ANXIETIES OF THE FICTIVE: THE IMMIGRANT AND ASIAN AMERICAN POLITICS OF VISIBILITY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY SOYOUNG SONJIA HYON IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RODERICK A. FERGUSON JOSEPHINE D. LEE ADVISERS JUNE 2011 © Soyoung Sonjia Hyon 2011 All Rights Reserved i Acknowledgements There are many collaborators to this dissertation. These are only some of them. My co-advisers Roderick Ferguson and Josephine Lee mentored me into intellectual maturity. Rod provided the narrative arc that structures this dissertation a long time ago and alleviated my anxieties of disciplinarity. He encouraged me to think of scholarship as an enjoyable practice and livelihood. Jo nudged me to focus on the things that made me curious and were fun. Her unflappable spirit was nourishing and provided a path to the finishing line. Karen Ho’s graduate seminar taught me a new language and framework to think through discourses of power that was foundational to my project. Her incisive insights always push my thinking to new grounds. The legends around Jigna Desai’s generosity and productive feedback proved true, and I am lucky to have her on my committee. The administrative staff and faculty in American Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Minnesota have always been very patient and good to me. I recognize their efforts to tame unruly and manic graduate students like myself. I especially thank Melanie Steinman for her administrative prowess and generous spirit. Funding from the American Studies Department and the Leonard Memorial Film Fellowship supported this dissertation. My professors in ethnic studies and communications at Mills College taught me how to theorize that life is complicated through culture. Vivian Chin, Julia Sudbury, and Ken Burke introduced me to many of the texts and ideas here, which made me want more. The friendships I found during graduate school sustain me today. Most of this project was written in intensive writing camps at the Kate Kane/Joyce Mariano residence in Chicago. Joyce supported me with her intellectual fortitude, and collaborated with me on many of the good ideas present here. Ms. Kate took on the burden of our care by nourishing our bodies with delicious food and providing sound advice. She is a more reliable and convenient search engine than Google. I am also grateful for Colonel Jackson and Miss Emilia. Their tender energies provided alleviation from the stress of thinking too much during these times. Jason Ruiz transformed me from a disaffected women’s college graduate to a sophisticated intellectual. He is an enthusiastic cheerleader, an astute critic, and loyal friend. He and Jill Doerfler, the greatest roommate and most fashionably coordinated scholar, gave me great comfort especially during my four years in Minnesota. Their companionship was rounded out by: Aaron Carico, Kim Park Nelson and her husband Peter Park Nelson, Heidi Stark, and Jori Carter. Harrod Suarez and Soojin Pate read many bad drafts, and provided guidance and feedback to the very end. These are reliable and generous colleagues and friends, and I am eternally grateful for their company, which kept me buoyant me during the loneliest of times and was always filled with good food, sidesplitting hilarity, and juicy gossip. My biological and nonbiological families are evidence of how the theories available in Asian American cultural practices are lived everyday, and inspired this dissertation. As scholars, filmmakers, writers, political organizers, arts administrators, artists, and curious people, their contributions are central here: Mike Chee, Daryl Chin, Kira Garcia, Jennifer Hayashida and Benj Gerdes, Sarah Jeon and Charlie McGarraugh, So Kim and Brad Gray, Bucky Kim, Rich ii Kim, Diana Lee, Erin Lee, Risa Morimoto, Elisa Paik, Angel Shaw, Marc Tidalgo, John Wong, Chi-hui Yang, and my relatives in the Hyon, Lee, and Lin clans. Christine Balance is dear to me because she migrates with me between many of our different social and professional spheres. Our friendship is interdisciplinary. THANK YOU for listening, asking, and prodding me along. Our conversations about film, politics, food, popular culture, art, and fashion refined many of the arguments from muddled jargon to coherency. I would not think graduate school as a possibility if it were not for my parents. When I was toiling away at my glamorous corporate job in the music industry, they persistently called my office to tell me I was not a “yuppie” (my father’s words) and that I should go to grad school for art (my mother’s idea) or my Ph.D. (both of their ideas). Their faith in the material value of intellectualism and artistic practice as social justice encouraged me to think of a graduate degree in the humanities as a necessary contribution rather than an impractical and vain endeavor. Likewise, I am lucky that my siblings—Jae and Nahyoung—are family that I would choose. Finally, I am indebted to Eric Lin. He furnishes me with courage so I can confront my limitations with vulnerability and nerve. His perspective of the world is like no other. It undoes me for the better. iii Abstract Anxieties of the Fictive: The Immigrant and Asian American Politics of Visibility analyzes Asian American literature and film to theorize the limits of representational politics that depend on visibility and recognition. Dominant discourses in Asian American studies examine the Asian immigrant as a contentious figure in U.S. national politics and culture. This dissertation departs from those frameworks to assess how the figure of the Asian immigrant is touted and suppressed for recognition and legitimacy in the nation and its cultural spheres, and emerges as a source of anxiety in Asian American cultural politics. In historical narratives, the Asian immigrant as a laborer and as a contributor to the nation is used to legitimate the place of Asians in America, but she is also a liminal figure that stands in excess to subjections of visibilities as American as well as Asian American and all its constituent ideals: Asian, Korean, individual, masculine, to name a few. Using cultural analysis, historical contexts, and critical race and gender theory, this project intervenes in common perceptions of the Asian immigrant as only reproductive of politics (i.e. Asian American activisms), culture (i.e. ethnicity and race), labor (i.e. capital), and nationalism (i.e. American dream) to illustrate how the Asian immigrant cannot be reconciled under nationalist tropes, narratives, and aesthetics as a subject. Instead, she emerges as a dangerously transgressive and excessive figure that produces critiques of normative formations of subjectivity and identity. This dissertation periodizes these desires for subjectivity and identity produced against the immigrant as occurring in the late 1970s following the institutionalization of Asian American as a racial and cultural category. I look at how Asian American film and literature, through specific examples and as generic categories, have represented and been defined as “Asian American” in relation to the immigrant to draw out contradictory notions of domestic, racial, and artistic politics and identities. As such, Asian American cultural production cannot guarantee prescriptive and reconciliatory notions of identity between the Asian American, American, and the immigrant. Rather than reading these excesses as failures of America and its legal and cultural apparatuses, the impossibility of subjectivity for Asians in the U.S. points to how Asian American cultural productions reveal alternative and heterogeneous representations of Asian America that are imperceptible, spectacular, and innovative, challenging the disciplinary terms of visibility administered and authorized by institutions and the markets. I observe these excesses through four cases: Eric Liu’s memoir The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker considers how his racial somatic challenges his claims to national identity underwritten by his articulations of English and its acoustic individualism; in Patti Kim’s A Cab Called Reliable, the protagonist, Ahn Joo’s subjectivity as a “Korean-American woman” exceeds the limned terms available by the authorizing narratives of belonging produced by the nation and diaspora; in Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow, the Asian immigrant stands in the shadows of heteromasculinities to critique discourses of equality produced by the state and markets; and Deann Borshay Liem’s adoptee autoethnography First Person Plural reconceives the Asian immigrant as a Korean adoptee to disrupt the naturalizing tendencies of family and nation to think of immigrant labors as generative of new formations of belonging and identity. iv Table of Contents Introduction • 1 One • 27 “I speak flawless, unaccented English”: The Native Speaker and Acoustic Individualism in The Accidental Asian Two • 76 “Way too weird. Way too dark. Way too depressing”: Transnational Compositions as Genealogies of Un/belonging Three • 109 “The right to be whoever the hell they want to be”: Better Luck Tomorrow and Asian American Cultural Politics of Normal Four • 166 “You must’ve been dreaming”: The Immigrant as Adoptee and the Other Possibilities of Assimilation in First Person Plural Epilogue • 210 Bibilography • 220 1 Introduction In many ways, this project is a hypertext of cultural expressions in my life. It catalogues the affects of immigrant shame, schooling in the burgeoning