Fetishizing the Orient: An Analysis of Movies and Books with Chinese-America Cross-Cultural Themes - Coursework Example

Fetishizing the Orient: An Analysis of Movies and Books with Chinese-America Cross-Cultural Themes By: Introduction This paper analyzes the writings of Chinese-American writers in the context of the clash of values between China and the United States – the perceived traditional values in China which were carried over to America by first generation migrants, and the conflicts and frictions with modern American values, which are embodied by the second or third generation Chinese-Americans who had been schooled and raised in the United States. This paper argues that Chinese-American cinema and books that are meant for Western viewers (by this, we mean that primary release was in the American market) are still informed by the “Western gaze”, meaning that it was created to cater to Western sensibilities and thus reaffirm Western perspectives and vantage points on what “China”, “Asia”, the “Orient” look like. I forward the thesis that while these works have a tendency to exoticize the Orient, creating an “othering” effect against Asians whilst depicting Americans as mainstream and ‘normal’. In order to analyze thie pieces of work, I will explore the different productions of meanings trough the narrative and the visual images in the films and books. The construction and interaction on the different histories, relationships, time/spaces frames will be deconstructed to understand the systems of representation embodied in the works. I draw upon the theory that meaning depends on the relationship between things in the world - people, objects and events, real or fictional- and the conceptual system, which can operate as mental representations of them (Hall 18). This paper will give a special emphasis on the analysis of the character, narratives, the expression of feelings and their connection with symbols and other images used. To quote Hall again, [W]e can correlate our concepts and ideas with certain written words, spoken sounds or visual images. The general term we use for words, sounds or images which carry meaning is signs. These signs stand for or represent the concepts and the conceptual relations between them which we carry around in our heads and together they rnake up the meaning-systems of our culture (Hall 18). I am going to divide my paper into two themes, both of which will support the core argument that there is an exoticisation of Chinese culture by the Western gaze and these films and books reinforce typical Western caricaturist notions of how Chinese people behave and relate to one another, and how Chinese culture evolves. The first theme is resistance to change and modernity, the second one is gender roles and perceptions. I am going to conclude with some reflections on cross-cultural “othering” and the prevalence of stereotyping. In analyzing my selected Chinese-American works, I draw from Benzi Zhang (4), who wrote as follows: ..cross-cultural readings are fraught with dangers. One of these dangers is our habit of reading the third world in terms of what, from our point of view, it does not have but wants to have" (83). Moreover, there seems to be a "tension between the raw material of the filmic text and the ineluctability of the Western analytic technology(85). It is both natural and ineluctable that Western audiences--including Western scholars--always "gaze" at Chinese culture from a Western perspective, but the problem is that the "gazee" is not always passive. Resistance to change and modernity Here, I argue that there is a predisposition to showing Chinese characters in movies, particularly Chinese elders, as resistant to change and vanguards of antiquated Chinese traditions, usually but not always with comic consequences. In a sense, it is quite similar to Chow’s critique of Western films as articulating “this epochal fascination with the primitive in ways that are possible only with the new technology of visuality (25-26). We begin by discussing the movie “The Wedding Banquet” which was directed by Ang Lee and came out in 1993, received with critical acclaim and awards. The movie is a gay-themed one about a homosexual Taiwanese immigrant with an American boyfriend. They are happy together. The problem begins when the Chinese parents of the Taiwanese immigrant, Wai-Tung, nag him about finding himself a bride. Wishing to accede to his parents’ demands and not wanting to reveal to them the truth about his sexual identity, he found himself a Chinese woman for a marriage of convenience – she wanted a green card and he wanted a proper Chinese wife. Of course, the comic scenes ensue, primarily a result of the conflict between Chinese tradition (getting married) and obedience to one’s elders, and the more “modern” and presumably American value of independence and acceptance of homosexuality. Much laughs were made of the the Chinese parents and their insistence on their son’s finding himself a bride, as well as the son’s comic attempts to comply with his parents’ demands and the obligations imposed upon him by Chinese culture. Eventually, the parents came around and realized that the most important thing was for their son to be happy. The father accepted the American boyfriend, and Wei-Wei, the Chinese prospective bride who eventually became pregnant with the son of Wai-Tung as a result of a drunken evening, left with dignity, at the last minute deciding not to give up the baby for adoption and instead giving it to the couple. The caricaturish theme of the unreasonable Chinese parent who insists on “primitive” or on the traditional and resists the modern as either “evil” or scary” is also depicted in the movie the “Joy Luck Club”, although that movie was less comical than the Wedding Banquet. The Joy Luck Club showed even more the tensions between first generation immigrant Mothers and second generation daughters. The elder women were shown to be extremely traditional and superstitious, or lived in a primitive culture that was ruled by (there is a scene for example, when one of the characters killed herself to perpetuate the belief that a ghost would descend upon the husband’s household if her child was not treated like a First Wife’s daughter). On the other hand, the Americanized daughters were made to appear “normal” and rational, and if they had some negative streaks in them it was because of their Chinese mothers and some flaw in their upbringing. For example, one of the daughters, Waverly, was seen to be extremely competitive as a little girl, and then growing up to be extremely competitive still. The film suggested that she was like that because of her mother, not because of anything in American culture or context. There are bothersome stereotypes in the movie, it seemed as if all the Western stereotypes of the Chinese and Chinese women were woven together to form a tapestry of a story – the tiger matriarch who pushed her daughter to excel and compete, the long-suffering martyr wife, the noble mother who will die for her child. This perhaps exemplifies or validates what a critical media scholar had once opined: This now brings us to the second theme to be explored, which is gender oppressions and gender roles – a source of endless fascination for Western readers and viewers. This is not to suggest of course that gender oppression in China was imagined, and that it did not exist at all. The just seems that there are very few Chinese-American literature that portray Chinese people in a way that is different from the Western remembered stereotypes. In the book “The Fifth Chinese Daughter” (1950) for example, gender stratifications play the backdrop in a story of a young girl who comes to terms with her Chinese identity and her American upbringing during the pre-war period. Early on in her life, she was already made conscious of the difference between men and women and it was already highlighted in her mind that men are more superior than women. The book, while receiving success, also had its share of critics. According to Motooka (2009), “Wong establishes an opposition between China and America in order to narrate the path of her own self-liberation, a progress measured by her movement away from Chinese cultural encumbrances towards budding (White) Americanisms.” ( 209). But an important and overlooked stereotype is that of the second generation Chinese daughter who has to repay everything her parents (especially her mother) have done for her, but cannot. Ninh writes: In an analysis especially informed by Michel Foucault’s theories of power, Judith Butler’s theories of subjection, and feminist discourses of trauma, I argue that through modes disciplinary and discursive, the second-generation daughter is perpetually produced as the unfilial subject – caught in a system of “designated failure”. (20) We now compare this with the book “The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts”, by Maxine Hong Kingston, which is compelling intelligent reading, that explored the intricacies of Chinese culture and showed the friction between it and American culture. Fascinating in her story was the character of the woman with “No Name” – herself a metaphor for the myriad ways that women were silenced and repressed. There is an authentic voice to the book that while perhaps not capturing the breadth of Chinese Orientalism, was true to her personal narrative and conflicts. An interesting line from the book is this: "[My mother] said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman." (Kingston 24). In a sense, there is something inherently problematic with this statement, basically creating dichotomies between a wife/slave and a warrior woman. But another fascinating thing to note could be the conflation of “wife” and “slave”, such that wife and slave are intertwined concepts in contradistinction to warrior woman. Conclusion According to Guillemin and Gillan (2004): [O]ur social and political locations affect our research. Our research interests and the research questions we pose, as well as the questions we discard, reveal something about who we are […] our research are governed by our values and reciprocally, help to shape these values. Reflexivity in research is thus a process of critical reflection both on the kind of knowledge produced from research and how that knowledge is generated (Guillemin & Gillan, 2004:274). Clearly, this calls upon us to be reflexive in our work, and as viewers and readers, to be critical of embedded stereotypes and meanings in the text that we read and the movies that we view. Meanings and symbols are produced and reproduced, and the way that they can negatively impact on cultural and gender stereotypes are often dismissed and swept under the rug. In truth, this reproduction of labeling and stereotyping, because it is so insidious, are what perpetuates the differences and make it difficult to truly bridge cultural divides. Works Cited Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Guillemen, M. & Gillam, L, ‘Ethics, reflexivity and “ethically important moments” in research’’, Qualitative Inquiry, Vol. 10 (2005). 10-24. Print. Joy Luck Club. Dir. Wayne Wang. Based on the book of the same title, written by Amy Tan. Hollywood Pictures, 1993. DVD. Khue, Erin. Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Hall, S. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, Sage Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 1997. Print. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. Print. Motooka, Wendy. “Nothing Solid: Racial Identity and Identification in ‘Fifth Chinese Daughter’ and ‘Wilshire Bus’” in Ellen Goldner and Safiya Henderson-Holmes (eds.) Racing and (E)racing Language. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001. The Wedding Banquet. Dir. Ang Lee. Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1993. DVD. Wong, Jade Snow. The Fifth Chinese Daughter. New York: Scholastic Books, 1950. Print. Zhang, Benjie. “(Global) Sense and (Local) Sensibility: Poetics/Politics of Reading Film as(Auto)Ethnography”. The Chinese University of Hong Kong. 1998. Web. 7 November 2011. Read More