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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Nascent Articulations of Feeling: Affective Care Labor in Emerging Postsocialist and Late Capitalist China-U.S. Circuits A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Kathryn Cai 2019 © Copyright by Kathryn Cai 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Nascent Articulations of Feeling: Affective Care Labor in Emerging Postsocialist and Late Capitalist China-U.S. Circuits by Kathryn Cai Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2019 Professor Rachel C. Lee, Chair This dissertation traces flattened affects in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Asian American and Chinese literature, original ethnographic fieldwork, and film that imagine circuits of migration and capital between China and the U.S. following China’s entry into the global economy. This project builds on interest in Third World and Afro-Asian legacies in Asian American Studies and on considerations of the transpacific as a transnational field shaped by but also exceeding nation-based formations. I do so to propose a postsocialist framework that considers emergent possibilities for transnational affiliations and forms of agency following economic reform in China, when it was once a communist world revolutionary touchstone. This postsocialist framework seeks to make visible forms of agency that take shape through non-revolutionary affects, such as ambivalence and detachment, that do not seek to clearly overthrow a situation. Instead, they enable living on within dominant nation-based projects tied to capital without full affective commitment to them. ii Specifically, the narratives this project examines center sites of gendered affective care labor within and outside the family as arenas through which to apprehend and learn to navigate these still- changing and emergent postsocialist conditions. Rather than affects commonly demanded of caretaking relations, such as complete emotional regard, availability, and investment, these narratives elaborate on valences of flatness as a way of traversing and living on within China-U.S. circuits through caring for the self and others. Flatness enables the figures of these narratives to do so without fully acquiescing to either Chinese imperatives to cultivate the self and family for the nation’s economic prosperity or U.S. imaginations of Asians as economic resource and threat. My first chapter examines Ha Jin’s The Crazed (2002) and Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude (2014) to consider how flattened affects are differentially available in different gendered subject positions in the wake of China’s accelerated economic growth and increasing ties between China and the U.S. from 1989 onward. Chapter Two elaborates on original ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, China (2017) to consider how my primarily female interview subjects who have lived through the Maoist era and China’s reform formulate flatness as healthful and desirable mode of caring for themselves and others to navigate and live with the unassimilable aspects of these vast changes. Chapter Three considers Chinese investigative journalist Chai Jing’s air pollution documentary Under the Dome (2015) and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) to elucidate how gendered affective care is a racialized technology that extends into a speculative, technologized future. The project ends with a coda on Boots Riley’s feature film Sorry to Bother You (2018) to further mine how transnational forms of gendered care work underwrite contemporary imaginations of the evolving global economy and possibilities for contesting its structures. iii The dissertation of Kathryn Cai is approved. Allison Carruth C. Jason Throop Rachel C. Lee, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2019 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii List of Figures vi Acknowledgments vii Vita viii Introduction 1 Care Work and Affect in Transpacific Postsocialist Circuits Chapter One: Ciphers and Subjectivities in China-U.S. circuits 28 Navigating 1989 to the Present in Ha Jin’s The Crazed and Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude Chapter Two: Literary and Ethnographic Narratives of World-Making 74 Affects and Attunement in Contemporary Beijing Chapter Three: Affective Labor as Technology in Speculative China-U.S. Circuits 150 Chai Jing’s Under the Dome and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea Coda: Postsocialist Affects: Emerging Afro-Asian Legacies in the Twenty-First Century 216 Bibliography 244 v LIST OF FIGURES Chapter 2 Figure 1 pp. 123 Coda Figure 1 pp. 236 Figure 2 pp. 236 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to express my deepest gratitude to everyone who has shaped this project and my time in graduate school. My advisor, Rachel Lee, has been a model of ongoing intellectual curiosity, openness, and rigor. My thinking and orientation to new possibilities for learning have been deeply shaped by her. Through her, I have also come to see the necessary intermingling of care and work in big and small ways as an ongoing project. I cannot thank Allison Carruth enough for her encouragement and all the time and energy she has invested into the details of my development from the first time I stepped into UCLA. She has inspired me with a vibrant example of what a teacher, scholar, and public humanist, as well as a caring advocate, can be. Jason Throop has given me new language and paradigms for attuning to and considering the many indeterminate ways that humans can be with one another, and my perspective on the world has been greatly enriched because of it. Helen Deutsch has opened new intellectual worlds for me that are also more inclusive worlds for bodies and minds. I am grateful for the examples and possibilities for both scholarship and relationality they have given me, and for her steady encouragement. Finally, Chris Mott has been a constant example of intellectual and personal generosity. I am also deeply grateful for the many people who have made homes for me in so many places. To my dear friends Christina, Kathryn, Alina, Shanika, Chaey, and Sloane: I am thankful beyond words for each step you have taken with me in life and to share in each of yours. I cannot imagine what these last years in LA would have been without Cari, Diana, Claudia, and Jananie, who have lived so much life with me and whose bond I cherish. Caitlin, Mike, Anna, Andy, and Kirsten, your care and humor have made my world more joyful. Thank you to Aku for your intellectual encouragement and sharing in new life steps, Carol for being another beloved mother figure in my life, Jen for your kindness, and Greg for your friendship and companionship in shared work. And vii thank you to my sister, Kalyn, for your care, and to my cousin-sister, Mali, for all the ways you have grounded me and helped me to feel more at home in a familiar but still foreign world. Above all, I cannot express the measure of my gratitude for my parents, Shuang and Yunming, who have made me who I am. I will never forget that you made a life for us from nothing but your own will and courage. You have given me so many worlds to live and explore and shown me so many shapes that love can take. viii VITA Kathryn Cai received her B.S. in Biological Sciences and B.A. in English from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2011 and expects to receive her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2019. Her research focuses on broadening the spectrum of affects associated with care labor in transpacific circuits of migration and capital through attending to bodily states and body-environment interactions in Asian American cultural productions. She has published articles on Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being in Literature and Medicine and Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose poems in a special issue on “Fugitive Environmentalisms” in the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association . She will be a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Humanities at Wake Forest University beginning in fall 2019. viiii Introduction Care Work and Affect in Transpacific Postsocialist Circuits This dissertation traces affective stances that enable orientations to large-scale conditions that are continuing to shift in the present. In particular, I examine in twentieth- and twenty-first- century Chinese and Asian American narratives that that grapple with China’s entry into the global economy, which officially began in 1978 and accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s. As is widely discussed in the Western popular media and academic scholarship alike, China’s economic growth on a massive scale has rendered it a significant global economic and geopolitical player, with far- reaching but shifting and unknown consequences. 1 China, however, has long been a globally significant site and actor. Maoist China once served as a historic touchstone for global Marxist and Third World movements and exemplified the possibility of a revolution that would overturn not just a capitalist but a racist and imperialist world order. 2 As scholars in Asian American studies increasingly consider the potentialities that Third World solidarities have for the racial and class politics of the present, 3 this project investigates how contemporary imaginations of China-U.S. circuits insist on the need to grapple with the emerging conditions of China’s economic reform. Far from a process with a clear end point and parameters, the drastic changes to local and global conditions are continuing to unfold in the present. The imaginative literature, original ethnography, and film I examine accordingly turn to murkier affects to sense and navigate these still-emerging and uncertain conditions. Rather than imaginations of revolution, these diverse narratives posit flattened 1 Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).