The Semblance of Identity

Aesthetic Mediation in Asian American Literature

Christopher Lee

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780804783705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Literaturkritik

The history of Asian American literature reveals the ongoing attempt to work through the fraught relationship between identity politics and literary representation. This relationship is especially evident in literary works which claim that their content represents the socio-historical world. The Semblance of Identity argues that the reframing of the field as a critical, rather than identity-based, project nonetheless continues to rely on the logics of identity.

Drawing on the writings of philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukacs, Christopher Lee identifies a persistent composite figure that he calls the "idealized critical subject, " which provides coherence to oppositional knowledge projects and political practices. He reframes identity as an aesthetic figure that tries to articulate the subjective conditions for knowledge. Harnessing Theodor Adorno's notion of aesthetic semblance, Lee offers an alternative account of identity as a figure akin to modern artwork. Like art, Lee argues, identity provides access to imagined worlds that in turn wage a critique of ongoing histories and realities of racialization.

This book assembles a transnational archive of literary texts by Eileen Chang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-rae Lee, Michael Ondaatje, and Jose Garcia Villa, revealing the intersections of subjectivity and representation, and drawing our attention to their limits.

ONE

The Strange Smell of Truth

Ethnicity, Translation, and Realism in the Cold War Writings of Eileen Chang

This chapter traces a prehistory of the Asian American idealized critical subject by examining the transnational Cold War career of Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920–1995), whose fame as a modern Chinese writer is matched by her almost complete neglect in Asian American Studies.¹ Even though Chang lived in the United States for more than half of her life and wrote extensively in English, she cuts an unlikely figure in a study of Asian American literature because she is primarily known as a Chinese-language author whose works were almost entirely concerned with Chinese topics. Politically speaking, she contributed to the exercise of American power in the Asia Pacific and was opposed to communism throughout her life. My goal is to show how Chang’s career, despite its rather different trajectory, was characterized by an engagement with some of the central themes that would later preoccupy Asian American literary culture.

By reading Chang through the framework of Asian American literary studies, this chapter is motivated by a desire to rethink the assumptions of a field built on the study of English-language writers who inhabit racialized Asian bodies in the United States. These parameters have been accompanied by a set of political criteria based on distinctions such as assimilation versus resistance and complicity with imperialism versus anti-imperialism, terms that reflect how Asian American culture and politics were conceived as a decisive break from the liberal consensus of the 1950s and 1960s. As Viet Nguyen has forcefully argued, these terms institute a rigid political idealism that forecloses more nuanced investigations into how Asians in the United States deployed “flexible strategies” to negotiate the “greater freedom and greater repression” of the Cold War period (66).

Scholars have been somewhat uneven in taking up this challenge: authors who were widely dismissed by cultural nationalists, such as Jade Snow Wong and C. Y. Lee, have received renewed attention in recent years, while others such as Betty Lee Sung and Virginia Lee continue to languish in obscurity.² It is perhaps not surprising that Asian Americanists have had almost nothing to say about Eileen Chang, whose life and career seem even more remote to the concerns of the field. One of the most important writers in modern Chinese literature, Chang was born and raised in Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan and Westernized city during the early twentieth century. Schooled in Chinese literary traditions, she studied English literature at the University of Hong Kong until the outbreak of World War II forced her to curtail her studies and return to Japanese-occupied Shanghai. There, her essays and fiction became instantly popular, but she quickly fell into obscurity after Japan’s defeat in 1945. She remained in Shanghai through the ensuing civil war and the communist victory in 1949, but returned to Hong Kong in 1952, where she worked as a freelance writer and translator for the United States Information Service (USIS). She eventually obtained a visa under the auspices of the 1953 Refugee Relief Act and immigrated to the United States in 1955, where she continued to write until her death in 1995. Always an intensely private person, Chang became notoriously reclusive in her later years, which only heightened her allure. By the time she died in Los Angeles, she had become one of the most iconic figures in modern Chinese culture.³

In the late 1950s, Chang’s earlier works were republished in Hong Kong and Taiwan. As a result, she gained a loyal and devoted following (her writings would not become available again on the mainland until the 1980s, which led to another round of Zhang-re, or “Chang craze”). Chang also wrote a substantial body of essays, translations, and fiction in English and had long wanted to achieve literary fame in the West, although she never succeeded in that regard during her lifetime.⁴ Next to a monumental English translation of late-Qing author Han Banqing’s novel Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai, her English texts include three novels that were written in both English and Chinese: The Rice-Sprout Song (1954), Naked Earth (1956), and The Rouge of the North (1967). The first two are anti-communist novels while the third is an expansion and rewriting of “The Golden Cangue,” a famous story from her early Shanghai period. Only The Rice-Sprout Song was published in the United States (the other two were published in Hong Kong and Britain, respectively); because it played an important role in launching her American career, I focus on this novel in this chapter.

In light of Chang’s personal history as a trans-Pacific migrant, we might place her among Sinophone writers from the same period who spent much of their lives in the United States, such as Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung, Nieh Hualing, and Yu Lihua. While these figures are usually taken up in Area Studies, I situate Chang’s life and works in Asian American literary history in order to highlight how the exercise of U.S. power during the Cold War contributed to the formation of transnational multilingual reading publics on both sides of the Pacific. This chapter focuses on how her treatment of ethnicity mobilizes discursive figures that foreshadow the idealized critical subject of Asian American culture in unexpected ways, even though Chang deploys them to very different ends. By taking a comparative approach, this chapter traces how she foregrounds the epistemological implications of literary realism in a cross-cultural context. Chang’s solution is to embrace an ethnicized authorial position that reinforces her foreignness vis-à-vis the United States, even while her iconoclastic literary practices end up destabilizing the very categories she inhabits.

Exilic Encounters

When she first arrived in the United States, Chang was known to only a handful of readers. In November 1955, while staying in New York, she visited one of the most accomplished figures in modern Chinese thought. Hu Shi (1891–1962) first came to prominence due to his association with the May Fourth movement.⁵ He later served as ambassador to the United States, a delegate at the founding of the United Nations, a member of the National Assembly, and chancellor of Peking University. A supporter of the Nationalist government defeated in 1949, Hu lived in self-imposed exile in the United States from 1949 to 1958, when he moved to Taiwan and became head of the Academia Sinica, a post he held until his death.

In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said suggests that exile is the metaphorical (and all too often actual) condition of the modern intellectual, whose life is characterized by “movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others.” “You cannot,” he writes, “go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation” (53). Exiles occupy

a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another. Being skilled at survival becomes the main imperative, with the danger of getting too comfortable and secure constituting a threat that is constantly to be guarded against. (49)

The lives of exiles such as Hu and Chang were marked by a sense of cultural anxiety that was prompted not only by their new surroundings, but also by their understanding of communism as a destructive force bent on dismantling all aspects of Chinese culture and society. As a result, notes Rey Chow, “émigrés who [could] no longer claim proprietorship of Chinese culture through residency in China henceforth inhabit[ed] the melancholy position of an ethnic group that, as its identity [was] being ‘authenticated’ abroad, [was] simultaneously relegated to the existence of ethnographic specimens under the Western gaze” (“Introduction” 15).

In a Chinese essay published in 1968 titled “Yi Hu Shizhi” (Remembering Hu Shi), Chang describes him fondly as a warm-hearted gentleman whose impeccable manners seemed oddly out of place. Hu lived in a Manhattan concrete building that looked “entirely like a Hong Kong-style apartment,” a realization that made Chang feel “a bit absent-minded, as if [she were] still in Hong Kong” (146).⁶ Amid this “intertwining of time and space” (shikong jiaodie) (147), memories of her previous encounters with his writings erupt in her mind. Once the leading thinker of his generation, Hu, it seemed, had fallen behind the march of history. The ideas that he had once championed at the vanguard of modernization were being denounced in mainland China and in danger of fading into obscurity elsewhere. Chang reflects,

I repeatedly find that when foreigners misunderstand modern China, it is because they do not know the impact of the May Fourth movement. . . . I feel that when youths from present and past generations, as well as those on the Mainland, oppose Hu Shi, they already do not know what they are opposing. I think as long as there exists what the psychologist Jung called the memory of a people [minzu huiyi], experiences like the May Fourth movement will not be forgotten. No matter how long it’s buried, it will continue to be the background of thinking. Jung was as notable as Freud. I cannot help but recall what Freud discovered: that Moses was killed by the Israelites. After the incident, they forbade themselves from mentioning it, but continued to believe in him. (148)

In this suggestive passage, Chang invokes Jung’s notion of collective unconscious to assert Hu’s historical significance. Unlike conventional accounts of modern Chinese history, she depicts the May Fourth movement not as a rebellion against tradition but as an integral part of it, and claims a crucial role for exiles such as herself in its defense and preservation. Turning to Freud, she elevates the metaphorically slain figure of Hu Shi into the Moses of modern China and argues that the hostility being directed toward him indicates his importance to a lingering, albeit embattled, collective cultural memory.

The point, of course, is not to take Chang’s version of modern Chinese history or, for that matter, her understanding of psychoanalysis as accurate or authoritative. Rather, what interests me is how her sense of ethnic identity acquires divergent meanings in various quotidian situations. Chang recounts a touching scene in which Hu, visiting her spartan living quarters at the Salvation Army, obsessively compliments their surroundings, a sign, she writes, of the “refined self-control [hanyang] of us Chinese” (150). She also recalls another conversation at his home during which the topic of the mainland came up. After Hu suddenly exclaimed, “It’s purely a military conquest!” Chang “paused and did not answer.” In her essay, she inserts this aside: “since the 1930s, I have felt the pressure of the leftists in my reading. Even though I instinctually felt repulsed and, as with most trends, I am a perpetual outsider, I know that their influence was not confined to the 1930s as in the West. At my silence, Mr. Hu’s face immediately sank, and he changed the topic” (148). The awkward silence between the two—a sign of ingrained gender and age protocols as well as the gravity of their conversation topic—registers the extent to which political events in the recent past continued to preoccupy their lives and thoughts. In this passage, Chang turns the melancholic experience of exile into a position from which to write authentically and authoritatively about Chinese culture and society. Circumscribed by the geopolitics of the Cold War, her seemingly natural invocation of Chinese identity indicates its protean character even as it remained foundational to her authorial persona.

Propaganda in a Cross-Cultural Frame

Chang’s career depended on anti-communist cultural institutions established during the early years of the Cold War. “After China entered the [Korean] war in 1951,” writes Robert G. Lee, “the United States made every effort to isolate communist China, economically and diplomatically, and embarked on a military policy of confrontation aimed at ‘containing’ the expansion of Chinese influence throughout Asia and the Third World” (152). Founded in 1953, the USIS played a key role in this strategy of containment.⁷ USIS offices around the world engaged in activities such as arranging cultural and educational exchanges, setting up reading rooms, and operating programs such as People-to-People and the Voice of America. USIS officials actively cultivated and supported local writers and artists and used their works to literally spread stories about communism. The Chinese versions of The Rice-Sprout Song and Naked Earth first appeared in serialized form in the USIS-sponsored magazine Jinri Shijie (The World Today), which was widely distributed in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as diasporic Chinese communities in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.⁸ The World Today Press, which published Jinri Shijie, also published the Chinese-language version of The Rice-Sprout Song.⁹ Chang dedicated the English version to Richard McCarthy, who was the director of the USIS in Hong Kong during the early 1950s and was later active in the burgeoning modernist literary scene in Taiwan. Years later, McCarthy recalled, “The USIS was a government agency that supported U.S. foreign policy, one aspect of which was to resolutely curb the spread of Mao Zedong Thought in Asia. One of the methods to achieve this goal was to truthfully report on conditions on the Mainland” (Kao 244).

What McCarthy considered truthful reporting would, for most readers today, likely be called propaganda. Chang’s novels were part of a large body of Chinese-language anti-communist literature that circulated during the 1950s, particularly in Nationalist-controlled Taiwan. These officially sanctioned texts portrayed the horrors of communism in order to garner support for efforts to retake the mainland, and dominated the literary scene at a time of severe censorship (Chang’s writings, which were deemed apolitical, were not censored, which made them even more influential in Cold War Taiwan).¹⁰ Anti-communist literature is largely dismissed today as a relic of a repressive past and for this reason, readers and critics have tended to downplay or ignore Chang’s contributions as anomalies necessitated by economic need. Such assessments reiterate a binary opposition between propaganda and authentic literature uncontaminated by political expediency, thereby obscuring the cultural significance of the former.

Broadly speaking, propaganda refers to any communication designed to influence and direct ways of thinking and acting; to cite a somewhat technical definition, “Propaganda is the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist” (Jowett and O’Donnell 4). In the West, propaganda originally referred to the missionary work of the Catholic Church, but by the twentieth century, it had become associated with the use of media technologies to shape public opinion and consolidate the power of the state. Widely associated with totalitarian regimes in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or Mao’s China, propaganda became antithetical to intellectual and aesthetic freedom in liberal democratic societies, where it still conjures images of heavy-handed, even farcical, assertions of political dogma, as well as a propensity for deception and manipulation. In Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, Mark Wollaeger departs from this view by describing propaganda as a modern strategy for making sense of and representing a rapidly changing world in which the objectivity of knowledge could no longer be taken for granted. Wollaeger traces how Anglo-American modernist writers adopted its methods and objectives. Both propaganda and modernism, he notes, were invested in “highly prized epistemic values” such as “information and knowledge; truth and facts; certainty and objectivity” (Stanley Cunningham, qtd. in Wollaeger 11), and both “provided mechanisms for coping with information flows that had begun to outstrip the processing capacity of the mind” (xiii).

Understood in this sense, propaganda offers a window into the definition of objective and reliable information. In the case of Chang, her reliability was closely tied to her ethnic identity, first as an exiled Chinese writer addressing Sinophone audiences and then later as an immigrant in the United States. In the United States, The Rice-Sprout Song was presented as an (auto)ethnographic text to readers who wanted otherwise unobtainable information about the mainland in the form of an emotionally accessible narrative.¹¹ Its attraction depended heavily on the assumption that Chang was a native informant whose displacement from the mainland enabled her to reveal the conditions that she left behind (whether she actually witnessed any of the settings and situations portrayed in the novel is a subject of extensive debate among Chang scholars). In short, Chang occupied a subject position in which epistemological privilege was indexed to cultural otherness. But even though she benefited from these assumptions, she was noticeably ambivalent about this role and repeatedly explored how acts of narration and translation unsettle the distinction between China and the West, the very terms of her ethnicization. In this context, what makes The Rice-Sprout Song unique is its cross-cultural status, acquired through acts of translation: it is a novel that has lived, as it were, different lives in different languages as it circulated among different publics.

As a work of propaganda, the novel’s objective is to provide believable information about life under communism in the form of a fictional narrative that communicates clear political positions. Even a cursory survey of The Rice-Sprout Song’s American reviews indicates that Chang’s (subtitled) “Novel of Modern China” captivated her readers by appearing to offer valuable and rare information. For many readers, the reliability of the novel was directly related to her personal history. Reviewers repeatedly referred to her “escape” in order to emphasize her firsthand experience of communism. For examp...