Watching the Asian Body on Western Screens and but the Girl
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INVENTORY OF PAIN: WATCHING THE ASIAN BODY ON WESTERN SCREENS and BUT THE GIRL Jessica Yu 0000-0002-9570-2667 Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (by creative work and dissertation) November 2019 The School of Culture and Communication The University of Melbourne ABSTRACT The title of this thesis, “Inventory of Pain,” draws on Edward Said’s idea that Orientalism was an attempt to “inventory the traces upon me [him], the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals” (25). In this thesis, I make an inventory of the painful traces upon me and others like me from being constructed both vaguely and specifically as an “Asian” body in Australia. In my work, being constructed as an Asian body is not taken as an abstract or theoretical idea. Rather, it is described as a material and mundane, sticky and violent, lived and living experience. I use mainstream Australian and American films and television shows as case studies to discuss the implications of not just these Othering texts but of being seen and of seeing oneself as “Other” through them. I focus on mainstream screen texts because of the way that the racially inscribed film and media stereotypes they frequently deal in become part of our cultural memories. While such stereotypes are not determinative they still have what Kent Ono and Vincent Pham call a “controlling social power”; in a recent study, Chyng Sun et al. found that while stereotypes of Asian characters on screen were seen as accurate by many of those surveyed and for Asian-Americans these stereotypes evoked a sense of pain. It is this sense of pain that I want to press into, as, in response to this pervasive cultural memory, I write and think through my own memories of encountering the Asian body on screen. Alongside the critical dissertation, is a novel which forms another inventory of pain, entitled But the Girl. It is a re-working of the Euro- and andro-centric bildungsroman genre, around a South-East Asian-Australian girl. To write my selfhood and identity, pushed to the side so often, is an act of self-aggrandising. It is to say: “So often, I have identified with you, Jane Eyre, Holden Caulfield, Anna Karenina, but now you will identify with me.” In both the critical and creative portions of this thesis, I inventory pain. In making pain an inventory, I take the raw material of wounding and transform it into a resource to be drawn upon. In making pain an inventory, I write not only about what they say but what we feel. ii DECLARATION This is to certify that: (i) This thesis comprises only my original work towards the Doctor of Philosophy Creative Writing except where indicated in the preface; (ii) due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used; and (iii) the thesis is fewer than the maximum word limit in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices. Jessica Yu iii PREFACE Some sections of this dissertation are modified versions of material written and published or presented during my candidature. These sections have been published as academic papers, short stories or presented at conferences and festivals. Critical Work Chapter One: “Postcolonial Writing and Affect: Putting the Personal into the Postcolonial” presented at British Commonwealth Postcolonial Conference 2019. Savannah, Georgia, 15 February 2019. Chapter Two: Yu, Jessica, forthcoming, “When We Say Smart Asian Girl We Don’t Mean Smart (White) Girl: The Figure of the Asian Automaton and the Adolescent Artist in the Kunstlerroman Genre”, Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, Pennsylvania State University, United States of America. Chapter Three: Presented the paper, “Realising the Asian Body on MasterChef Australia” at South West Popular/American Culture Conference 2019, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 21 February 2019. Chapter Four : --- Creative Work “Tongue” forthcoming in the Liminal Anthology. “Excerpts from But the Girl” presented as part of Edinburgh Art Festival at Rhubaba Gallery, 2017. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I express my deepest gratitude to Dr Amanda Johnson and Dr Maria Tumarkin for their supervision of this thesis. The encouragement, patience, courage and care that I was shown by both of you was immeasurable. Professional editor Catherine McInnis proofread and formatted this thesis for me. For this, I am very grateful. I am grateful for the financial support of the Australian Postgraduate Award and the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship as well as the following departmental funding: the Faculty of Arts Graduate Research International Grant 2019, the Research and Graduate Studies Scholarship 2017–2019, the Graduate in Research Arts Travel Scholarship 2019, the School of Culture and Communication PhD Excellence Award 2019. I am also grateful for the Grace Marion Wilson Glenfern Fellowship 2016 and the Royal Over-Seas League Arts Travel Scholarship 2016–2017. I express my deepest gratitude to my parents, Siew Imm Ooi and George Yu and my grandmother, Tan Thye Neow for raising me. Thank you also to my brother, Jonathan Yu as well as my sister-in-law Debbie Low and my nephews, Matthias and Timothy Yu for being there for me. Thank you to MeiMei Hodgkinson for being my best friend. Thanks to my husband, Lachlan Zammit for everything. Finally, I thank my God for what he has done for me. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Declaration iii Preface iv Acknowledgements v Critical Work 1 Chapter One: Introduction 2 Chapter Two: Smart (White) Girls 26 Chapter Three: Gweilo Food 51 Chapter Four: Lover-Other 77 Bridging Statement 106 Plot Summary of Novel 108 Creative Work: Second Half of But the Girl 109 Bibliography 213 Works Cited 213 Additional Sources 223 vi INVENTORY OF PAIN WATCHING THE ASIAN BODY ON WESTERN SCREENS CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION RACIAL GRIEF, THE ASIAN BODY AND NOURISHMENT AS METHODOLOGY In his introduction to Orientalism (1978), Edward Said writes, “In many ways my study of Orientalism has been an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.” (25). When I read these words for the first time, I felt the tautest strings inside me slacken. Yes, I knew what it was to be dealt with as a person whose face was symbolic of some nebulous yet all too familiar entity. At times, I would inhabit the body of the person staring at me and I would think, Not another one and they’re all like that. But also, I would hear the voices of those around me speaking: I don’t know who you are. I knew what it meant to have someone else “making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it … teaching it, settling it, ruling over it” (Said 3). I was “it”. The theory of “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 3) is, in a sense, a theory of how this style has dominated, restructured and had authority over me. Said describes Gustave Flaubert’s portrait of the Egyptian dancer, Kuchuk Hanem as an automatic body which symbolised a “dumb and irreducible sensuality” (186–7). Hanem’s was a re-named body that couldn’t speak, allowing Flaubert, that sensitive Frenchman, to possess it through language. Hanem’s body was my body. As I read Said’s words, I felt that, like his, my research must not lose sight of the lived reality of being an “Oriental”. And it struck me that much of my existing academic research was done with the thin and worn pretence that I was studying literary theory and not my own experiences. By discussing the reverberations of colonial power with a detached air I was left feeling the depersonalised hollowness which Lisa Ruddick thinks of as the inevitable outcome of playing the “game of academic cool” (“Nothing is Cool” 71). How could I write about these things as if they had never happened to me and everyone I know? The question that succeeded this realisation was so difficult to answer that I wished I hadn’t posed it to myself. What would it mean to write and research in a 2 way that didn’t deny my experiential knowledge of Orientalism? Part of the answer was in using existing research in postcolonial studies but turning away from full commitment to what Said calls conducting research “as severely and rationally as possible” (26) and what post-critical and feminist scholars such as Rita Felski, Bruno Latour, Lisa Ruddick and Susan Fraiman might call the detached, tough guy pose of the academic (Fraiman xii; “Nothing is Cool” 72; “Near Enemy” 4; Latour 228; Limits of Critique 2). This thesis is both motivated and methodologically formed by my personal experiences. Said asserts that in his study of Orientalism he has never “lost hold of the cultural reality of, the personal involvement in having been constituted as, ‘an Oriental’” (26). However, where Said’s experiences as “an Arab Palestinian in the West” (27) is the implicit starting point for Orientalism, my lived experience of inhabiting the body of an “Asian girl” living in Australia is the explicit focal point of this study. Similarly, where Said describes in passing his affective experiences of being a racial “Other” in the West as “disheartening” (27) and the longevity of Orientalism as “a depressing matter” (326), I foreground my research and research methodology in the grieving and rehabilitation of the wounded self. It is through this practice that I hope to find the words I can use to make reparations to unseen wounds.