Reenactment of Ethnic Identity of the Asian American Women Playwrights, Velina Hasu Houston and Julia Cho

Reenactment of Ethnic Identity of the Asian American Women Playwrights, Velina Hasu Houston and Julia Cho Sun Young Cheon The Graduate School Yonsei University Department of English Reenactment of Ethnic Identity of the Asian American Women Playwrights, Velina Hasu Houston and Julia Cho A Masters Thesis Submitted to the Department of English and the Graduate School of Yonsei University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Sun Young Cheon December 2009 감사의 글 이제 겨우 석사논문을 마치고 첫 발걸음을 힘겹게 내딛었습니다. 논문의 주제를 정하고 첫걸음을 내딛기까지 많은 방황과 혼란이 있었고, 그러한 시간을 지나 완성한 글에는 그간 의 혼란이 고스란히 담겨있는 듯합니다. 상대적으로 긴 시간을 들여 작성하였지만 많은 부 분 아쉬움이 남는 작업이었습니다. 그러나 그러한 아쉬움과 후회들은 앞으로 남겨진 더 긴 시간들을 위한 소중한 경험이 될 것이라 생각합니다. 이러한 혼란과 망설임,, 그리고 그것들을 홀로 맞서야하는 긴 시간 묵묵히 지켜봐주시며 아낌없는 조언으로 이끌어주신 우미성 교수님께 깊은 감사를 드립니다. 대학원에 처음 진학 했을 시점부터 논문을 완성하고 또 마무리하기까지 선생님의 사려 깊은 격려와 조언은 긴 시간의 방황과 혼란을 헤쳐 나갈 수 있는 등불이자 커다란 힘이 되었습니다. 또한 갑작스러 운 부탁에도 흔쾌히 부심선생님을 허락해주시며 논문이 완성되기까지 조언과 지도를 아끼지 않으셨던 이경원 교수님과 박형지 교수님께도 깊은 감사를 드립니다. 그리고 처음 영문학에 대한 흥미를 일깨워주셨고 아낌없는 조언으로 길을 밝혀주셨던 오경심 교수님께도 깊은 감 사의 인사를 드립니다. 마지막으로 그 누구보다도 사랑하는 나의 부모님., 방향을 잃고 헤맬 때 장애물에 부딪혀 넘어질 때, 그러한 삶의 가장 힘겨운 순간순간들을 두 분이 함께하여주셨기에 이겨낼 수 있 었습니다.,.,, 감사합니다 그리고 사랑합니다 그리고 내 하나뿐인 형제 우리 오빠 오빠가 있 어서 항상 든든하고 행복합니다.. 그리고 가슴깊이 사랑합니다 Contents Abstract----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ii Introduction-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 Chapter 1. Methodology: ‘Homely and Unhomely Asianness’ and Asian American Abjection Theory--------------------------------------------------------------10 Chapter 2. Houston’s ‘Homely Asianness’: The Asian American’s Cultural Affinity with the Culture of the Asian Homeland-----------------------------------------22 (1) Horrifying of Village Patriarchy---------------------------------------------26 (2) Appropriation of Homeland’s Tradition------------------------------------33 Chapter 3. Cho’s ‘Unhomely Asianness’: Autonomous Claiming of the Asian American Self-----------------------------------------------------------------------------42 (1) The ‘Unhomely Asianness’ and Self-Recognition as the Abject --------46 (2) Disseminated Traumatic Past Memories and Remembering------------62 Conclusion-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------74 Works Cited----------------------------------------------------------------------------------80 Abstract in Korean--------------------------------------------------------------------------83 i Abstract Reenactment of Ethnic Identity of the Asian American Women Playwrights, Velina Hasu Houston and Julia Cho Sun Young Cheon Department of English The Graduate School Yonsei University In this thesis, “Asianness” synthesizes visible Asian ethnicity, tradition, and values that socioculturally and psychologically determine Asian American individuals’ status in American society through interacting with Americanness. If American values and traditions consistently affect the process of Asian American’s identity construction, so does Asianness. By comparing the different aesthetic modes of reenacting Asianness of Houston and Cho, this thesis examines how Asianness dynamically interacts in the constructing and deconstructing process of Asian American ’ s sociopolitical and psycho-cultural identity within white-dominated American society. In Houston’s literary strategy described as the term, ‘Homely Asianness’ in this thesis, I focus on how Houston’s literary strategy of claiming cultural affinity with her mother ’ s homeland results in an aesthetic contradiction: ineluctably dependent on the already-sanctioned boundaries of Asian culture and white- dominated American culture, she cannot represent the sort of cultural newness necessary for the construction of Asian American cultural autonomy. Moreover, the playwright’s aesthetic tendencies in both readily assuming the agent of colonial discourse and appropriating stereotypical images of Asian American as well as Asians results in her following the colonial discourse in calcifying such images. Meanwhile, Cho ’ s strategy of confessing cultural estrangement between Asian ancestral culture and Asian American culture, examined in the later part of this ii thesis, shows the later-generation Asian American playwrights’ more progressive way of claiming ethnic identity. Cho’s aesthetic strategy shown in her two memory plays, 99 Histories and The Architecture of Loss, demonstrates her capacity to focus on the cultural newness that fills the void after being detached from the existing cultural norms of Asian ancestral culture and western American culture. Keywords: Asianness, Americanness, ethnic identity, stereotypical images, Velina Hasu Houston, Julia Cho iii Introduction The ability to create a home—an ethnic, cultural, racial, and national ‘home’—are qualities that the artist of color will have to find without the help of the Wizard and his knapsack full of privileges. - Velina Hasu Houston When I first encountered Velina Hasu Houston’s famous signature play, Tea (1987), I was fascinated by its stunning beauty and feminist aesthetics. However, at the same time, what constantly irritated me was the fact that the play does not obviously disclose the Amerasian individual’s voice, which is the playwright’s own ethnic identity as she proclaims in The Politics of Life (1993). This apparent contradiction of Houston prompts me first to examine how Houston reflects her own ethnic identity in her plays. And I compare Houston and the later-generation Asian American woman playwright Julia Cho to examine how Asian American women playwrights from different generations reflect or reenact their ethnic identity by disclosing, concealing, or making up their inherited Asianness. In this process, what interests me most is the fact that the degree to which each playwright reveals her own voice corresponds inversely with the degree to which she reveals Asianness in her plays. While Houston, who conceals her own individual voice under the mask of those of Japanese war brides, affirms and deploys a specific part of her ethnicity among various ethnicities, Cho, who belongs to the “me” generation of Asian American 1 playwrights, strategically conceals her ethnicity by implication. This thesis examines how the two playwrights’ different attitudes toward representing their inherited Asianness, is related to their aesthetic strategy within the sociopolitical context of their respective historical periods. Chronologically, Houston belongs to the second wave of Asian American playwrights. The Asian American Movement was one of the last ethnic- consciousness movements, beginning during the late 1960s. It was inspired by the antiwar Third World movements, calling for an end to the Vietnam War and to the institutionalized racism in the U.S. During this period, Asian American antiwar groups like Triple-A (Asian Americans for Action, 1969) were appropriating theatrical strategies such as guerrilla theatre to assert their sociopolitical ideas. This coincided with the foundation of the East West Players (the first Asian American theatre company) in 1965, and consequently, the Asian American theatre became a dialectical locus of racial and identity issues surrounding Asian American beings within the U.S. This first wave of Asian American playwrights initiated recognition of an Asian American identity crisis that was succeeded by the claiming of an Asian American self by the second wave of Asian American playwrights in the 1980s and 1990s as well as third generation playwrights in the new millennium. From the 1980s to 1990s, the second-wave playwrights, such as David Henry Hwang, Philip Kan Gotanda, and Houston, were able to get mainstream American’s recognition and to challenge it with optimism and ambition. For these second-wave playwrights including Houston, claiming ethnic identity was crucial to gain visibility in the Eurocentric American society. 2 The third wave of Asian American playwrights writing from the 1990s to the present, detach themselves from any specific ethnic identities. They also reject “the binary choice of either representing the Asian American experience or writing non-Asian American or ‘universal’ (often meaning ‘white’) stories” and “responsibility of representing their entire group” (Lee 203). Their plays came to articulate diverse themes and issues, telling their own individual stories. On the third-wave Asian American playwrights, Esther Kim Lee comments in A History of Asian American Theatre (224) that “Asian American theatre has no boundaries in the new millennium.” In this atmosphere, three representative plays by Julia Cho, 99 Histories (2002), the Architecture of Loss (2004), and BFE (2005) focus on the Asian American self. In contrast with Houston’s deliberate appropriation of her own ethnicity resorting to the ancestral homeland, Cho does not obviously use her own ethnic background. Thus the term, ‘unhomely Asianness’ refers to the later generation of Asian Americans’ cultural estrangement from their ancestor’s homeland culture, as shown in Cho’s plays. Julia Cho’s character, Eunice, a late-generation Asian American woman, says that what Asian Americans inherited from their immigrant ancestors was not culture or language but “a disease”: Eunice. I don’t inherit language or culture, hell, I don’t even inherit your hair your looks. I inherit a disease. (Eunice swallows her bitter laughter.) That’s my heirloom (99 Histories 40). 3 Cho depicts the late-generation Asian Americans’ inherited

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