escape and global belonging. with him. Though the desire to belong to his “race” comes as a reaction to the As a transitive cultural subject, the “pushing” of the West into a racial narrator in Gold by the Inch eludes category, his own way of thinking does categorization, since his “ethnicity” is not align with his “racial communities” of always unstable. In the West he finds Thai, Chinese or Malaysian culture. He himself in an apparently anti-racist, must belong to his skin, yet his skin does “global” culture, yet he feels forced to not suggest any particular cultural essence, emigrate from the United States, and in fact, changes easily with the season. surrendering to the demand to act out his On a Malaysian beach, the narrator lies own racial background: “Your skin is your “under the sun, hoping it will bake the uniform. A beacon and a answer into my skin. Bake my belonging. membrane…Dark, but not dark enough to But it’s not me that’s lying back this hide your insides. Skin that betrays afternoon, just my skin” (Chua 1998: 121). difference. Foreignness. Contagion Even among his own kinship, the narrator ….Where are you from? The suspicion is still an impostor. Rather than uniting always cuts through like a knife” (Chua under common principles, values, beliefs 1998: 121). Chua’s narrator realizes that it or interests, the narrator internalizes the is due to his skin color that he can never Western gaze and reduces belonging experience being “ethnic-free,” and though entirely to his skin. Yet in a Western racial he may “feel” cosmopolitan, without Jim, formation, his skin and mixed heritage are the suspicion of being an outsider follows enigmatic, and mark him as an ambiguous him everywhere. His skin cannot be cast- Other. He is not quite Chinese, not quite aside. Rather, it exposes the very Malaysian, and not quite Thai, but contradictory nature of the global definitely not white. His attempts to imaginary by denying his belonging in a belong to his race are shattered when he supposedly anti-racist imaginary. Yet Jim discovers his grandmother’s grave, and refuses to see these contradictions: “When rather than discovering his “true self” I had told Jim what had happened [in the through the invocation of the matriarch, he Subway] he didn’t believe me,” the realizes that “there is no prepackage of narrator says, “He was certain I had made identity or ethnic heritage left to possess. up the story just to amuse him” (Chua No folk tales passed on from 1998: 57). The narrator’s skin is his Grandmother’s knee. No warm flavors of exclusionary mark, one that allows him to home pathetically re-created on the other discover contradictions within the global side of the planet. Nothing. Nothing but a imaginary that his white partner, Jim, hole in the ground” (Chua 1998: 135). either cannot see, or chooses to ignore. As Instead of the history and ethnic heritage the narrator says after the incident, “things that the narrator expects, the grave invokes

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the same alienation and despair that he felt Rather than live within a “beautiful lie,” in the “host countries” of the West. the narrator chooses the abject self of unrestrained freedom, denying forms of The airport cultural, national, racial or ethnic collectivity; instead, he finds solace in the Home is not defined by the arbitrariness of his own identity. With no walls that contain us but by the direction left, he seeks belonging among community in which we the world of plane tickets and visa bribes. participate. Home is not a place to be owned or mortgaged. In a Yet, the airport too, as a so-called “neutral sense, home is nowhere. (Chua institution,” functions as a factory in its 1997: 13) production of global subjects, where the desire to belong reaches its apex in At the end of Gold by the Inch , with no production, not of commodities, but of options of belonging left, the unnamed experience itself: of trips, of tourist narrator reflects on his own desire to opportunities, of cultural and social capital, belong and rejects that desire. Unable to of more visas on one’s passport, of belong to romantic relationships experiential knowledge provided through dependent upon monetary transactions, the airplanes, petroleum and mass amounts of narrator plunges into the vast, illimitable labor power. This repetition of the airport world of travel, armed with no identity as another “neutral institution” might have formation but anti-identity, with no led to Stephen Sohn’s conclusion that “the community collectivity other than the novel does not exact any closure; instead, “abject.” His unstable identity becomes a it offers a replicating narrative of the cultural form among the abjected. He process of sexual exploitation and becomes a subject who, as Viet Nguyen hedonism that overpowers the efficacy of says, “refuses to be hailed by dominant political and historical knowledge” (Sohn ideology [but] can also refuse to be hailed 2006: 107). However, as a hybrid subject by resistant ideology” (Nguyen 2002: 157). belonging neither to ethnicity, family, Chua’s narrator surrenders to his loss of religion, place, nor with a lover, at the belonging through his love for his Thai novel’s end, the narrator’s belonging lover, Thong, and admits the artificiality appears instead through a return to global of such belonging: migrancy, through a global imaginary not of cosmopolitan subjects, but of global You will build your love on a lie. “rejects.” As the narrator says during his A lie so beautiful that you will trip in France: “I felt strangely at home forget it’s pure fiction…you call here, amid the trophies of civilization. At the airline. There are still seats first I thought I was in the midst of on the plane back to New York someone else’s civilization. I couldn’t the next day. Flights to Hong easily be called Thai or Chinese or Kong every few hours. Tokyo. Malaysian or American, but I certainly Taipei. Dubai. Beirut. Berlin. wasn’t French” (Chua 1998: 56). As one Los Angeles. Flights to anywhere. who inhabits a transitive identity, the The world is yours. (Chua 1998: narrator is able to see a country he has 205) never visited before as both “strangely home” and at the same time “someone

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else’s civilization.” He never quite claims of real universality. As he lies in bed with ownership, but also never quite feels alien Jim, the narrator begins to “feel many to it. The novel’s end suggests a things”: reinterpretation of belonging as either “belonging to,” in the sense of ownership The open door of every and property, and “belonging with,” in the consciousness. A plane streaks sense of “going along with” or “to relate toward a place I’ve only heard to.” In the first sense, “belonging to,” of before. Somewhere. A city functions within exchange relationships, where a familiar language and can be consumed as any ethnic food or crackles on the pavement. I’ve trinket. Chua’s ending disrupts this gesture heard its songs. Their meanings when he writes “You thought this was beat against a fading alarm. Five something in which you wouldn’t have to A.M. It’s almost time to go. My participate. Thought this was a story you eyes brace against a white dawn. could just watch unravel. A consuming Fireflies light the way home. stain that stops short of where you’re (Chua 1998: 208) standing. No.” (Chua 1998: 208). The “you” in this passage implicitly refers to His last words stress the desire for a new Jim, yet by never mentioning the character way of belonging, one with “a familiar by name, the narrator’s refusal to be language” but in a place he has never been. commodified extends to include the reader. “Home,” for the narrator, cannot exist in a place, but exists only within travel itself, “Belonging with,” on the other hand, not just as that experience produced suggests a type of belonging without through the airport-factory, but as the ownership, one that does not own “home,” condition of traveling through different but rather feels “strangely home.” Slajov cultural forms and identities, where it is Žižek’s notion of “real universality” is always “almost time to go.” “Travel” in useful to us here, where “real universality” this sense offers a way of “belonging is “identifying universality with the point with” that posits the abject itself as the of exclusion,” a type of belonging among ambivalent ego-ideal of desire. an abject community of hybrids, none of which can be called a “normative subject” Chua’s ending invites the reader to (Žižek 1997: 51). This envisioned “belong with” an unstable identity, universality, while perhaps idealistic and producing belonging where none formal, aims not at decentering the previously existed. The novel’s ending normative subject, but at extinguishing it finds similarities in the desire to belong to altogether. 4 Though the airport can easily a global imaginary, from the factory to the be seen, like the factory and the mall, as a airport, and seeks to answer those desires place that produces a “global subject,” for by invoking “belonging” through the Chua’s novel the airport symbolizes a type journey itself, until so many spaces and contexts have reinterpreted one’s identity 4 This could very well be what John Cruz that only the unstable conflict remains. By envisions in his calls for an end to a politics of producing such a mode of “travel,” Chua difference: “multiculturalism is necessary but reinterprets “belonging to” a collectivity as not sufficient,” he says, “Multiculturalism is a property that says little about the not enough. It has to be reconceptualized as material essence of an individual, but means rather than ends” (Cruz 1996: 37).

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