SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... Living with, among, and as Others: Creolizing Transpacific Chinese Diaspora A Dissertation Presented by Tzu-hui Hung to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature Stony Brook University May 2011 Copyright by Tzu-hui Hung 2011 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Tzu-hui Hung We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Ira Livingston – Dissertation Co-Advisor Professor, Humanities and Media Studies, Pratt Institute E. K. Tan – Dissertation Co-Advisor Assistant Professor, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies Iona Man-Cheong – Chairperson of Defense Associate Professor, History David L. Eng – Outside Reader Professor, English, Comparative Literature, and Asian American Studies University of Pennsylvania This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Lawrence Martin Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation Living with, among, and as Others: Creolizing Transpacific Chinese Diaspora by Tzu-hui Hung Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature Stony Brook University 2011 This dissertation theorizes the urgency of creolist epistemology—emphasizing the non- identitarian self-making process rooted in experiences of migration, colonialism, and transculturation—to the studies of Chinese diaspora. I argue that creolization, as a concept historically associated with the multiethnic culture-building of Caribbean (post)coloniality, offers a useful analytic trajectory for articulating the heterogeneous networking practices of Chinese overseas beyond the current discursive limits of ethnicity, bloodline, nationality, language, and the exclusionary ontology of Chineseness. Specifically, I examine turn-of-the-twentieth-century and contemporary literary, journalistic, and cinematic articulations of multiethnic Chinese networks in the former Straits Settlements, the postcolonial Philippines and Malaysia, and transpacific Asian America. Highlighting the process of culture-making rather than culture as an end-product susceptible to dilution or mixture, this work identifies the diasporic condition as living with, among, and as others, as a continuous labor of self-fashioning in binding human partnerships. Addressing problems of identitarian Chineseness in previous diaspora scholarship, I iii deploy the paradigm of creolization to show that identity categories are products of networking strategies and that the vagaries of socio-political contingencies continuously shape the experiences we often taken as the natural signs of kinship ties. The body of this work investigates a set of transpacific Chinese self-making moments that follow the age of 19th-century Euro-American imperialisms and Asian mass migrations. First, I read short stories and essays in the Singapore-based Straits Chinese Magazine (1897- 1907) to examine Straits Chinese colonial belonging under the convergence of British rule, Qing- Chinese labor influx, and Malayanization. Second, I foreground practices of detour vis-à-vis the reigning ideology of homecoming in Tsai Ming-liang and Wong Kar-wai‘s Sinophone films to uncover disavowed kinship affinities between dislodged Chinese and their Southeast Asian neighbors. In Chapter Three I analyze how performative speech acts of self-parody and racial passing shape the creole Chinese subjectivity through novels from contemporary queer Asian America (Gold by the Inch and Fixer Chao). Finally, I study the representation of Tsinoys (Chinese Filipinos) as mestizos in the recent Mano Po film cycle in post-millennium Philippine cinema to interrogate the community struggle to belong in the context of postcolonial Filipino nationhood. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction From Diaspora to Creolization A Transpacific Archive of Becoming 1 Contesting Chinese Diaspora 6 Toward the Paradigm of Creolization 11 A Creolist View on Self-making and Culture 19 Creolizing Transpacific Chinese Diaspora 23 Chapter One ―There Are No Chinamen in Singapore‖: Creolization and Self-Fashioning of Straits Chinese in the Colonial Contact Zone ―Chinamen‖ and Straits Chinese 27 Why Straits Chinese? 29 Creolization and Self-Fashioning of the Straits Chinese 33 Existential ―Crisis‖ and the Reform Movement 36 Fashioning the Model Straits Chinese 43 Chinese or British? 53 Chapter Two Detours of the Sinophone amidst the Lures of Home: I Don‟t Want To Sleep Alone and Days of Being Wild Homecoming and the Kinship Household 61 Chinese among Others: the tactic of Detour 70 Tsai Ming-liang‘s I Don‟t Want to Sleep Alone 78 Wong Kar-wai‘s Days of Being Wild 95 Chapter Three When Bodies Speak and Words Recoil: Passing for Chinese in Translocal Queer Asian America Passing for Chinese 111 Gold by the Inch 114 A Parody of Travel Narrative 115 History as Purchased Fiction 119 Empathy, or What We Called Friendship 123 Fixer Chao 132 Parody and Its Performative Effects on Self Formation 155 The Experience of Language as Racism 140 v Interlude A Story of Passing, or How to Be Like Fixer Chao 148 Chapter Four Sliding Between Chinese and Filipino: A Postcolonial Recast of Tsinoy Mestizoness in the Mano Po Films The Mano Po Craze 150 A Study of Tsinoy as Mestizo 153 Performing Tsinoy Mestizoness: Narrative Strategies 163 A Multilingual Re-routing of Cultural Affinities 173 From Mano Pos to Their Pinoy Sisters 181 Works Cited 183 vi Acknowledgments This dissertation has been long in the making. Its submission grants me not a sense of completion but the precious opportunity to thank many people whose guidance, support, criticism, and warm presence have now become part of this work. First and foremost, this dissertation could not have been possible without the mentorship of my co-advisors Ira Livingston and E. K. Tan. My deepest gratitude goes to Professor Livingston, who has been a most important inspiration and support to me since the first day of my gradual school. I am indebted to him for all the intellectually scintillating conversations we have had in Long Island and Brooklyn in the past seven years, his invaluable teaching and writing of performativity, and his indelible words of wisdom, encouragement, and humor. I thank Professor Tan for being a great mentor and friend and for offering me a strong sense of groundedness at Stony Brook University. I am particularly grateful for his scholarship, guidance, and the timely support he lent at all critical moments. I would also like to thank my two wonderful dissertation readers Professors Iona Man-Cheong and David L. Eng for their intellectual generosity, criticism and advice, and most importantly, for being the inspiring figures I look up to. I have enjoyed many fortunate days at Stony Brook with the precious friendship from many people: Chingling Wo, Xiaoning Lu, Rita Sung, Jayson Jacobo, Evren Akaltun, Wentao Jiang, Lunpeng Ma, Paohsuan Huang, Min Xue, Ruby Chen, Elena D‘Amelio, Eva Nagase, and Marta Kondratyuk. I also extend my appreciation to the following people who have cheered for me and provided generous help in various forms along the way: Professors Robert Harvey, Krin Gabbard, Kamal Sridhar, and our most wonderful department secretaries Mary Moran-Luba and Alinda Askew. vii Most of all, without the enduring presence of my parents and my loving husband Yang Xie, who have seen the best and the worst of me, I couldn‘t have persisted through this long, bumpy journey. Special thanks to the Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies for the Patricia Brennan Dissertation Award and to Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange for the Dissertation Fellowship for ROC Students Abroad. Chapter One is a revised version of ―‗There Are No Chinamen in Singapore‘: Creolization and Self-Fashioning of the Straits Chinese in the Colonial Contact Zone,‖ Journal of Chinese Overseas 5.2 (2009): 257- 90. I thank Brill‘s permission to reprint this article. viii Introduction: from Diaspora to Creolization A Transpacific Archive of Becoming In the opening story of China Men (1980), ―On Discovery,‖ Maxine Hong Kingston allegorizes the tribulations of early Chinese American laborers through protagonist Tang Ao‘s uncanny experience of captivity and gender deformation in the newly discovered ―Women‘s Land.‖ Ears pierced, feet bound, face powdered, and fed on women‘s food, the captive male laborer was remade in months into a hip-swaying, submissive court maid. Setting the tone for subsequent stories like a grandfather slaving on the transcontinental railroad, a son returning to China to appease the dead mother‘s ghost, and a Chinese American brother serving military in Vietnam, this three-page allegory gives flesh to the Chinese immigrant history of racialization and gendering in North America. Indeed, it tells us how Chinese diaspora became indentured aliens in an immigrant nation-state.1 On the other side of the Pacific, Taiwan-based Malaysian Chinese writer Kimchew Ng captured the colonial strains between Chinese immigrants and Malay indigenes that linger to haunt post-independence Malaysia in his short story, ―Allah‘s Will‖ (Ala De Zhiyi, 1996). In this fictional account, an arrested