Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture

Asia in Flight

Sheng-mei Ma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136893933
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book offers an incisive and ambitious critique of Asian Diaspora culture, looking specifically at literature and visual popular culture. Sheng-mei Ma's engaging text discusses issues of self and its relationship with Asian Diaspora culture in the global twenty-first century.

Using examples from Asia, Asian America, and Asian Diaspora from the West, the book weaves a narrative that challenges the twenty-first century triumphal discourse of Asia and argues that given the long shadow cast across modern film and literature, this upward mobility is inescapably escapist, a flight from itself; Asia's stunning self-transformation is haunted by self-alienation. The chapters discuss a wealth of topics, including Asianness, Orientalism, and Asian American identity, drawing on a variety of pop culture sources from The Matrix Trilogy to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This book forms an analysis of the new idea of Asian Diaspora that cuts across area, ethnicity, and nation, incorporating itself into the contemporary global culture whilst retaining a distinct Asian flavor.

Covering the mediums of literature, film, and visual cultures, this book will be of immense interest to scholars and students of Asian studies and literature, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and film.

Part I
Asian diaspora visual culture

1
Shadow’s shadow in visual culture

Anime’s doll, alien’s home

Just as Disney’s Peter Pan, forever young, flies from aging and time, which constitute life, his shadow takes leave of the ball and chain of the person.¹ Recapturing his shadow, Peter has it sewn back to his soles, by the maternal Wendy with a needle and thread. Earlier, Peter tries in vain to “glue” back the shadow by rubbing soap on his toes. A male stereotype unaccustomed to domestic chores, Peter Pan mistakes cleansing, purging by means of soap, for affixing, conjoining. Perhaps, subconsciously, Peter wishes to be done with the shadow as much as the shadow wishes to be done with him. Therefore, the final act of coupling continues to uncouple, until Wendy the “Little Mother” and embodiment of social obligations shackles them together. Figuratively, Wendy is Peter Pan’s shadow, and vice versa, wedded for mutual needs: humans like Wendy want to fly, but the high-flying Peter cannot bear the loss of his shadow. To cast no shadow, that is, to leave no traces under the sun, lies dubiously between immortality, as the bodyless Tripitaka crosses Reach Sky River at the end of The Journey to the West,² and death, as ghosts are shadows of the living.³ Wendy and Peter Pan are the pair of the kite flyer on the ground and the flying kite in the sky, a mere dot in the distance to each other that form a symbiotic coexistence.

Theirs is the human condition: we are forever sewn at the heels with our own shadow. To live means to be tagged along, scarcely aware of the unfamiliar familiar, the presence by oneself that is absent in one’s consciousness, in part because of the shadow’s shape-shifting elusiveness. However, the master–slave relationship of person and shadow reverses when the person becomes an empty shell to hold flights of fancy, or when the physical, bodily existence is there in order to sustain out-of-body reveries. The negligible shadow becomes a poetic trope for fleeting yet ceaseless waves of human desires. Shadows externalize the metamorphosis of internal mental constructs, the stream of consciousness in modernist terms. The psychic screen, like the sea, is never blank and still, perpetually reflecting the sky and in flux. Seemingly irrelevant and amorphous, such psychic, even archetypal images dictate human behavior, frequently projecting inner longings and anxieties in the form of doppelganger, double, alter ego, and shadow. Does an imaginary shadow in literature and art cast its own shadow? What would a shadow’s shadow be? Shadows of a shadow; dreams within a dream; flashbacks within a flashback; desires conjured up by another desire; clicks to enter, again and again, the labyrinthine virtual reality, perhaps, virtually, our reality.

Before its postmodern, self-reflexive turn to shadow’s shadow, the notion of shadow has existed for centuries, certainly pre-dating Walt Disney. In both West and East, the centrality of human is a late invention of Enlightenment and modernity. The Old Testament decrees that God made man “in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26), that “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). Adam is thus a shadow of the divine, Eve a shadow of the patriarchal Adam. The Jewish tradition tells of the giant Golem created out of, like Adam, clay or dust, one blessed by God, the other not. Golem is likewise a shadow of Adam. More fundamentally, these living, animate creatures and their lifeless, inanimate source, dust or death, reflect each other.⁴ The Eastern literary tradition abounds as well with the motif of shadows. The contemporary and kindred soul to Plato, who writes of shadows on the cave wall,⁵ Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (369?–286? BC) allegorizes and blurs reality and dreamscape. Waking up from a butterfly dream, Zhuangzi muses that he is uncertain whether he dreamed of the butterfly or the butterfly dreamed of him. Subsequent exegeses never question the human apriority of Zhuangzi’s dream, the butterfly being Zhuangzi’s shadow. Conceivably, though, the butterfly’s dream could proceed apace, with Zhuangzi awakening within rather than from that dream. Zhuangzi, therefore, is the shadow to the shadow. After all, it is disingenuous to decenter humanity while never unseating the pre-eminence of Homo sapiens, from the ancient time to present-day animal studies.

Zhuangzi would have been far more subversive to the value system had he had a David Cronenberg fly dream or a William Burrough cockroach dream.⁶ An un-poetic metaphor is perhaps an oxymoron to a classical philosopher, unimaginable until the existentialists. Classical dream within a dream crumples into modernist nightmare within a nightmare when human beings are conceived not by a butterfly, but by Kafka’s vermin. Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis (Kafka 1915) does not wake up to find himself transformed into a beetle; he has been one all along, shrouded in residual human image. In the words of Jeff Goldblum playing the human-fly, mad scientist protagonist in Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986): “I am an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. Now the dream is over and the insect is awake.” Given that the pronoun “who” refers only to human beings, the grammatical glitch denotes a transgression against boundaries of species and systems, in effect dehumanizing God’s look-alikes, now insect look-alikes. Lest the charge of one-upmanship be leveled against my coinage of shadow’s shadow in view of the plethoric literature on shadow, I am in fact guilty of one-downmanship for undoing human-centric discourse.

Shadow’s shadow destabilizes the relationship between person and shadow, shifting away from the supremacy of personhood. To valorize shadow as the originator renders the person shadowy. Indeed, humans have willingly turned their bodies into shadows or reflections of desire, such as Trekkies or Star Trek aficionados and anime fans’ cosplay (costume play or masquerade). A drastic self-erasure or -makeover is East Asian plastic surgery to simulate youth and beauty, of a singularly Caucasian strain. Despite the illusion of a new self in sci-fi and cosmetic idealizations, a cosplayer wears a mask rather than natural skin, and even a skin graft begins to age once it heals from plastic surgery. Take, for instance, cosmetic surgery perpetrated in East Asia. Reluctant to accept bodies in their natural state, patients have bones fractured and flesh slashed to reflect youth or an essentialized Caucasian facial feature and physique, which is but a shadow of actual Caucasianness. The patient then becomes the shadow of a shadow. Asia subliminally sheds the old and traditional self for a shade fairer, literal in the cosmetic transformation of piaobai (bleaching), whereby a face is the dirty linen to be whitened like the tragic Michael Jackson (1958–2009). Extreme form of fandom or seeker of the fountain of youth come to resemble religiosity-inflected trance when a possessed human mind and body lend themselves to an outside spirit that no longer exists physically, thus a shadow of a previous self. That shadow then casts its spell over a medium in trance, who is to echo an echo of a being that is now a non-being.

The phenomenon of psychic shadow is theorized by Sigmund Freud (1919) in “The Uncanny.” Parsing the etymology of the German word heimlich, Freud argues that its meaning of familiar and home-like turns, in due course, into “concealed and kept out of sight” (375), or private and secretive. Heimlich thus mirrors its antonym of unheimlich (unfamiliar, strange, uncanny). “[T]his uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (394), Freud concludes: “[T]he unheimlich is what was once heimlich, home-like, familiar; the prefix ‘un’ is the token of repression” (399). Other than the word play, Freud draws heavily from the German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816). Freud analyzes Hoffmann’s obsessive, paranoid, feverish “dream-text,” equating the recurring motif of eye-gouging or blinding with castration. Hoffmann describes the beautiful automaton in the words of the protagonist Nathaniel’s disinterested friend:

She [Olimpia] would be beautiful, but that her eyes seem to have no ray of life; they always seem to lack the power of sight. Her gait is always curiously measured, as though her every movement were produced by some mechanism like clockwork. She plays and sings with the disagreeably perfect, soulless timing of a machine, and she dances similarly. Olimpia gave us a very weird feeling; we wanted nothing to do with her; we felt that she was only pretending to be a living being, and that there was something very strange about her.

(Hoffman 2000: 111)

Nathaniel is nonetheless enthralled by Olimpia, mechanical “like clockwork,” sightless and soulless. That the window to the soul is shut renders suspect any claim to living organism. Olimpia is created in part by Coppola/Coppelius, whose name, Freud observes, derives both from the root “coppo” for “eye-socket” and from “coppella” for crucible (382). True to their names, Coppola peddles spectacles; his avatar Coppelius, the Sandman who traumatized Nathaniel’s childhood, was an alchemist. Eyes are indeed fetishized in the title itself. Explaining to the child Nathaniel, his mother likens the Sandman to a figure of speech, meaning “you are sleepy, and can’t keep your eyes open, as though someone had thrown sand in them” (86). Natty the family’s old nurse is more graphic: “He’s a wicked man who comes to children when they don’t want to go to bed and throws handfuls of sand into their eyes; that makes their eyes fill with blood and jump out of their heads” (87). In contrast to Natty’s horror story, parents in real life today continue to soothe frightened children with their eyes crusted shut upon waking up that it is the Sandman’s sleepy dust. Roy Orbison also croons sweetly, alliteratively in “In Dreams”: “The candy-colored clown they call sandman/Take us to sleep every night.”

Whether Natty’s and Hoffmann’s Gothic horror or parents’ and Orbison’s bedtime story, the Sandman does not come to take us to bed, the Sandman is us, and we are the Sandman. Drowsiness arises from within our body, not from without. Our body also secretes skin cells and dead matter, releasing eye discharge, among other things. The waste expelled from the body used to be part of the body; the refuse of ashes and dust will be the eventuality of the body. On a more practical note, parents rehearse the tale of the Sandman to impose an objective, “stranger” authority on sleepy children possibly throwing a temper tantrum: their little bodies wish to “go nighty night,” but they will themselves to stay awake through hyperactivity. The Sandman is deployed like a Freudian fetish, easing and obviating the transition to sleep and awakening, yet marking and memorializing the disjunction of day and night. The paradox of concomitant disavowal and acknowledgement informs the trope of sand. Sand irritates eyes, which are closed to purge foreign objects through tearing for the ultimate purpose of reopening the eyes. Likewise, we sleep in order to replenish ourselves and to wake up, to stop dreaming. But we often wake up from our nightly dreams to daydream; Christians also view our eternal sleep as returning to the Lord, thus eternal life. Wakefulness and sleep, living and dead, and the animate and the inanimate interface, as elegized by T. S. Eliot’s protagonist over London Bridge in The Waste Land (1922): “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Common folks may feel like zombies to the poet given to doomsday hyperboles. Eliot’s narrator, however, echoes the ranting of Hoffmann’s mad man/ prophet, Nathaniel: “each individual, fancying himself to be free, only served as a plaything for the cruelty of dark forces” (100). Humans are but marionettes in the fixed game of life, its outcome predetermined.

By following Hoffmann’s lead, Freud, Our Father of Psychoanalysis, seems to have committed a Freudian slip himself, failing to parse “Sandman” in relation to wakefulness and sleep, person and shadow. The Sandman splices together the inanimate sand and the animate man. A man is sand, puny and negligible, infinitesimal and indistinguishable. Each person’s life, like sand in the hourglass, seeps away grain by grain, barely noticeable, unless one is cruelly reminded that “The sand goes pit-pat in your glass.”⁷ One of the earliest timepieces, the hourglass is also called sandglass and sand clock, regulating, standardizing human life. The spontaneity of human organism comes under the control of mechanical time and social evolution. Not only do sand and clockwork go back a long way but sand from the earth heralds ensuing raw materials from Nature—gold, silver, bronze, iron, and the like— that produce tools, machines, and Ovid’s periodization of mythical time in The Metamorphoses (1955: 33–35). What the Creator makes from clay, the created simulate with Nature’s resources. Whereas human and machine are oftentimes dichotomized, their uncanny kinship can be traced back to the single entity called the Sandman. Both human and machine are made from clay and other inanimate materials of the earth; they grow estranged in part because they were mirror images in time immemorial. Coppelius’ alchemy in “The Sandman” alleges to transubstantiate crass metals into gold, as if breathing the mystery of life into insentient objects.

Whereas medieval alchemy transforms metal into gold, modern sci-fi melts human and machine, spirit and matter, into cyborgs. Even before Donna Haraway’s (2004) “A Manifesto of Cyborg”, machines and matter have long shadowed human life and body. Machines such as Coppolla’s spectacles and clocks encase our body; biochemically engineered pills and medical procedures—implant, transplant, pacemaker, hip replacement—prolong our lifespan. Both the supernatural extreme of alchemy and magic, on the one hand, and the dehumanized extreme of machine and artificiality, on the other, form a trinity with human, which—not who—is one point of the triangle instead of the center. This skepticism of humanity motivates Mamoru Oshii in his anime Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004), which revolves around an investigation of homicides committed by sexaroids, robots designed to serve at the “pleasure” of their owners. Anime, in Baudrillard’s term, is simulacrum, reproductions without originals. Oshii’s detective protagonists, Major Motoko Kusanagi and Batou, are collages of idealized, hence nonexistent, Caucasianness and Japaneseness, masculine muscularity and feminine curvaceousness. The Major’s Asian guazi (melon-seed or oval) face is exoticized with blue-eye inlay in Ghost in the Shell (1995). Each of the multitude of sexaroids in the 2004 sequel embodies cutesy, teenage gaucheness with sensuous red lips and turquoise, bluish green eyes. Adult eroticism and girlish, pedophiliac vulnerability intensify each other, culminating in the implosion of female bodies.⁸ Females implode or invite their own downfall, justifying the violence visited upon female nudes, which, in slow motion, feasts the male gaze. One of Oshii’s tactics is to have the God-like, omnipresent Major download her mind into one of the multitudinous sexaroids in order to rescue Batou besieged by sexaroids. As if celebrating female empowerment in a Goddess, Oshii orchestrates one sexaroid, annihilating her numerous identical twins. A killer girl kills her automaton shadows, a horde admittedly more desirable than Star Wars’ androids or The Lord of the Rings’ orcs. But the exoskeletal, insect-like beauty is repeatedly imploded, from inside out, plates of cheeks and breasts ripped open, as if the ballistic penetration comes from within, launched by a mirror image of all the victims. Just as children’s imagination enlivens their dolls, Oshii’s male fantasy animates sex toys hand-drawn against a computer-generated background. It is ironic that the remarkable craftsmanship and the mind-bending philosophizing on the cyborg future gift-wrap Oshii’s phallic fixation and Occidentalist, Orientalist stereotypes. Similar to Freud (1900) generalizing on the basis of his own gender bias and sexual neurosis in The Interpretation of Dreams, Oshii and many a patriarch misconstrue male fantasy as universal humanity.

Anime’s doll

Oshii’s sexaroids revolt against their masters because they are unwilling to be sex slaves, whose ghost or soul used to belong to teenage runaways, now extracted and “dubbed” by yakuza into sexaroids. These robots hence feel virtually real to pedophiliac users/anime viewers but remain shadow’s shadow, much in the same way virtual reality entangles with our reality. The title’s choice of “ghost” and “shell” strategically devalue, depreciate “soul” and “body,” human qualities already called into question by the title. In particular, “ghost” renders spirit or soul duplicitous, a spin-off of the self, yet a non-self as well. Such Eastern tendency to challenge the supremacy of humanity via shadows recurs in classics as well as in modern texts. In addition to Zhuangzi, Javanese Wayang Kulit (shadow puppetry), Japanese Bunraku (three-person manipulated puppetry), Chinese and Taiwanese budaishi (hand puppetry), and more comprise a long tradition.⁹ Oshii is not alone is continuing this legacy in anime: Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles (1928) deploys Bunraku puppets and The Makioka Sisters (1946–48) draws from Bunraku’s firefly hunt. Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior, 1980) deals with a shogun’s double after the shogun is assassinated, a shadow without the person. Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien memorializes the hand puppet master Li Tianlu in In the Hands of a Puppet Master (1993) and returns to hand puppetry in the French-language Le voyage du ballon rouge (2007). The Bhutan–Tibetan Khyentse Norbu orchestrates an impromptu shadow play during a blackout in The Cup (1999).

Oshii’s anime performs a shadow play with puppets, either the blue-eyed Major or the Schwarzenegger-...

Table of contents

• Routledge contemporary Asia series
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Asian diaspora visual culture
• Part II Asian diaspora literature
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index