Global Asian American Popular Cultures

Shilpa Dave, LeiLani Nishime, Tasha Oren

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479837496
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A toolkit for understanding how Asian Americans influence, consume and are reflected by mainstream media. Asian Americans have long been the subject and object of popular culture in the U.S. The rapid circulation of cultural flashpoints—such as the American obsession with K-pop sensations, Bollywood dance moves, and sriracha hot sauce—have opened up new ways of understanding how the categories of “Asian” and “Asian American” are counterbalanced within global popular culture. Located at the crossroads of these global and national expressions, Global Asian American Popular Cultures highlights new approaches to modern culture, with essays that explore everything from music, film, and television to comics, fashion, food, and sports. As new digital technologies and cross-media convergence have expanded exchanges of transnational culture, Asian American popular culture emerges as a crucial site for understanding how communities share information and how the meanings of mainstream culture shift with technologies and newly mobile sensibilities. Asian American popular culture is also at the crux of global and national trends in media studies, collapsing boundaries and acting as a lens to view the ebbs and flows of transnational influences on global and American cultures. Offering new and critical analyses of popular cultures that account for emerging textual fields, global producers, technologies of distribution, and trans-medial circulation, this ground-breaking collectionexplores the mainstream and the margins of popular culture.

Part I

Stars and Celebrities

1

Trans-Pacific Flows

Globalization and Hybridity in Bruce Lee’s Hong Kong Films

Daryl Joji Maeda

Bruce Lee is often imagined as a martial artist who broke out of Asia to become an international superstar. This narrative obscures the decades-long, if not centuries-long, trans-Pacific flows of peoples and cultures from which Lee emerged and that he addressed in his films and martial arts performances. Instead of understanding Hong Kong as the locality from which Lee escaped to enter the global arena, this chapter argues that the three films he made as an adult in Hong Kong are already thoroughly enmeshed in processes of colonialism, migration, hybridization, and globalization. The historian Penny Von Eschen notes briefly that “Bruce Lee’s career was the product of globalization” and illustrates the “multiple global flows” of people, capital, and culture.1 This chapter goes beyond the social history of Lee and his migrations to consider how his Hong Kong films construct a syncretic aesthetic of martial arts to reject the notion of cultural purity in favor of hybridity and privilege migration and diaspora over settlement and home. In short, it shows how representations of fighting provide visual narratives of cultural mixtures and national crossings.

Bruce Lee’s filmic sensibility mirrored his own transnational life. Although his family hailed from Hong Kong, he was born in San Francisco while his father was touring the United States with a Cantonese opera troupe. When he was still an infant, his family returned to Hong Kong, where he grew up and appeared in twenty films as a child actor. He returned to the nation of his birth at the age of eighteen, taught kung fu, and found work in Hollywood, first as Kato in the television series The Green Hornet and later in small roles in films and TV shows. He pitched a television show about a Chinese martial artist to Warner Bros. but was bypassed for David Carradine, the white actor who starred as the Shaolin monk Kwai Chang Caine in the Kung Fu television series. Convinced that he could never surmount racial prejudice in Hollywood, Lee returned to Hong Kong, where he starred in three films that broke box-office records in Hong Kong and throughout Asia.2 Becoming the biggest movie star in Asia finally enabled Lee to star in a Hollywood-produced film. Enter the Dragon (1973) brought Lee his greatest success in the West, but by the time it was released, he was dead, the victim of sensitivity to a prescription medication, an overdose of illegal drugs, a mob hit, or a mysterious kung fu assassination—depending on which version you find most believable.

Although it might be tempting to treat Enter the Dragon as the culmination of Lee’s transnational career, his three prior Hong Kong films show how processes of colonialism and globalization can be comprehended through the visual medium of cinematic martial arts. In sequence, these films depict the creation of a diasporic community, contest colonialism through the construction of a hybrid nationalism, and finally deconstruct cultural and national boundaries. This trilogy of sorts contains an arc that points to an increasing ethos of migration and hybridization and may be read as an allegory of the transnational movements and crossings that have characterized the Pacific for over a century.

Diasporic Community in The Big Boss

Bruce Lee’s first movie with the Hong Kong production company Golden Harvest was The Big Boss (1971), which was released in the United States as Fists of Fury. In it, he plays Cheng Chao-An, a country bumpkin from China who travels to Thailand to find work. This journey reflects a centuries-old pattern of out-migration from southern China, which has created diasporic communities of ethnic Chinese in nations throughout Southeast Asia. Cheng obtains a job in an ice factory that turns out to be a drug-smuggling operation run by the titular Big Boss. Although he has vowed to his mother not to fight, circumstances eventually force his hands (and feet), and he ends up kicking all kinds of ass. The film explores major themes of loyalty, ambition, romance, and revenge. But most important, for the purposes of this essay, it shows the creation and maintenance of a diasporic community.

The film opens by showing Cheng arriving on a ferryboat and quickly being apprised of the dangers of this new land. The uncle who greets him at the ferry warns, “Life here is very different from back home, so be careful.” Uncle’s warning proves prophetic, for when they stop at a roadside stand for shaved ice treats, four local thugs accost the pretty female proprietor and a little boy selling rice cakes. Uncle reminds Cheng that he has promised not to fight, pulling out a jade pendant that Cheng wears under his shirt. Throughout the film, this “locket” symbolizes Cheng’s promise to his mother to avoid fighting. Fortunately, another man arrives and singlehandedly dispatches all four hoodlums. He turns out to be Cheng’s cousin, Hsu Chien, who throughout the film functions as Cheng’s alter ego in four ways. First, he is an awesome fighter; second, he resembles Cheng facially; third, he wears dark Chinese garb identical to Cheng’s uniform; and finally, he ardently seeks justice for his community.

Hsu Chien leads Cheng and Uncle to a house that stands in stark contrast to the alienation suggested in the opening scene and introduces Cheng to six more male cousins and his sister, Chiao Mei, who eventually becomes Cheng’s romantic interest and represents family and community throughout the film. The male cousins live together, working, eating, and sleeping communally and calling each other “brother” at various times to emphasize their close bonds.

Cheng joins his cousins in working at the ice factory, where two cousins accidentally discover the drug-smuggling operation then subsequently disappear. Hsu Chien attempts to find them, confronts the Big Boss, and eventually falls victim himself to the Boss’s henchmen. When Cheng and the remaining cousins go on strike to protest the disappearances, the factory manager orders a band of thugs to attack them. Mindful of his promise to his mother, Cheng watches the mayhem wistfully, even while the workers take the brunt of the beatings and his cousins urge him to fight. But when a hoodlum rips the locket off Cheng’s chest, the trademark Bruce Lee snarl emerges, he emits a fierce howl, and jumps into the fray. The fight ends with the thugs fleeing from Cheng, but he finds his jade pendant—and his promise—shattered.

Rather than punishing Cheng, the manager promotes him to foreman and takes him to a dinner where he is plied with extravagant food, abundant liquor, and available prostitutes. When Cheng awakes in the morning, he finds a naked woman snuggled up against him, but he dresses quickly, only to bump into Chiao Mei as he scurries out of the brothel. Cheng returns to the factory and orders the laborers to resume working, but they refuse and instead accuse him of selling out. These juxtapositions show that Cheng has betrayed the trust of his surrogate family and strained his ability to belong to the diasporic community that they have built.

Cheng returns to grill the prostitute, who informs him that the factory is a drug-shipping operation. After he leaves, the Boss’s son kills the prostitute and kidnaps Chiao Mei to add to his father’s harem of drug-addicted prostitutes. Cheng goes to the factory, where he discovers the drugs and Hsu Chien’s body encased in the blocks of ice. But as he is processing the information, the Boss’s son and a gang of knife-wielding minions attack. In a pitched battle Cheng defeats them and kills the Boss’s son. He rushes home only to find all of his male cousins massacred and Chiao Mei missing. The morning finds Cheng sitting beside the river, contemplating the slaughter, as a voiceover externalizes his inner thoughts: “I promised my mother I’d keep out of trouble. . . . If I had any sense, I’d get out of here. If anything happened to me, who would take care of Mom? . . . She’s over seventy, but I can’t just walk away from this. I just can’t do that, I can’t.” A vision of his slain cousins and Chiao Mei appears in the water as he ponders his old promise to his mother. Torn between the vow made in the homeland and allegiance to his newfound community in a new land, Cheng tosses his packet of belongings into the river. This symbolizes a fundamental break. He is casting aside the things he brought from the motherland and making a new start, declaring that his primary allegiance belongs to the community of expatriates he has joined. He stares heavenward and vows vengeance, an act that will cement his place in the new nation.

In the climactic scene, Cheng runs to the Big Boss’s compound where he faces off with a half-dozen guards armed with knives, all of whom are Thai rather than Chinese and clad in gloriously garish 1970s Western-style slacks and shirts, in contrast to Cheng’s simple black and white Chinese garb. The fight takes place on a lawn in front of a reflecting pool, behind which is a Thai-style Buddhist shrine, a visual reminder that they are not in China but in a foreign land. After quickly defeating the guards, Cheng takes on the Big Boss himself. Like Cheng, the Boss also wears a collarless, wide-cuffed Chinese coat, and alternating shots of their feet show Cheng and the Boss to be wearing identical dark gray/black flowing Chinese pants and canvas shoes. They match each other unarmed, punch for punch and kick for kick, until the Boss grabs two knives from the fallen guards and begins to get the best of Cheng. During the fight, one of the Boss’s prostitutes frees Chiao Mei and urges her to flee. The fight ends when the Boss flings a knife at Cheng, but Cheng kicks it back and buries it in his gut. Cheng thrusts eight fingers deep into the Boss’s chest and punches him in the head repeatedly until both collapse, Cheng motionless atop the dead body of the Boss in a symbolic death of his own.

After Cheng finally manages to kill the Boss, Chiao Mei arrives with two cars full of Thai police officers who rush out to capture Cheng. He shakes them off and threatens to fight, but when Chiao Mei cries, “Listen Cheng, give up!” he looks up, as if conscious of his situation for the first time in a sudden rebirth of sorts, and he raises his bloodstained hands to be arrested. The film concludes with the handcuffed Cheng and Chiao Mei walking toward the police cars, flanked by the officers. This ending is unsatisfying in the sense that it presumes that Cheng will have to face trial for murder, but in other ways it represents a new beginning for him. To begin with, when he fights the Big Boss, Cheng takes on his evil doppelgänger. By slaying the Boss, Cheng not only exacts revenge for his cousins but also eliminates his old self. Similarly, Cheng’s alter ego Hsu Hsien lies buried in ice. With these symbolic doubles dead, Cheng must build a new identity and self. But what will that identity be? Although the film ends before answering that question definitively, it certainly implies that the new beginning will occur in Thailand with Chiao Mei. Cheng’s submission to Thai justice suggests that whatever fate awaits him, he will face it not in China but in this land that will become his new home. Furthermore, Cheng and Chiao Mei walking together arm in arm toward the police car suggests that the two of them will enter the future together and that the family they build will replace the lost diasporic community represented by the cousins. Thus, The Big Boss represents how diasporic migrations create new senses of identity and belonging as people leave their homelands behind.

The Globalization of Martial Arts in Fist of Fury

Bruce Lee’s second film, Fist of Fury (1972), came out hot on heels of The Big Boss. The two were scheduled for release in the United States close together, and a mix-up resulted in their titles being switched. The Big Boss was supposed to be called The Chinese Connection, a reference to The French Connection (1971), a then-current film about narcotics trafficking, while the title of the second film was mistranslated as Fists of Fury (note the pluralization of “fists”). During export or import, the reels were placed in the wrong cans, and the titles were thus swapped, so the first film became known in the U.S. as Fists of Fury and second film as The Chinese Connection despite having nothing to do with drug smuggling.3 (In this essay I refer to films by their original titles, simply because they make more sense.) The titling blunder shows how travels across national borders and cultural and linguistic boundaries can deform meanings, but Fist of Fury also demonstrates how the transnational migrations can result in wondrous new hybrid forms.

On the surface, the subject matter of Fist of Fury appears to be ill suited for exploring the notion of hybridity. Bruce Lee plays Cheng Chao-an, a student of the Jing Wu school of martial arts in early twentieth-century Shanghai. In the film, martial arts provide an arena for contests over national supremacy and expressions of national pride. During this period, China was humiliated by a series of unequal treaties that granted foreign nations, including Japan, extraterritorial rights in China in places such as the International Settlement of Shanghai, where foreigners enjoyed rights over Chinese citizens. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Cheng is denied entrance to a park that features a sign reading “No Dogs and Chinese Allowed”.

Historically speaking, the real Jing Wu school was established after the unsuccessful Boxer Rebellion, in which martial fighters tried to oust British imperialists from China. The school was intended to preserve the teaching of various kung fu styles and was thus closely associated with Chinese nationalism.4 In the film, the leader of the Jing Wu school and Cheng’s beloved t...