Asian American Identity and Queer Intimacy in American Woman 99

American Vs. Woman: Asian American Identity and Queer Intimacy in American Woman 99 Feminist Studies in English Literature Vol.19, No. 3 (2011) American Vs. Woman: Asian American Identity and Queer Intimacy in American Woman Jae Eun, Yoo (Seoul National University) I. Wendy Yoshimura and Jenny Shimada On February 4, 1974, a 19-year-old American heiress, Patty Hearst, was kidnapped by an armed urban revolutionary group called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) from her apartment in San Francisco. After two months of ransom negotiation, Patty Hearst surprised America by announcing that she had joined the SLA, and only a few days later, she was witnessed robbing a bank along with the radical cadre. Later that month, all the members of the SLA except Patty Hearst and Bill and Emily Harris were killed in a fierce house fire that followed a shootout with Los Angeles police. In September 1975, Patty Hearst was finally arrested with another woman, Wendy Yoshimura. Susan Choi’s second novel, American Woman, is loosely based on this famous case of kidnapping in the 1970s. In an interview, Choi stated that she was attracted to Wendy 100 Yoo Jae Eun Yoshimura because she was completely eclipsed by Patty Hearst in the contemporary media as well as in the public memory. Creatively filling in the untold story of Wendy Yoshimura, Choi explores a Japanese American woman’s struggle for the identity naturally bestowed on Patty Hearst: that of an American woman. The former term, “American,” is persistently denied to the protagonist of American Woman, while the latter term, “Woman,” has its own historical and social complications for her. The daughter of a former internee at the Manzanar War relocation camp for Japanese Americans during the Second World War, Jenny Shimada, the fictional counterpart of Wendy Yoshimura, finds herself constantly read as a poor third world or mysteriously oriental girl. She is never accepted as an American, nor can she imagine herself as a properly mature woman. Similar struggles can be detected from the media portrayal of Wendy Yoshimura. What is prominently different in Choi’s characterization of Jenny, however, is her queerness. Jenny finds different ways of imagining and presenting herself when she develops a queer relationship with Pauline, a character based on Patty Hearst. Choi deliberately moves away from the historical events by giving Jenny and Pauline a whole year together. Their queer intimacy reveals the terms and conditions, as well as omissions, implicit in the phrase “American Woman,” as it effectively exposes and thus loosens the effects of patriarchal sexual and racial representations. In this sense, queer intimacy functions as an important critical tool for Choi, as it reveals the constitutive collaboration of sexual and racial discourses in marking racially and sexually different subjects. American Vs. Woman: Asian American Identity and Queer Intimacy in American Woman 101 At the same time, Choi highlights the limits of ahistorical queer desire. Jenny and Pauline’s queer relationship ends abruptly and completely because they have disregarded the history that has conditioned them not only sexually but also racially. However, Jenny brings her father to the Manzanar camp site at the end of the novel not because her queer experience has failed, but because it has helped her realize fully what has formed her subjectivity. Thus, queer insight helps Choi explore the question of Asian American identity in the context of what Michael Warner calls “a wide field of normalization” -- hegemonic social structures that authorize and reinforce the reproduction of social hierarchies such as sexuality and race (Fear xxvi). II. Asian (American) Woman Underscoring the difficulty of representing an Asian American woman without resorting to given stereotypes, American Woman begins from Robert Frazer’s point of view. Robert Frazer is a leftist sportswriter who has helped Jenny relocate to the East Coast when her lover William Weeks is arrested for bombing federal government buildings in protest against the Vietnam War. Jenny, however, disappears on her own soon after. Somewhat annoyed by her independence, or rather, her not needing his help, Frazer tracks down Jenny. For Frazer, Jenny is “like a job he once had that he’s finished with. He’s sometimes been vaguely offended by how far out 102 Yoo Jae Eun of her way she went to show she’d never wanted his help, but beneath this affronted feeling, he’s very rarely wondered where she was. He’s certainly never cared” (9). This beginning, which resembles that of a traditional detective novel in which a male detective figure searches for a missing woman, implies that Jenny and her story have to be carefully assembled from fragmentary traces. Eventually Frazer finds Jenny precisely because she is “a Japanese girl, after all, in a lily-white corner of upstate NY” (9). As a fugitive, Jenny improvises her name and history constantly -- she is Sally from China, Iris Wong from California, Alice Cha from New York -- but none of these fake identities makes any difference for her. Her Asian face is the only identity marker that she is allowed to have. Even before readers meet Jenny, they encounter the images and adjectives that envelop her. Jenny is evasive, elusive, unimposing, sensual, artistic, and oriental, all stereotypical traits that supposedly define Asian women. Some of these markers indeed help Jenny to find work for two fugitive years restoring the paintings of a mansion in upstate New York belonging to a wealthy lady called Miss Dolly, but when readers finally hear Jenny’s inner voice, they find out that she is feeling extremely lonely in her struggle to avoid attention. She deliberately hides behind the stereotypical images and thereby intensifies them, and her contrary desire to be recognized in a different context tortures her. In this way, racial stereotypes, working alongside sexual discourses, label Jenny as a mysterious yet non-threatening Asian woman, a stereotype exploited and reinforced repeatedly. As a result of the racialization of her sex, or sexualization of her race, Jenny’s American Vs. Woman: Asian American Identity and Queer Intimacy in American Woman 103 Asian-ness renders her attractive and vulnerable to white men as her racially defined femininity augments the masculine power of white men by contrast. Despite his sympathy and engagement with the revolutionary left, Frazer imagines and connects with Jenny in sexual terms. For him, Jenny’s sexual attractiveness largely has to do not only with her sexuality but also her ethnicity, as she is, essentially the mysterious oriental girl. Frazer’s friend who has agreed to shelter her when she arrived at New York also approaches her inappropriately, without her consent. Jenny is thus always exposed and threatened by the sexual self-vindication of white American men. The reason that Frazer searches for Jenny is in tune with the racial and sexual stereotypes through which he sees her; he wants to assign Jenny a subsidiary job with the three fugitive SLA members, regardless of her objection to their political claims and methods. He feels Jenny “wasn’t merely the only person he could trust this way, she was the best he could imagine” (32) because of the simplified image of Jenny that he carries. In media representation, Jenny’s real life model, Wendy, was portrayed as playing a maternal role for the group. She supplied meals and nagged about housekeeping until she gave the fugitives up as hopeless (Alexander, 6). However, Choi modifies this story to develop Jenny’s relationship with Pauline. Still feeling out of place, Jenny witnesses the same reactionary racial and sexual politics reproduced and reinforced in the revolutionary group. The surviving SLAmembers, Juan, Yvonne, and Pauline turn out to be another small community centered around men and validating male authority, despite the fact that they risked their lives to fight the dominant society. 104 Yoo Jae Eun The now widely recognized marginalization of women within the revolutionary cadres of the period disappoints Jenny. Juan, the only male among the surviving cadre takes charge. Despite the appearance of communal agreement, he is the one who commands the other two women, telling them what to do. After sometime, Juan even commands Jenny what to do and orders her not to argue with him (197). Moreover, not only is Jenny expected to submit to Juan’s authority, but she is still judged by her Asian face. In the same imperious way, Juan imposes the “third-world” generalization on Jenny. According to him, Jenny owes her leadership to “the People! Your People, Third World People” (213). Jenny refuses such racial generalization: “Just because I’m a Japanese woman, you can’t define me in terms of just that” (139). However, Juan cannot understand Jenny’s point: “All I’m saying,” Juan said, “is your skin is a privilege. Your Third World perspective’s a privilege.” “And all I’m saying is, stop saying I’m from the Third World when I’m from California” (140). Regardless of her resistance to Juan’s reverse racial stereotyping, Jenny is repeatedly marked as an exotic “alien” by revolutionaries as much as by conservative Americans like Dolly. For Juan, as for other Americans, if one’s skin color is not white, then one cannot be considered American. Furthermore, Juan considers Jenny’s resistance childish and vain, and, in his attempt to teach and lead her, he tries to play the American Vs. Woman: Asian American Identity and Queer Intimacy in American Woman 105 Father as he does with the other girls in the group. In the figure of Juan, racial and sexual discourses conspire against Jenny once again. Thus, in the minds of others, Jenny is an oriental, the mysterious female.

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