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 populations and consumer subjects. Christopher Patterson 1 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 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 12:22:55AM via free access MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities, Special Issue No. 18, 2009 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 50 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 12:22:55AM via free access Global Imaginaries and Global Capital “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.

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