Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns: Hmong Cultural Warriors Performing Genders
Louisa Schein and Va- Megn Thoj with Bee Vang and Ly Chong Thong Jalao
In the variegated worlds of Hmong America, the ongoing social and dis- cursive life of Clint Eastwood’s feature Gran Torino ( ) represents a site of cultural struggle that has gone largely unreported. Indeed, in this essay we maintain that the struggles pursued by Hmong cultural producers and consumers in relation to the Hollywood lm may be of import to the US social and racial order in ways that have yet to be interrogated. Particularly, we draw attention here to regimes of gender and sexuality as they interface with racial and ethnic hierarchy, asking questions about Eastwood’s white masculinity in friction with conventionalized Asian masculinities. Our trajectory is toward suggesting how ongoing Hmong cultural production in and beyond the lm matters in a social hierarchy that remains highly ambivalent about Asian malehood. What follows here emerges from an extended dialogue, begun after the
positions : . / - Copyright by Duke University Press
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 764
Hmong hunting incident, about potential discursive fallouts from the media circus that proliferates around such events. We interact from the respective locations of Hmong American lmmaker/activist with organizing back- ground in Hmong communities and of anthropology/gender studies scholar with decades working with Hmong Americans. The viewpoints presented emerge out of our synergistic play of insights. They are driven by a joint concern for the material effects of both hypervisibilities and their counter- part invisibilities. The rst instantiation of this interchange was published in American Quarterly as “Occult Racism” — in which we read Va- Megn Thoj’s hor- ror screenplay, about a mass murder of Hmong campers, against the Chai Soua Vang shooting to illuminate the erasure of race in the playing out of the case.1 In subsequent work, we juxtaposed a number of high- pro le incidents to expose the tensions around invisibility and hypervisibility for Hmong, then turned to a reading of the recent Clint Eastwood lm Gran Torino. Our engagement with the lm has included not only a textual inter- rogation but also our close involvement with Hmong actors and production assistants, as well as concerned community members, from the moment of casting to the shooting, editing, release, and reception of the nal product. Since the release, our work has also been inected by racial visibility activ- ism in collaboration with lead actor Bee Vang and Hmong studies scholar Ly Chong Thong Jalao, among others. In this essay, we turn to the cultural and racial politics of performing Gran Torino and to arguments about how Hmong negotiate the mediated terrain of US gendered politics. As the arti- cle proceeds, we move toward increasingly multivocal modes of presentation commensurate with our praxis, with the ensemble character of our joint work, and with media production in general. Previously, we focused on the problematic of Asians being constructed as armed peril on US soil. Here we briey reprise those issues — particu- larly as concern Hmong Americans and Hmong gangs. We then turn to a more in- depth treatment of other Asian types — the sexual woman and the effeminate man — as played out in Gran Torino and its aftermath. We delve into the politics of gender and sexuality as they are deployed in and beyond the lm to instantiate social hierarchy. One of our tenets is that the life of the lm, and its signi cance for ethnic community, extends well
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 765
beyond the static text that circulates as entertainment in dominant culture replayed ad in nitum on airplanes, HBO, and YouTube. Our methodolo- gies are elaborated in consideration of the ongoing social and productive life of Gran Torino’s aftermath.
Model Masculinities After the troubled Korean American student Seung- hui Cho killed thirty- two people at Virginia Tech in Spring , “popculturalist” Jeff Yang mused on his Web site that recent events and media coverage had “swung the image of Asian American males away from the ‘meek, passive, and mild’ end of the spectrum and toward ‘violent, bloodthirsty, and dangerous.’ ”2 “Swing,” of course, is the appropriately operative verb, since a pendulum in motion might describe the polelike imagings of Asians in the American imaginary. In recent decades, the “model minority” — nerdy, unaggressive, and politically uninvolved — has been thought to hold sway as the dominant characterization, with periodic ruptures such as the portrait of gangland Chinatown in Year of the Dragon (Michael Cimino, ) and the murder- ous high- achieving high schoolers gone haywire in Better Luck Tomorrow (Justin Lin, ). Somewhere midswing fall Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (Danny Leiner, ) and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guanta- namo Bay (John Hurwitz, ), which paint Asian males acting out against model minority stereotypes but only as bad boys, not as reckless killers. But was the model minority gure really holding sway or was it always counterpointed by an Asian menace, one that was probably perpetually for- eign, even if he lived here, and was violent as a matter of cultural essence? In her study of Hollywood cinema, Romance and the “Yellow Peril,” Gina Marchetti documents this latter character, one who is also a sexual threat to white women, as far back as the early twentieth century.3 During the Viet Nam War, as H. Bruce Franklin details, this menace came to be concretized as the barbaric Viet Cong capable of unimaginable tortures.4 It is conceivable, too, that model minority and ruthless aggressor are not necessarily polar opposites. Amy Brandzel and Jigna Desai suggest a wounded, frustrated masculinity as the diagnostic image at the root of Asian American killerhood.5 In this formulation, the Asian would be a
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 766
wannabe sexual aggressor, but his geekish sensitivity would block him from being sexually attractive to (white) US women. Enraged at his “racial castra- tion,” his categorical exclusion from erotic playerhood, he would strike back with violence.6 Brandzel and Desai argue that this trope in pop representa- tion has obscured the race critique that might otherwise be salient in, say, an analysis of Seung- hui Cho’s rampage: “Perhaps the media, and white Amer- ica in general, worked so hard to t Cho within the wounded- masculinity type in order to avoid the other hermeneutical option: the racially oppressed retaliating for their isolation from the privileges of normative citizenship.”7 When the murders at Virginia Tech began to be processed, by main- stream media and Asian American commentators alike, as the un/intel- ligible acts of a Korean American student, certain of us watchers of media racialization recalled the spectacularizations of another Asian, Chai Soua Vang, the Hmong hunter who had killed six white hunters in the woods of Wisconsin in . Were these events likely to be discursively linked, and if so, what effect would they produce? Would we see the rise, or the return, of a racial menace in the form of gun- toting ruthless killer Asian men, and what would be the consequences? What difference would it make to the discursive homogenization of Asians that one of the killers was Hmong, a group that has articulated awkwardly if at all with prevailing images of Asian Americans? Would the construct of wounded masculinity come into play as it had with other Asians? Or would tropes of guerilla warrior and US street gang prevail, carrying forward an abiding image of Hmong as predisposed to killing? The attribution of Hmong killerhood was intensi ed once again when in June of Vang Pao, the former general who commanded Hmong troops for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Viet Nam War, was abruptly arrested in California along with nine of his purported henchmen. The accusation was of arranging to purchase arms and of conspiring to overthrow a foreign government — Laos. The media had a heyday since once again Hmong could be thumbnailed in conveniently newsworthy ways. Not only were “the” Hmong now terrorists like any other Bin Laden, they were terrorists who’d been caught red- handed and could be served up to a frightened American populace ever more doubtful about the ef cacy of the US search for Osama himself.8
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 767
But regardless of whether the conspirators were guilty of an actual plot to return violently to their homeland, what concerns us here is the conation of the now deceased Vang Pao and his coterie of those scheming to go back with the entire Hmong people.9 Such a conation harks back to decades of generalizing the Hmong émigré story as the story of all Hmong, omit- ting that Hmong remain scattered several million strong across multiple states of China and Southeast Asia as well as in diasporic sites from France to Australia to French Guyana. In both Asia and the West, most Hmong pursuits are far from war mongering and revolve around simply pursuing survival through agriculture, wage labor, or small business. Hmong profes- sor Chia Youyee Vang, in a letter to the New York Times, recalled, “There were Hmong ghting on both sides, supported by both East and West. Many were neutral, struggling just to stay alive in the most bombed region in world history to date. Hmong expatriates’ relationships with Laos are widely varied, and thousands return from abroad annually to visit relatives, establish businesses, or even to take up residence.” What genericizing “the” Hmong as guerilla warriors does is to instill such warriorhood in them as character. The reluctance of many Hmong to participate in the “secret war” in the rst place can be strategically misre- membered in favor of their supreme cultural suitability for the job. This in turn can be repackaged to explain Hmong gangs — which, of course, are not uncommon among a plethora of urban US ethnic groups — and even anomalous shooters such as Chai Soua Vang. In January , the material consequences of such Hmong typing were brought home violently. Another Hmong hunter, Cha Vang, was brutally killed by a white hunter, once again in the woods of Wisconsin. There was little mystery about who had shot and stabbed the Hmong father of ve, rammed a stick down his throat, and attempted to conceal his lifeless body: the murderer, white twenty- eight- year- old James Nichols, not only con- fessed to having done it, but he gave the police a chilling rationale — that the ‘‘Hmong group are bad,’’ that Hmong ‘‘are mean and kill everything’’ and ‘‘go for anything that moves.’’ And the discourse of Hmong “killer- hood” continues to be reproduced. A month after Cha Vang’s death, a Uni- versity of Wisconsin Madison law professor made news for telling his law class, among other things, that Hmong men are warriors and that second-
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 768
generation Hmong tend to end up in gangs. Amidst the furor, in which the professor was both denounced and defended, someone quietly posted the following sarcastic slur on the Chronicle of Higher Education news blog in response to the story (since removed): “The Madison police blotter speaks volumes about the ‘peace- loving’ Hmong.” Where other Asians may be seen as perpetual foreigners among Ameri- can citizens, Hmong, then, have also come to be seen as perpetual warriors, by de nition deserving of nothing more than exclusion. In this portrait, a gure such as Chai Soua Vang comes to be construed as of a piece with his ferocious ancestors in their callous devaluing of life. Reiterated with impunity in an array of venues, these moments of speech become acts — of epistemic and material violence. Numerous incidences of police brutality perpetrated against Hmong youth in recent years have suggested that law enforcement insists on reading Hmong as particularly dangerous and trig- ger happy. And the acts are complemented by silencings — silencings of the hate such statements nurture. Most Hmong in the Midwest, especially hunters, can recount the incessant harassment and violent threats against Hmong, whether on hunting grounds, golf courses, or urban streets, even prior to Cha Vang being killed. Yet the Wisconsin attorney general refused throughout his murderer’s trial to validate this experience — even as it was evidenced in Nichols’s own account — by adding hate crime to Nichols’s charges. And the Chronicle of Higher Education, which had several times reported on the Madison law story, declined to publish a commentary on it from a group of Hmong academics.10
Casting Character in Gran Torino The ongoing elaboration of Hmong American hyperviolence in popular discourse took spectacular form in Clint Eastwood’s feature Gran Torino. Alongside the menace of armed Hmong men, however, emerged other gures of masculinity and femininity to be explored further here. The production, rumored to be the last lm in which Eastwood would act, authenticated the Hmong types it purveyed through its casting and publi- cizing of purportedly “natural” actors. In search of Hmong actors for ten leads and supporting roles, Warner Brothers worked through Hmong com-
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 769
munity organizations in Fresno, St. Paul, and Detroit to hold open cast- ing calls. Hundreds turned out. Amazingly, all but one of those eventually chosen were rst- time actors. Euphoric at their role in this history- making venture, they threw themselves into creating credible characters and impro- vising Hmong language lines on camera.11 Their hope was to imbue their roles with credibility, but did they stand a chance of overriding the straitjacket of the plot? In the following we approach Gran Torino not as critics per se, but ethnotextually,12 pursuing a close reading of the lm from the perspective of the Hmong American context in which its production takes place and to which it speaks in a particular voice. Our reading does not purport to represent an authorita- tive Hmong point of view, but it is, nonetheless, inseparable from multiple Hmong perspectives. By foregrounding such perspectives here, we aim to expose some of the elisions created by the dominant unidimensional reading of the text as a tale of an individual white man’s transformation. We argue for an approach that reads the text in terms of sociopolitical engagements rather than individuated subjectivity, and that takes account of the produc- tion process, not only the nal result. We also attend to postrelease conten- tions over what matters to Hmong in the mass circulation of the lm. Gran Torino’s story predictably centers on Eastwood’s character, Walt Kowalski, a grumpy Korean War veteran of Polish descent estranged from his own family after his wife’s death. The action is propelled by the contest between a hapless newcomer Hmong family and a predatory Hmong street gang who struggle over the soul of a teenage boy. Eastwood’s character gets drawn into his neighboring Hmong family after their teenage son Thao tries to steal his vintage Gran Torino vehicle on a dare from the gang. East- wood then becomes a paternal gure toward the boy when he exacts physi- cal labor as payback for the attempted theft. Not only does he tutor Thao in masculine forms of work, but he presumes to “man up” the boy, liberating him from the effeminacy apparently imposed on him by his domineering mother and sister (and implicitly his race). Eventually, Walt becomes more and more of a white savior trying to intervene to keep the boy from the gang. But the gang keeps coming, renewing its menace by not only recruit- ing the boy but raping his sister in retaliation for her brother’s reluctance. Replete with a panoply of the types that have had a stranglehold on
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 770
mainstream representation since the Hmong arrival in the United States, Gran Torino features, then, not only the gun- toting youth gang but also an ingénue nerdy boy and ritualistic elders who speak no English, including a mystical shaman. This lineup does double duty, con rming Hmong in their putatively culture- bound, dysfunctional, new- immigrant status and coming full circle to the erstwhile peril of the generic Asian in the form of the gang that combines lawless violence with sexual violation. Whether the Hmong actors’ energy could disrupt their buttonholing by the script as paradigmatic others is subject to debate.
Viet Nam Savior Syndrome Redux It is dif cult to settle on a singular reading of Gran Torino in terms either of contemporary US gendered race and immigrant relations or, alternately, of the legacy of the Asian wars that propel its story. Indeed, perhaps one of its effects is to show that so many present interactions are inevitably and endur- ingly shaped by war memory. From many key moments in the lm, from grandsons nding Walt’s silver star, to Walt recounting to the priest his war trauma, to his nal speech to Thao before going to meet his fate with the Hmong gang, it is clear that the veteran’s identity still clings to Walt, constituting his motivation for many acts. Always ambivalent, Walt is both repulsed by his own war history — particularly the cold- blooded killing of a young Korean boy who was just trying to surrender — and yet still living that history as a soldier. He keeps his M rie — salvaged from Korea — at his side, and brandishes it several times during the lm. He chastises others for lacking a soldier’s ethic. After a local conict, when the priest confronts him for not calling in police help, he defends himself by averring that one has to react with speed, that in Korea “when a thousand screaming gooks came across our line, you just had to act quickly.” There is much to indicate that the neighborhood’s transformation into a Hmong enclave is misrecognized by Walt as “a thousand screaming gooks” crossing the line once again. Much of the structure of the plot suggests that one Asian enemy is substituted for another in the war- torn psyche of this aging veteran. He expects to hate all of them, initially exclaiming, “Why
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 771
do all these Chinese have to move into this neighborhood?” He polices his turf, dramatically driving them off his tiny patch of lawn at rie point after a scufe among them causes them to breach the boundary. But just as he carries the war forward, he longs to end it, to set up Hmong as stand- ins so that he can make his peace with the erstwhile Korean counterparts that haunt him day and night. While, at the level of the dialogue, he ostensibly learns in great depth that Hmong are not Koreans, and is even lectured by Sue about their having come to the United States because they fought on the “American’s side,” at the level of the plot, his redemption for Korea relies upon his acts with this latter Asian counterpart as embodied by Hmong. While critics have emphasized Walt’s personal redemption, a reading of the script’s intergroup relations brings saving to the fore instead. If read as an allegory for the wounds of Viet Nam, the lm allows the central gure of the white US citizen to complete the project of saving Asians from them- selves that was so humiliatingly aborted in Southeast Asia. More speci cally, it sets up good Asians and bad Asians, coded in predictably gendered ways such that those worthy of being saved are feminine, vulnerable, unable to defend themselves on their own turf, and ultimately, raped. The hypervio- lent bad Asians are macho, ruthless, and most importantly, uncivilized, as marked by the ultimate transgression — violation of the incest taboo when gangbanger Spider is alleged by Eastwood to have raped his own kin.
The Hmong Story as Shadow Here it is compelling to read critically the response by mainstream viewers and critics in the initial weeks of the trailer circulation and early release. To those of us concerned with Hmong American community, the phenom- enon of Gran Torino has been historic not only for its showcasing of Hmong within the story but also for the visibility it potentially produces for Hmong actors as talents and as high- pro le professionals making an impact on the US public sphere. These dimensions have, however, been consistently con- signed to the shadows, the backstory, the sideshow. The rst trailer to be released was edited so as to not only eliminate any references to Hmong but include an early line in which Walt misrecognizes his neighbors as Chinese
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 772
(“Why do these Chinese have to move into my neighborhood?”), leaving prospective viewers to assume that the lm indeed concerns Chinese rather than Hmong immigrants. Critic write- ups buzzed ad nauseum about Eastwood as actor, director, creator, even songwriter. They talked about his previous work. They talked about Gran Torino as his acting swan song. Most said nothing about the Hmong performances, or they dashed them off in a phrase.13 The National Board of Review conferred two high awards, for best actor and best screen- play, both of which emphasized solely the achievements of the white cre- ators, not the ensemble and the multiethnic storyline. At the end of the rst week of general release, Louisa Schein talked to people who, while highly aware of the lm, hadn’t seen it yet; some proclaimed not to have ever even heard of Hmong, oblivious to the central driving role that Hmong played in the plot. Indeed, one and a half years after the lm’s release, and after much critical attention in print, lead actor Bee Vang reported that he still regularly met people in and beyond the industry who, despite knowing his role in the lm, didn’t know he was Hmong or that the lm concerned Hmong. While none of these points are surprising as de rigeur Hollywood modes of operation, they bespeak the complicity of these entertainment media in the perpetuation of Hmong marginality. Such regimes of representation intimate an uncanny continuity with the collective forgetting to which Hmong have been subject since their arrival in the United States, an amne- sia that had its inception in the of cial secrecy around the war in Laos. Moreover, they reinforce the temporal suspension of Hmong at that early moment of resettlement in the United States. They are of a piece with The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, the book- length journalistic study of a clueless, non- English- speaking, “noncompliant” Hmong family of new arrivals and their conict with Western doctors over medical care for their acutely ill child with epilepsy.14 Moreover, that a good proportion of the Hmong lines in Gran Torino were left unsubtitled conspires to mute Hmong speech and dovetails with Eastwood’s slurs of “screaming” and “jabbering” gooks. The cumulative effect of these imagings — from the new/unsuccess- ful immigrant trope to the sidelining of Hmong actors in the creation of
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 773
Gran Torino — remains the unthinkability of Hmong as productive, proac- tive players in US society. It con rms them in their af liation with other Asian minorities who occupy feminized positions in the US racial order except during moments of violent outburst.
Perpetually Subordinate? With eerie synchronicity, Gran Torino’s release spanned the changeover from the administration of the Bush patriarch to the rst presidential administra- tion of color, that of Barack Hussein Obama. With US popular attention focused on the passing of the white- monopolized mantle to a newcomer of color, it is provocative to read the collective sentiment that might be echoed in Gran Torino’s own drama of ethnic succession. Is the “manned up” Thao of the nale, now armed with the emboldening accoutrements of Walt’s bigoted mouth, his tools, his dog, and his car, but still pointedly donning his own ethnic garb to attend Walt’s funeral, a vision — albeit ambivalent — of the future? How to read the inheritance of the Gran Torino vehicle by Thao? In the driver’s seat of Walt’s car, with Walt’s dog beside him, Thao drives away from the camera in the closing shots of the lm noticeably no longer in the old neighborhood, but now along the placid shores of the lake. Walt has ceded his most cherished treasures to Thao, not to his own fam- ily, making it clear that the patriarch is somehow passing on his legacy to this other boy. In the tradition of the classic bildungsroman, the father g- ure must be eliminated in order for the younger to accede to his manhood. Certainly, the plot has all these twists, as Thao gradually acquires pieces of Walt — from languages, to tools, to knowledges — while Walt’s intactness gradually corrodes up to his ultimate demise. But has Thao become a man who stands on his own, or does he remain a spiritual client of Walt, as perhaps signi ed by his nal encasement within Walt’s identity — the vintage car? Will his manhood be necessarily deriva- tive, ever unimaginable as a successor, or as a parallel to that of Walt, the de nitive white man? Moreover, Walt is not only the de nitive white man, according to teen character Sue, he is the newer and better father, thanks to his nationality. Midway through the lm, Sue sits on the porch with Walt,
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 774
thanking him for becoming a father gure to Thao: “I wish our father had been more like you. . . . He was really hard on us, really traditional, and really old school.” “I’m old school,” is Walt’s retort. “Yeah, but you’re an American.” In the immigrant version of the bildungsroman, a passage from tradition to modernity is entailed in tandem with the paradigmatic com- ing of age of the subject. Sue’s comment suggests that Walt’s superiority as a father gure derives from his assisting Thao in his transformation to modern/American citizen. If the form of the bildungsroman includes, then, not only maturation, but, for immigrants and minorities, assimilation and identi cation with dominant national values,15 then Walt is the one for the job of transforming Thao. Yet as Viet Thanh Nguyen points out, in the always- differentiated US ethnoracial order, full maturation is necessarily foreclosed for minori- ties as they also still gure as the hyphenated others of those dominant val- ues.16 The progress of the story keeps the Walt character at center with his own personal transformation, while he excludes Thao from the climactic confrontation with the gang by depriving him of ring a gun and, instead, effectively infantilizing him behind the locked door of his basement. The concluding scene likewise excludes Thao from achieving sexual manhood as he drives off with only a dog at his side. Indignant Hmong male viewers countered that for Thao’s nale to signify manhood would have required not only a girlfriend at his side but a white one at that. It is tting, then, that the Gran Torino text, while ostensibly presenting Walt as conferring masculinity on Thao, ends up making that masculinity ever tenuous and derivative, and ultimately only partially realized. In most mainstream responses to the lm, the sole focus is on Walt’s redemption, with Thao relegated to serving as the foil for Walt’s self- transformation. Viewers attuned to prevailing regimes of Hmong invisibility will perceive the apparent hypervisibility won by Hmong presence in the lm as surrep- titiously belied by the plot. Being locked in a basement until the world has been made safe by the white hero is a spectacular metaphor for this peren- nial sidelining.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 775
“I shot Clint! Yeah, woohoo!” Elvis Thao, a hip- hop artist who plays one of the gangbangers, speaks vol- umes in his Internet letter, “A Message to the Hmong Community and City of Milwaukee,” when he celebrates partaking in the cold- blooded and fatal riddling of Walt with bullet holes on set. Elvis resets the terms of the dis- cussion, reminding us that from the perspective of Hmong involved in the production there is something else going on that displaces concerns about the nature of Hmong representation in the text. That something has to do with the fact of Elvis Thao, a regular guy from Milwaukee with no act- ing background, “slaying” the legendary Clint Eastwood in a high- pro le production. The agonism of masculinities is almost palpable — a younger man of color standing armed opposite a senior and unarmed white man of stature and narratively prevailing. What Elvis and the other actors want us to attend to as we view Gran Torino, then, is not so much the oft- noted, typi ed, and distorted Hmong- ness on- screen but rather the arti ce of the actors’ creative process. They want us to see that Gran Torino is fashioned, and done so in part by the hands of Hmong craftspeople. Invoking Eastwood’s celebrity status encodes a message of elite belonging, however ephemeral, achieved through par- ticipation in the making of Gran Torino, and more speci cally by being put on par with the patriarch by standing off with and then eventually slaying him. For Elvis and much of the Hmong community, this belonging has signi cance far beyond the elite circles of Hollywood.17 In a certain way, Elvis is intimating a kind of Hmong coming of age in the world of high- prestige media, one that has been longed for and painfully out of reach until this moment. Before Gran Torino, perhaps the biggest Hmong claim to fame in Hollywood was the Disney actress Brenda Song in Suite Life of Zach and Cody as well as actor Wa Yang’s eeting appearance in Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima as a soon- to- be- killed Japanese soldier. In an inter- view with Hmong Today newspaper, Yang bespeaks the trepidations about exclusion that buzzed fervently on the Internet during the Gran Torino cast- ing: “When I rst heard that Clint Eastwood was shooting a movie about the Hmong people, my rst fear was that Hmong people wouldn’t get cast for the Hmong parts. But when I heard that they were going to cast only
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 776
Hmong people . . . I was really happy to know that was the direction they were taking.”18 Troubling as it may seem to celebrate the staging of victorious Hmong hyperviolence, Elvis’s glee resonates with the argument made by Celine Par- reñas Shimizu about the need to attend to the authorship of actors play- ing conventionally Asian roles. Interrogating a widespread and orthodox critique of Asian women’s subordination as enforced through their acting out of hypersexualized Asian femininity in theater, narrative lm, and pornography, Shimizu cautions that we risk diminishing the artists them- selves through our reex of revulsion: “To understand acting as simply re- presentation of corresponding phenotypes and national identities is to say that actors and actresses play roles as noncreating beings.”19 Instead, she suggests, “The act of creation is stunning because it illuminates the fact that actresses are actually working within the constraints of their craft, roles, and jobs. . . . While the act may simply reaf rm the role . . . some kind of limited authorship occurs.”20 Moreover, as Judith Butler’s treatment of performativity has maintained, it is not only the fact of authorship but the effect of its recognition that deserves attention.21 For instance, instead of seeing static, rei ed Asian gangbangers in Gran Torino, we might perceive these roles as crafted on camera by engaged Hmong men who are concerned both to do a convinc- ing job and to be acknowledged for that effort. This is their aspiration: they hope that their skill will reveal itself, deauthenticating the Hmong gang in favor of a construction — what Butler calls a “citation”22 — of a Hmong gang. In this process, they have the potential to denaturalize, even to subvert, the hold of that trope as de nitive Hmong character, showing it to be contingent and always in production. That they appear as young male actors volitionally assuming the gangbanger images that their roles portray shows the eld of Hmong malehood to be open and plural, to contain a range of possibilities, not a deterministic teleology. The stakes are high, for they must subvert a script that puts demonizing words even in the mouth of the Hmong teenage girl. Sue proclaims to Walt, “It’s really common: Hmong girls over here t in better. The girls go to school and the boys go to jail.” Not all the boys, is Elvis’s point. It is very intentional that he says he shot
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 777
Clint not Walt. He also recounts a story of a friend telling him that this will make him an object of envy for famous actors the likes of Tom Cruise and Denzel Washington. It is these assertions of parity with the elite world of Hollywood acting that register the cultural work that is being done in terms of belonging and legitimacy through the making of Gran Torino. Such appearances might also be described as a gurative form of voice. In this move from invisibility to hypervisibility, Hmong actors have been constrained yet again by a script not their own, one that includes Walt more than once referencing “screaming” and “jabbering” gooks, by scenes that feature women speaking shrilly, sometimes hysterically, in rapid Hmong, and by postproduction decisions that leave much of their speech unsubtitled. It would be easy to calculate all this as a form of muting, but what the actors insist is that voice be construed more capaciously, taking into account the work of their bodies and acts, their presence on set as opposed to other Asian actors, and their ongoing speaking selves in interviews, press appear- ances, and even subsequent lms long after the moment of shooting.
Deconstructing Sue’s Strength While the maligning of Hmong masculinity proceeds apace throughout Gran Torino, we must also attend to the question of what is being accom- plished by the apparent strength of Sue’s counterpositional character. In de ance of Asian women’s typi ed hyperfemininity, Sue is outspoken, vir- tually fearless, gregarious, and ercely protective of her brother. In a rare moment for US ethnic representation, she (and Walt) even make her white boyfriend look effeminate by standing up to menacing men of color on the street and calling them on their Asian slurs. Where Walt uses his gun, Sue brandishes her words in retorts such as “My name? ‘Take your crude overly obvious come on to every woman who wants to pass and cram it.’ That’s my name,” or “Of course, right to the stereotype thesaurus. Call me a whore and a bitch in the same sentence.” And these are not just any retorts. While of dubious credibility as actual lines, they indicate what might be coded as an antiracist, protofeminist consciousness fused with a street savvy that is undaunted by taunts and threats. Even Walt recognizes her strengths, call- ing her smart at one point (in contrast to her brother) and even affectionately
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 778
“honoring” her with the Asian slur “Dragon Lady,” which would, in typical usage, be reserved for older and more powerful women. It could be argued, then, that Sue exempli es a strong Hmong Ameri- can womanhood, forged through the hardships of immigration in families in which fathers are weakened by culture shock or killed during the war. Language strength is one of the chief hallmarks of such women, and Sue exhibits it in spades, with wit, vocabulary, knowledge, and even persuasion skills. Gran Torino could be heralded as a celebration of the achievements of Hmong American women who survive by learning how to improve on the most daunting situations — instead of “going to jail.” But there are other more pessimistic readings of Sue that should also be considered. It is noteworthy that her strength comes to the fore as a counter- point to Thao’s character when he needs to be emasculated for the plot. For instance, when he is taunted by a gang, Thao, in stark contrast with Sue, merely buries his head in his book and walks on in silence instead of talking back. One of the rst Hmong lines of the lm is from their grandmother, who puts the siblings in direct relation by denigrating Thao, saying, “He does whatever his sister orders him to do.” However, once he is to begin his (albeit incomplete) transformation in the direction of Walt’s form of man- hood, Sue’s formidable character is summarily sacri ced. It could even be argued that it is precisely her sacri ce that emboldens him, gives him such hypertrophied man characteristics, in the form of a gun- wielding avenger, that Walt has to rein him in by locking the basement door. It is also strange that despite her tremendous verbosity, there is no indica- tion that Sue attends any kind of school, that she values learning, or that she has future goals for herself. Indeed, when we see her reading, it is only an entertaining magazine or catalogue. By default another lumpen- refugee, her seeking work to help out the family never comes in for consideration despite all the worries about Thao’s lack of employment. Indeed, all her strengths seem to exist in the service of her brother. One is left wondering if she in fact has a character, or if she is simply a foil for her brother’s character. As Nenick Vu has suggested, Designed as a character that exists primarily to serve the lm’s storyline, Sue is unable to develop as a real character with her own motivation and
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 779
resolution. She is positioned similarly to ethnic damsels in distress in clas- sic Westerns, comparable to the role of the Native American princess who needs rescuing by the sheriff. At other points in the lm, she serves as a cultural ambassador, clarifying the Hmong culture and people. Although Sue is portrayed as intelligent and strong, she has no personal motivation to guide her character. She serves as a sort of tour guide who informs Walt and the audience about the Hmong community, and works to get Walt to agree to mentor Thao. . . . In this way, Sue exists primarily as a continuous plot device to connect Walt to Thao and the Hmong commu- nity and to drive the story along. 23
Sue as Sexual Victim While both her character and lines have exuded a modicum of strength, then, the plot development rewards Sue for her talents with the utmost vio- lence. A brutal rape at the hands of men she knows well strips her of her dignity and renders her earlier invincibility a mere chimera. In what is for many viewers the most disturbing scene of the lm, she is put in her place, coming home to sit among the other women who hysterically fawn over her in Hmong, no longer able to ght back. Her wit and savvy, celebrated as they are throughout the lm, do not triumph in the end. Rather they are forced to submit to the muscle of Hmong gangbangers whose reason for aggressing against her, instead of against Walt himself, is never really explicated in the script. She is, in the end, reduced to a voiceless vehicle for struggles between men. Her only lines after the rape, despite appear- ing in multiple scenes, are “Hello?” and “What’s going on?” as she frees her brother from the basement at Walt’s request. With Sue neutralized, the arrogant force of the violent Hmong males ultimately brings Walt out, mak- ing him the only man who can retaliate and save Sue and Thao from the gang’s reign of vicious tyranny. Why is rape the catalyst, the hinge that swings Walt toward his termi- nal act? In some ways, Sue’s rape seems to be overdetermined by a colonial racial logic that persists in the collective unconscious of Western producers and consumers of such narratives. As we’ve seen, she starts out as a vocal, speaking subject, even leaning toward masculine in her forwardness. Her
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 780
wardrobe is studied in its plainness, refusing sexual objecti cation. But she is gradually disciplined by the plot to be transformed into a broken, silent body de led by her own men. The rape of Sue serves multiple functions, none of which come as any great surprise but which secure a more conven- tional racial order that might have appeared transgressed in earlier parts of the lm. Indeed, this move toward conventionality in racio- sexual politics had been foreshadowed when Sue and her white boyfriend encountered the three black thugs on the street. Sue tries hard to talk back to their verbal sexual aggression: “Oh great! Another asshole who has a fetish for Asian girls. God, that gets so old!” But words couldn’t defend her — indeed they incrim- inated her. The thugs retaliate by roughing her up, having cleared her impo- tent boyfriend out of the way. All their threats are sexual. She is not a mark for money, drug sales, or anything else; she is only signi cant for her sexual objecthood. Even her spunky resistance is eroticized. When she challenges them for stereotyping her they exclaim, “Bitch is crazy!” and “I like ’em like that.” It is this encounter — when Walt materializes just in the nick of time and rescues her with an armed, phallic machismo that his junior white counterpart (amusingly played by Eastwood’s son Scott) couldn’t marshall — that is the pivot. From this point on, no matter how fatherly his relationship with Sue, she will necessarily be sexualized vis- à- vis this old man. This prelude, then, suggests that ultimately the Hmong rape is a disci- plining for Sue having spoken up; it thereby refeminizes her. It positions her as the perennial brown woman needing rescue by a white man from other brown men. And it gures her squarely within the Western fantasy of powerless “other” women who are constituted by their sexuality and only readable to the West as sexually oppressed beings. These victims are inevi- tably somehow dependent on Western men to ameliorate their victimhood. In a recurring trope, they are hypersexual and frequently prostitutes, who in turn become loyal and devoted sexual partners to their saviors. In Sue’s case, she does not begin as hypersexual; indeed she starts out as asexual, but the plot does not seem to be able to sustain this subject posi- tion for an Asian woman. Walt’s honor and sacri ce is ostensibly intensi- ed by his absence of direct sexual attention to Sue, as demonstrated by
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 781
the contrast with Youa/“Yumyum,” the beautiful girl at the family party who ends up dating Thao at Walt’s interested prompting. But his relationship with his ingénue neighbor is nonetheless sexualized by his initial rescue and eventual quest for mortal vengeance after her rape. Sue’s sexualization bolsters Walt’s masculinization. Meanwhile, it is noteworthy that the black thugs initiate the sexualization of Sue, but that it is the Hmong men who complete it physically. This complementarity arguably blackens the Hmong gangbangers, aligning them with their African American seniors in sexual predatorship against women of color.24
Fashioning Alternative Masculinities If Sue’s sexualization illuminates the intransigence of the gendered racial order, the struggle over Asian male feminization — as much at the heart of Gran Torino’s logic as is hyperviolence — has continued to be expanded upon in cultural productions subsequent to the lm. A parody project involv- ing Hmong actors, writers, and producers and spoo ng the racial/sexual premises of Gran Torino takes issue with the lm’s conventional alignments, which not only feminized Asian men but also homosexualized them. The spoof exploits the raunch and sexual innuendo of the original “manning up” scene in the barber shop to make some pointed interventions around masculinity. Ly Chong Thong Jalao drew out lead actor Bee Vang, one of the central authors of the work, about the import of the short video:
LJ: Tell me about the spoof project.
BV: We wanted to make a parody of the barber shop scene — the manning up scene from Gran Torino. It’s pretty popular — the clip has half a mil- lion hits on YouTube.25 Why is it so funny that an Asian boy gets taught how to banter like “a man” by two old white guys? And that he fails? The climax of the scene is Thao’s being a naïve immigrant and not getting what the white men are teaching him.
LJ: The original scene is done humorously though, right? Couldn’t you argue that the Gran Torino script is itself parodying these white guys — making their retro masculinity seem ridiculous?
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 782
BV: Maybe, but I don’t think it works. Audiences are so busy laughing at Thao that they don’t even notice that Walt and the barber are over the top. It comes off as conventional masculinity . . .
LJ: So what was the spoof trying to do?
BV: I worked with a Hmong team and we created a skit to upload to YouTube. We shot it professionally and performed it in a couple class- rooms too. It is premised on a racial role reversal. Two Asian guys man- ning up an older white guy. It doesn’t try to be believable. Its humor comes from the fact that it would be unthinkable for this scenario to ever happen. We called it “Thao Does Walt.”
LJ: What kind of Asian guys were they? What kind of masculinities did they have?
BV: They were very different — but both very campy. The idea was to make sure they didn’t seem to mimic white masculinity in any way. Or rely on displaying a mainstream masculinity to compete with whites.
LJ: So who were these characters?
BV: We stayed very close to the structure and lines of the original scene. So I played in the Walt position as Thao, but a Thao that was a wise old kung fu master. It’s one of the few images of Asian men that’s not femme in some way — that has some kind of alternative masculinity. I put on an exaggerated Asian accent and a long scraggly beard and we wrote lines that sounded sort of absurdly mystical but also vulgar. We had a thirty- something white actor who played Walt, a Walt who wanted to learn about manhood from me — “Master Thao.”
LJ: What about the barber character?
BV: He’s more complicated. We were thinking about how some of the key humor in the original relies on homophobic slurs like “dicksmoking” and “boy is my ass sore from all those guys at the construction site.” The thing is, when you put homosexuality together with the US racial hierarchy you get Asians always in the feminized position which is also the homosexual position. The bottom position. Since Asians are always homosexualized
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 783
Bee Vang as Thao teaches white Walt the “way of the Asian warrior” with ping pong paddle as weapon. Courtesy Bee Vang
this way in dominant culture, they aren’t able to own their individual sexuality — gay or straight. So we wanted to create an Asian man who is proudly gay, and even queeny. So the barber Martin becomes a stylist in “Martin’s Beauty Salon.” He tweaks the lines, so that where, in the origi- nal, he greeted Walt by sarcastically saying “Walt, I should have known you’d come, I was having such a pleasant day,” now he says it with a twist: “I should have known you’d cum,” and he glances at Thao’s crotch. He also irts with straight Walt, and tries to make him uncomfortable. Makes him squirm a bit from his own homophobia.
LJ: Give me an example of how this works in your script.
BV: Well, rst of all, Walt doesn’t really get it about the sexuality stuff. After Thao sends him out the rst time, he comes back in and tries to slur Martin by calling him a “dicksmoking Asian closet queen.” On the one hand, he puts “dicksmoking” and “Asian” together, which shows him to be a typical white guy who assumes making Asian guys homo is the best way to degrade them. On the other hand, he stupidly calls Martin a “closet queen” which makes no sense, since Martin is obviously way out of the closet. He shows himself to be so retro that he assumes outing a gay man would be a way to insult him.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 784
Wa Yang as Martin has Walt bend over while telling him that the bottom is actually in control. Courtesy Bee Vang
LJ: How does Martin respond?
BV: He turns the tables — and teaches Walt some irty gay ways of inter- acting “like a man.” When Walt gets told the rst time that he’s failed at the “male” banter, and asks how he should have done it, Martin says, “Why don’t you start with a submissive kowtow, then show me your ass” — and he physically turns Walt around so he has his back to Martin — “and blow me a kiss.” Then he pushes Walt farther by talking about the advantages of being a bottom in sex. He says, “Remember, the bottom is actually in control.” He’s obviously playing with Walt, who he assumes would feel that being on the receiving end in gay sex is emasculating in a bad way.
LJ: What is that supposed to mean: “actually in control”?
BV: The line has a lot of meanings. Martin’s provoking Walt by suggest- ing that being the bottom in gay sex can be desirable. And he’s being extra shocking by making a reference to the power play in sadomasoch- istic scenes. But it’s also got a coded meaning. It refers to the premise of the spoof — the role reversal. In the skit, the minority men are literally in control. In the real world, the veiled threat is that minority men are actu- ally more and more in control, and that they will rede ne masculinity in
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 785
the future. As that happens, Walt’s masculinity will be shown up as more and more out of date. As a work of minority cultural production, then, the spoof video traf cs in the multivalence of top/bottom hierarchy to disturb the putatively low social ranking of Asians as homosexual. Signi cantly, a struggle between top and bottom actually appears in the original Gran Torino script, though it is dubious whether the writer had in mind the sexual connotations that Vang and his collaborators inserted. Importantly, the scene — which pres- ents itself as athletically homosocial — by virtue of the language of top and bottom, suggests a homosexual innuendo. The scene is situated as a fore- shadowing, an intimation that Thao may have the potential to achieve, even rival, Walt’s masculinity. It foregrounds Walt’s aging and enfeeblement when he cannot move a heavy freezer up from his cellar and decides to reach out for Thao’s help. In the process, through the repartee between the two men, it enshrines the top position as the preferable one. The scene pro- ceeds as follows: Thao answers the door: “Toad, you got a minute?” The two descend to the basement and Walt proceeds: “Here it is. Here’s the deal. I take the top because that’s the heaviest. I pull on that and you stand right back here and you push and help me push it up each step. Just like that.” “Well then let ME take the top,” Thao suggests. “No, no. I got the top.” “No really. I’ll take the top. It looks pretty heavy.” “Look. I’m not crippled. I’ve got the top.” “If you don’t let me take the top, I ain’t helping. I’m gonna go back home.” “Now listen to me — “ “Now you listen old man. I’m here because you need help. So it’s either top or I’m outta here.” “Alright you take the top. I’ll push. Just don’t let it slip out of your little girl hands. And crush me.” “Don’t give me any ideas, pal.”
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 786
Not surprisingly, the top position in this interchange is constructed as the stronger, more strenuous, and dominant position — wielding the power to crush the bottom. The symbolism in terms of social hierarchy is quite trans- parent, and it is after this interchange that Walt begins to take Thao seri- ously as a potential man. At rst he doesn’t want to relinquish his dominant position, but eventually he is forced to in order to achieve cooperation with the younger man of color, whom he needs. He protests until the end, insist- ing on ascribing “little” and “girl” to Thao’s hands — the same hands that are now pulling the freezer up the stairs for him. But from this scene of ineffective emasculation on, he transitions, initiating his campaign to man Thao up. Thus is inaugurated an agonism over who sets the terms. In the subse- quent scene, Thao suggests that masculinity can be multiply — or cultur- ally — de ned by asserting that the yardwork Walt is having him do is — according to Hmong gender norms — “women’s work.” The assertion is freighted by the fact that this is precisely the jab that the Hmong gang- bangers have used to taunt Thao when they try to man him up by recruit- ing him. By the end of the gardening scene, the two males have decided on construction as a job for Thao to pursue forthwith, but only if he is able to “man up” enough to land the work in the rst place. Walt’s retort to Thao’s cross- cultural challenge is to assert that only through conforming to his ver- sion of masculinity will Thao be able to participate in the US economy. Thao capitulates to going through the motions but shows himself to be a reluctant pupil, rolling his eyes and dragging his feet in the barber shop. In an interview with Schein, Bee Vang recounted how he used this resistance to show emergent manhood: “I tried to show Thao’s change through the physicality of my performances. I hung my head less and less. In the bar- bershop scene, I made my voice get a bit raspier and more like Eastwood’s as they tried to ‘man me up.’ I threw in some sassy gestures. By the time I was getting the job at the construction site, I added more of a swagger to my walk.”26 Through his artisanship as actor, then, Vang reveals the arti ce of gender construction. And at the level of production relations on set, his account of his acting strategies reveals that the bottom does indeed retain at least a modicum of control.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 787
Which Masculinist Praxis? It is clear that Gran Torino falls squarely within the long tradition in US popular culture of resting on homosexualization to slot Asian men into less- than- masculine status in the racial order. This extension of emasculation into homosexualization is amply deployed in Gran Torino, even in the nal scene in which Walt uses it to provoke his executioners. In his penultimate lines before his martyrlike sacri ce, Walt accuses the gang of engaging in incest, since Spider has been identi ed as Thao and Sue’s cousin. When Smokie pulls his gun for the nal showdown, Walt, calling him a “shrimp dick midget,” taunts, “Yeah, yeah, go ahead, but watch out for your boy- friend [Spider] because it was either he or you or someone who raped one of your own family, your own blood for Christ’s sake” (emphasis ours). It is to be expected, when Hollywood reiterates Asian male emascula- tion through the alignment of iconic small penises with having boyfriends, that there would be a strong impulse on the part of Asian cultural authors to push back against this trope. What remains to consider here is how the recurring agonism of masculinities plays out in subsequent cultural pro- duction, especially that by men of color. As critic Daniel Kim elaborates, cultural production by Asian men has perched on the razor’s edge between deriding homoerotics or af rming them in the collective effort to counter Asian male feminization.27 This high- stakes contest recalls the hypermas- culinist polemics of author Frank Chin and his collaborators, who edited several collections of Asian American writings. In a much- quoted passage, Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan exclaim, “The white stereotype of the Asian is unique in that it is the only racial stereotype completely devoid of manhood. Our nobility is that of an ef cient housewife. At our worst we are contempt- ible because we are womanly, effeminate, devoid of all the traditionally mas- culine qualities of originality, daring, physical courage, creativity.” They go on to a veiled allusion to sexual orientation: “We’re neither straight talkin’ or [sic] straight shootin’,”28 which is then made more explicit in the allegation, “It is an article of white liberal US faith today that Chinese men, at their best, are effeminate closet queens like Charlie Chan.”29 As King- Kok Cheung points out, the masculinist move to recuperate manhood through Asian Americans’ talking back on the straight master’s
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 788
terms is a mine eld. Such retort is fraught with the perils of other stigmas that can be proliferated to secure a conventionally de ned manhood: In the last two decades many Chinese American men . . . have begun to correct the distorted images of Asian males projected by the dominant culture. Astute, eloquent, and incisive as they are in debunking racist myths, they are often blind to the biases resulting from their own accep- tance of the patriarchal construct of masculinity. . . . One can detect not only homophobia but perhaps also a sexist preference for stereotypes that imply predatory violence against women to “effeminate” ones. Granted that the position taken by Chin may be little more than a polemicist stance designed to combat white patronage, it is disturbing that he should lend credence to the conventional association of physical aggression with manly valor. . . . In taking whites to task for demeaning Asians, these writers seem nevertheless to be buttressing patriarchy by invoking gender stereotypes . . . and by slotting desirable traits such as originality, daring, physical courage, and creativity under the rubric of masculinity.30 A corrective masculinist hyperviolence can, of course, seem like the irre- sistible antidote to centuries of exclusion from the respectable manhood of the all- American middle class. The imagery of top and bottom is likewise generative, particularly in thinking the gendered racial politics that infuse Gran Torino. That Bee Vang as Gran Torino’s Thao seizes the top in the freezer scene could be read as a relatively clear- cut usurpation based on the shared premise that the bottom is the unfavorable, inactive, and denigrated position in both social and sexual hierarchies. So is it to be applauded? What Cheung cautions and Daniel Kim expands upon here is that a seiz- ing of the top position, or the means of assault as for instance concretized in guns, demands that we also “understand how . . . antiracist cultural politics comes to articulate itself with instead of against homophobia,” that “what can look and feel like empowerment or liberation from the perspective of heterosexual men of color can easily depend on a disturbing disidenti cation with and a denigration of other racially and sexually stigmatized identi- ties.”31 Savvy about this peril, the “Thao does Walt” spoof performs a pre- emptive move, embedding avowed homosexuality rmly within the cast of central characters.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 789
Conclusion We began our meditations on Hmong male visibilities by positioning them in relation to the poles typically available to Asian Americans in the US racial regime — “model minority geek” and “hyperviolent menace.” Our reections suggest, however, that these two tropes may be less like poles and more like paired regimes of normative citizenship. Ly Chong Thong Jalao relates the effects of this severely limited range of possibility on the subjectivities of Hmong viewers: “For many of the Hmong who saw Gran Torino, the most believable part of the lm occurs when the gang mem- bers kill Walt at the end. The scene is believable not because the lm’s por- trayal of Hmong youths as violent and predatory gang members depicts an essential reality, but because the gang members are the only characters in the lm who exhibit the kind of agency that approximates the real possi- bilities and precariousness of life in a Hmong American community. That is to say, despicable as they appear on screen, the Hmong gang members defy the very disciplining the lm’s plot imposes on Thao.”32 For even if Thao has begun to date Youa, the nal scene af rms his asexuality. No girlfriend accompanies him in the car, only a bestial companion, albeit one that some mainstream viewers have deemed an “emblem of manhood.”33 How can Thao become a man without sexuality? The perennial formula is reentrenched in the hands of a white production that ultimately retains the polarity of hypersexual gang predator versus asexual good citizen. For Asian American men any sex is bad sex. Hence asexuality becomes the nail in the cof n that seals the good Asian into the shadow life of inferior man- hood and derivative social membership. With this in mind, it is not dif cult to imagine that a resistance to the relentless accretion of lines like “shrimp dick midget” throughout the lm — including the denigration of Thao ad nauseum by calling him “pussy,” “pusscake,” “little girl” with “no balls” — would give rise to an impulse for unquali ed celebration of the nal moment in which the gang- bangers become “straight- shootin’ ” and level their guns in unison to kill a Clint Eastwood character for the rst time on- screen. This would seem a clear- cut victory for Asian American masculinity. Indeed, as Jalao con- tinues, “For many younger Hmong Americans, the gang members’ devia-
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 790
tion from middle class propriety becomes a locus through which America is made contestable once again, and whereby they do not have to adhere to a moral center de ned by rigidly prescribed racial and gender roles.”34 Here Hmong audiences embody oppositional viewing modalities, in effect denat- uralizing racial hierarchy through sympathetic alliance with the vili ed bad Asians. But Bee Vang as parodic Master Thao and Wa Yang as proudly gay Martin go a step further, using their Hmong- authored spoof to resignify those hierarchies. The line “the bottom is actually in control,” delivered, no less, by an out gay man, troubles the terms, intimating greater subversions to come, including the demographic reality that whites will no longer be in the majority in the US by the year . Among these subversions is precisely the Hmong acquisition of voice. So where the diegesis of Gran Torino may afford a limited glimpse of de ance in the misplaced agency of the gangmembers, what we offer here are some other glimpses. For one, the Hmong actors narrate their craft elo- quently, revealing how participation in production gives them wiggle room to fashion presentations of their characters and make their performativity visible, even if it goes unrecognized by mainstream viewers. And subse- quent Hmong productions, whether in the form of critique and commen- tary, or in the form of new dramatic works, suggest countervoice, even if their circulation cannot achieve anything like parity with the dominant text. A boom in Hmong American narrative lmmaking, inspired in part by the impulse to counter Gran Torino and currently ourishing, augurs more complex portrayals in the future. That these authors would be developing presentations of alternative masculinities in their own cultural productions speaks volumes about the stakes in Hmong and Asian American position- ing in the racial order, perhaps revisioning the durable perpetual warrior as, instead, a cultural warrior.
Notes
We acknowledge the various contributions to our joint work by Wa Yang, Jesse Aubert, Doua Moua, Edgar Rivera Colon, Paul Kite, Noel Lee, Elvis Thao, Abel Vang, Jigna Desai, and Robert O’Brien. . Louisa Schein and Va- Megn Thoj, “Occult Racism: The Masking of Race in the Hmong
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Schein and Thoj R Beyond Gran Torino’s Guns 791
Hunter Incident: A Dialogue between Louisa Schein and Va- Megn Thoj,” American Quar- terly , no. ( ): – . . Jeff Yang, “Asian Pop: Angry Asian Men,” San Francisco Chronicle, May , , www .sfgate.com/cgi- bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/ / / /apop.DTL&ao=all. . Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and the Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst: University of Mas- sachusetts Press, ). . Amy L. Brandzel and Jigna Desai, “Race, Violence, and Terror: The Cultural Defensibility of Heteromasculine Citizenship in the Virginia Tech Massacre and the Don Imus Affair,” Journal of Asian American Studies , no. ( ): . . On “racial castration,” see David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). . Brandzel and Desai, “Race, Violence, and Terror,” . . See Tim Weiner, “General Vang Pao’s Last War,” New York Times Magazine, May , , www.nytimes.com/ / //magazine/pao- t.html. . Louisa Schein, “A General’s Changing Presence: Why Did Vang Pao’s Arrest Become a Unifying Event for So Many?” St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press, July , . . The article, “Knowledge, Authority, and Hmong Invisibility,” by Dia Cha et al., can be seen in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, March , , www.diverseeducation.com/artman/ publish/article_ .shtml. . Louisa Schein, “Hmong Actors Making History Part : The Bad Guys of Gran Torino,” Hmong Today, August , , – , news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article .html?article_id=cffbd ddeba a bd and “Hmong Actors Making His- tory Part : Meet the Gran Torino Family,” Hmong Today, September , , – , news .newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id= b cfafdacbc dca . . Louisa Schein, “Homeland Beauty: Transnational Longing and Hmong American Video,” Journal of Asian Studies , no. ( ): . . See the critique of the centering of Eastwood and the conation with his characters in Tania Modleski, “Clint Eastwood and Male Weepies,” American Literary History , no. ( ): – . . Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ). . Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . . Ibid., – . . Indeed, Hollywood belonging, despite the key roles of Hmong in Gran Torino, their indis- pensability to driving forward the plot, has been tenuous at best. Out of ten Hmong actors
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 positions 20:3 Summer 2012 792
with leading and supporting roles in the lm, only the two main leads were invited to attend the premier in Los Angeles. The credits are likewise skewed, listing most of the white supporting actors but only a couple of Hmong until the very end. . Wa Yang, author interview, January , . . Celine Parreñas Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . . Ibid., . . Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theater, ed. Sue- Ellen Case (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), – . . Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, ). . Nenick Vu, “Gran Torino: Mainstream Depictions of Race without History” (unpublished manuscript, ). . Our thanks to Ruthie Gilmore for pointing out this dynamic of blackening. . For the original clip, see “A Funny Scene from Gran Torino,” YouTube, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=VXD yOxIPB (accessed March , ). . Louisa Schein and Bee Vang, “Gran Torino’s Hmong Lead Bee Vang on Film, Race, and Masculinity: Conversations with Louisa Schein, Spring, ,” Hmong Studies Journal ( ): . . Daniel Y. Kim, Writing Manhood in Black and Yellow: Ralph Ellison, Frank Chin, and the Literary Politics of Identity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ). . Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan, “Racist Love,” in Seeing through Shuck, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Ballantine, ), . . Jeffrey Paul Chan et al., eds., The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japa- nese American Literature (New York: Meridian, ), xiii. . King- Kok Cheung, “The Woman Warrior versus the Chinaman Paci c: Must a Chinese American Critic Choose between Feminism and Heroism?”in Con icts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch (New York: Routledge, ), – . . Kim, Writing Manhood, xxii. . Ly Chong Thong Jalao, “Looking Gran Torino in the Eye: A Review,” Journal of Southeast Asian American Advancement ( ): . . See for instance, Adrienne D. Davis, “Film Review: Masculinity and Interracial Intimacy in Gran Torino and Star Trek,” New Political Science Journal ( ): . . Jalao, “Looking Gran Torino in the Eye;”ibid.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/positions/article-pdf/20/3/763/460567/pos203_05Schein_FPP.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021