A Race So Different

Performance and Law in Asian America

Joshua Chambers-Letson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814771617
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Coutumes et traditions

“Legal history, theater, and everyday performance come together in this illuminating, profound, and intrepid study.” – Josephine Lee, University of Minnesota

1 / “That May Be Japanese Law, but Not in My Country”: Madame Butterfly and the Problem of Law

Tuan Anh Nguyen spent most of his life in the United States. He was born in Vietnam to a US American father and Vietnamese mother in September 1969. His mother abandoned Nguyen and his civilian contractor father, Joseph Boulais, when he was only a few years old. In 1975, Boulais returned to the United States with his six-year-old son, whom he continued to raise. At the age of twenty-two, Nguyen pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual assault on a minor in a Texas state court. A few years later in 1996, while serving out the terms of his eight-year sentence, Congress passed the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA). IIRAIRA mandates the deportation of aliens convicted of a felony charge. As a result, the Immigration and Naturalization Service initiated deportation proceedings against Nguyen, and an immigration judge subsequently ordered his deportation to Vietnam. Despite having a citizen father and being raised by this father in the United States, the US government considered him to be an alien and targeted him for deportation to a place he hardly knew.

Nguyen’s legal status was written nearly thirty years before his birth, at the height of the Korean War and the US military’s occupation of Japan. In 1952, Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Act, heavily revising the section of the US code that regulates immigration and naturalization. As part of the act, the legislature clarified citizenship eligibility for children born abroad to unwed parents when only one parent is a US citizen. While children born to citizen mothers automatically receive citizenship retroactive to birth, children born to citizen fathers must meet three additional requirements for citizenship eligibility. Nguyen appealed his case, arguing that the differential burden violated both fathers’ and sons’ equal protection rights. (Unaware of the differential burden, Boulais had not registered his son as a citizen within the statute of limitations.) Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Supreme Court opinion in Nguyen v. INS affirmed the constitutionality of the law, counterintuitively arguing that the three-part bar—despite the fact that it made it three times easier for fathers (often US servicemen) to escape responsibility for illegitimate children born overseas—forwarded a legitimate government interest in the “facilitation of a relationship between parent [father] and child.”¹

In a 2009 New York Times interview, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who was among the dissenting Justices) described Nguyen (and a similar case, Miller v. Albright) in terms that directly associated it with the legacy of US imperialism in Asia. In a surprise move, she did so by suggesting that the majority’s ruling was written under the sign of a popular Orientalist opera: “They [the majority] were held back by a way of looking at the world in which a man who wasn’t married simply was not responsible. There must have been so many repetitions of Madame Butterfly in World War II. And for Justice [John Paul] Stevens [who voted in the majority in Nguyen and penned the Miller opinion] that was part of his experience.”² Ginsburg’s interview implies that the impact of Madame Butterfly extends beyond the proscenium arch, insinuating itself into the high court’s interpretation of the law. At the same time, she evidences the ways in which Western audiences regularly mistake the fiction of Madame Butterfly for a reality. As if the opera were a template for actually occurring incidents, she muses, “there must have been so many repetitions of Madame Butterfly.” Somewhere in the middle of Nguyen and Madame Butterfly, the difference between a legal reality and an onstage theatrical spectacle collapses.

In 1907, Giacomo Puccini premiered Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.³ It is a tragic story of a Japanese bride in nineteenth-century Japan who is married to and ultimately abandoned by her US American husband, ending in the young bride’s suicide. Since its debut, Madama Butterfly has become a centerpiece of most major opera companies’ repertories, and by some accounts it is one of the most produced operas in the world. Due to its iconic and canonical status, Madama Butterfly has contributed significantly to the shaping of cultural stereotypes of Asian difference and Asian femininity. As such, the Butterfly narrative is a central critical object for the field of Asian American studies.⁴ But how is it that Madame Butterfly has come to influence the writing of American law, and in what surprising ways does the narrative itself function as a vessel for the transmission of knowledge produced about Asian racial difference in US law?

This chapter argues that the legal management of Asian and Asian American difference is not simply the historical background against which the various versions of Madame Butterfly were written but that the Butterfly narratives themselves function as agents for the law’s codification and transmission. Madame Butterfly is a product, manifestation, and ultimately a representative of exclusion-era jurisprudence; it is part of the dominant culture’s juridical unconscious. This term is a legally focused amendment to Fredric Jameson’s description of literature as part of the “political unconscious,” whereby “master narratives have inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them; such allegorical narrative signifieds are a persistent dimension of literary and cultural texts precisely because they reflect a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality.”⁵ As I will demonstrate, the Butterfly narrative neatly aligns with exclusion-era jurisprudence in areas of the law ranging from the immigration code to courtroom procedure and child custody. As a work of popular entertainment, it codified and represented these narratives, giving them the verisimilitude of flesh-and-blood presence onstage while confirming and embedding them within the national culture. Furthermore, as Ginsburg’s comment suggests, Madame Butterfly’s legal force is not contained in the twentieth century. Due to its continued popularity, it still functions as part of the nation’s juridical unconscious. It acts as a medium for the continued transmission of exclusion-era ideas about Asian racial difference, projecting these ideas onto the contemporary Asian American body.

Figure 1.1. Geraldine Farrar in the 1907 Metropolitan Opera premiere of Madama Butterfly. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera Archives.

Before continuing, I need to make one key point about my intervention into critical analyses of the Butterfly narrative. In the compendium of critical work published about the narrative, few scholars have critically interrogated the role of law in Madame Butterfly. But the law is everywhere in the heroine’s tale, including lengthy discussions of the marriage contract that binds Cho-Cho-San to her US American husband, legal counsel provided by her friends after she is abandoned, and a stunning scene in which the heroine imagines herself performing before a judge in a US court. Important Asian Americanist analyses of the narrative have often overlooked the legal theme in their studies of the Orientalist configurations of gender and the spectacle of US empire in the Butterfly narrative. While some of the studies have focused on the opera, many more have turned to works inspired by the opera, including two seminal works that premiered in 1989: David Henry Hwang’s Broadway play M. Butterfly and Claude Michel-Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s musical Miss Saigon.⁶ Much less attention has been paid to the two texts on which the opera is based, John Luther Long’s 1898 novella and Long and David Belasco’s successful Broadway adaptation of this work in 1900.⁷ The three original versions of Madame Butterfly were, like their descendants, popular and commercial successes, but few contemporary studies offer a comparative analysis of all three. If one looks at each version individually, the law seems simply to be an otherwise random incident of plot, which might account for the literature’s critical oversight of this factor. However, when the versions are read comparatively, it becomes clear that the law is a consistent concern that is central to and survives every early iteration of the story.

A focus on the problem of law in Madame Butterfly is necessary insofar as it supplements a missing piece of the Butterfly puzzle. My interest in the problem of law does not offer an alternative to critical investigations of race, gender, and empire in Madame Butterfly so much as it builds on this body of scholarship in order to offer a robust example of the ways in which these phenomena are produced at the intersection of law and performance in the narrative. It should be observed that one of the notable exceptions to the paucity of scholarship about law and Madame Butterfly is an article written by family law scholar Rebecca Bailey-Harris. Bailey-Harris’s 1991 article is a study of the “conflict of laws” posed by Madame Butterfly and analyzes the recently codified Meiji reforms of 1898 in Japan in relation to US jurisprudence of the same time.⁸ While the author provides a precise accounting for each and every legal question that Madame Butterfly raises regarding both US and Japanese law, her approach is avowedly guided by a mechanistic attention to the “issues of concern to a lawyer in the audience [that] arise from the plot.” Bailey-Harris goes so far as to ask whether the heroine would have been “better advised to refrain from so drastic a step [her suicide]” given the likelihood that both the United States and Japan would have recognized her marriage.⁹ Like Ginsburg, Bailey-Harris treats Madame Butterfly as if it were a possible historical reality, exhibiting little critical interest in the fact that the heroine is a fictional construct structured by bourgeois, racist, sexist, and imperialist aesthetic conventions. As an alternative, I offer a close reading of the problem of law in Madame Butterfly, one that attends to both the questions of law and aesthetics, in order to demonstrate the legal function of an aesthetic performance which works alongside the law to transmit and codify Orientalist notions about gendered, racial difference for Asians and Asian Americans.

This chapter is divided into three parts. After mapping out the cultural significance and the historical development of the three versions of Madame Butterfly, I trace the alignment between Long’s novella and Asian-exclusion legal discourse. Part 2 expands this analysis to focus on the legal theme within Madame Butterfly as it reflects Asian American jurisprudence in the late nineteenth century. Part 3 brings us into the present with a focus on Trouble, the mixed-race progeny of Pinkerton and Cho-Cho-San’s love affair. I thus conclude with an assessment of the ways in which this mixed Asian figure becomes manifest as a problem for contemporary law and culture.

Prologue: A Brief History of the Three Butterflies

It is little coincidence that the publication and dissemination of the various versions of Madame Butterfly occurred during a period of increased anxiety about the threats posed to national and racial borders by Asian bodies flowing in and out of the sphere of the US empire. Long’s novella was published in 1898, sixteen years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the same year that the United States officially began both the colonization of the Philippines and the illegal annexation of Hawai‘i. At the end of the nineteenth century, US border definition was threatened by the empire’s territorial expansion outward and the need to draw foreign bodies inward in order to satiate the needs of expanding capital.¹⁰ Legal and cultural apparatuses thus began to mark Asians as the exception to national, legal, and cultural forms of theatrical as a means of managing and containing the crisis that they posed to the constitution of ideal borders and national subjects. As a representative of the dominant culture’s juridical unconscious, Madame Butterfly exemplifies Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns’s assertion that US American popular culture is “part of the ideological state apparatus that extend[s] U.S. cultural hegemony” and empire.¹¹ It manifests and embodies the racial ideology of the dominant culture through aesthetic means.

The short synopsis of all three narratives is this: a US officer, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, is stationed in Nagasaki, Japan. Beset by boredom, he takes a fourteen-year-old Japanese wife—Cho-Cho-San (or Cio-Cio-San in the opera). Eventually Pinkerton abandons his Japanese child-bride, who remains steadfast in the belief that he will return. In his absence, she raises their son, curiously named Trouble. Importantly, Trouble was born after Pinkerton’s departure and without his knowledge. Pinkerton’s friend Sharpless, a US consular officer, remains concerned for the young woman and her son and attempts to convince the girl to remarry. She declines, believing that her marriage is protected by the laws governing marriage in the United States and that she will be able to press her case in a US court, if necessary. Pinkerton eventually returns from the states but—to Cho-Cho-San’s great horror—with a white (US American) wife. As a result, Cho-Cho-San kills herself in the hopes that Pinkerton will claim and raise his son.

John Luther Long never set foot in Japan, and according to opera historian Arthur Groos, much of his narrative was pieced together from collaboration with Long’s elder sister, Jennie Correll. Correll lived in Nagasaki for a number of years as a missionary before returning to the United States in 1897.¹² The centrality of the question of law in the three versions of Madame Butterfly may have been an accident of autobiography, as Long did not make his living as a novelist and dramatist but as a lawyer.¹³ The story first reached the upper- and middle-class audience of Century Magazine in January 1898. It proved so ...