“Come almost home”: Deconstructing the Asian American Model Minority Myth in Chang-Rae Lee’s A Gesture Life
Asian American representation in the COVID-19 era “In being represented as citizen within the political sphere, the subject is ‘split off’ from the unrepresentable histories of situated embodiment that contradict the abstract form of citizenship. Culture is the medium of the present . . . but is simultaneously the site that mediates the past, through which history is grasped as difference, fragments and flashes of disjunction. It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as ‘American’”. –Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts 2 In the process of creating a culture of Asian American literary history, the Asian American subject must define its place within the national literary history of America. The creation of this literary culture is the assertion of the Asian American voice in mainstream American media—a task that is especially relevant amidst the present wave of racial equity movements spurred by the tragedies of the COVID-19 […]
Continue ReadingFear is a Virus: Xenophobia in Mostafa Keshvari’s Corona (2020)
In an interview for the Rhode Island International Film Festival in August 2020, Mostafa Keshvari, the director of Corona, stated: “The virus doesn’t discriminate … we need to learn from the virus and treat each other the same.” The idea of making a film to call for unity and solidarity came to Keshvari in January 2020 when he was reading about attacks on people of Asian heritage. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, many Asian Americans have been subjected to coronavirus-related xenophobia in the United States. The country has witnessed “a sharp uptick in reports of public racial abuse of ‘Asian-looking’ individuals” since the outbreak allegedly started in Wuhan, China. Keshvari’s film, Corona—Fear is a Virus (2020), is a timely fictional representation of such stigmatisation. The film focuses on xenophobia pertaining to East Asians and Asian Americans, specifically on anti-Chinese sentiments. It focuses less on the actual health emergency, […]
Continue ReadingCovid-19 Triumphalism in China’s 2020 Docudramas
Just as Trump vociferated throughout 2020 regarding the “Chinese Virus” and “Kung Flu,” China was slowly turning international bad publicity to its advantage. Weiji, or crisis in the Chinese language, comprises two words: danger and opportunity. Flipping the former into the latter, Chinese propaganda for domestic consumption does not help Asian minorities in the United States; rather, they exacerbate Sinophobia within U.S. conservative media and the echo chamber of nearly half of U.S. voters favouring Trumpism in the 2020 presidential and congressional elections. From the perspective of an Asian immigrant in the United States, one who had pledged the unnatural “Naturalization Oath” of renouncing “all [former] allegiance and fidelity,” Covid-19 encapsulates a quandary, sharpening one’s identity, shall we say, neither here nor there. (“Former” implied in the oath may as well be “formal,” as informal—affective and psychic—filaments linger long after overt political acts.) In the eyes of the fatherland, those […]
Continue Reading“We Are Not A Virus”: Challenging Asian/Asian American Racism in the 21st Century
The first time I collaborated with U.S. Studies Online: Forum for New Writing was when serving on a panel discussing Asian American historian Gordon H. Chang’s book Ghosts of the Gold Mountain in November 2020. [1] Sitting in front of my computer and seeing my colleagues from afar, I find the discussion nonetheless intimate and moving. We mourn my Cantonese ancestors who migrated to the West Coast in the 1800s—who worked hard to build the railroad yet were never recognised until recently—as Asian American scholars work together to exhibit the stories through online archives, documentaries, and books. And Gordon Chang is one of them. As a Cantonese person who grew up hearing the Gold Mountain myth, their works deeply touch me and are among the reasons I am a researcher in Asian American studies. But the content of the work is not all that moves me. The community the panel […]
Continue ReadingAsian American Solidarities in the Age of COVID-19
‘The majority of Americans [regard] us with ambivalence… We [threaten] the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics [leaves] no room for any other color, particularly that of a pathetic little yellow-skinned people…’ -Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer “We don’t have coronavirus. We are coronavirus.” – Cathy Park Hong Since news of a novel coronavirus began to spread across the U.S., an incrementally high number of hate crime incidents directed against Asian Americans has continued to rise in unprecedented ways and at an accelerating pace with 60% of Asian Americans and one-third of all Americans personally witnessing an episode of anti-Asian harassment in 2020. Reports of verbal harassment, refusal of service, vandalism, physical assault and even murder has persistently plagued Asian communities nationwide over the last twelve months. Notably, there has been no concerted effort from federal agencies to […]
Continue Reading(Re)Constructing the Past in George Saunders’ “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline”
The American Civil War (1861-1865), which cleaved the country into two halves, the North and South, is known as one of the most violent, tumultuous, divisive events in American history. Yet, instead of reflecting the actual brutally violent realities of the country’s past, the war is reconstituted in America’s collective memory as a sanitised consumer product. This tension between the imagined and the actual is the catalyst for the titular story of George Saunders’ 1996 collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which uses its historical theme park setting in order to draw attention to the ways history manipulates or constructs the past in a way that either obscures or valorises the violence within American history. Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacrum is key to understanding how the theme park space functions. Baudrillard defines the term simulacrum as ‘ha[ving] no relation to any reality whatsoever.’[i] What this means is that no matter how […]
Continue ReadingReality Check or Business as Usual? COVID-19 and the Future of U.S. Capitalism
“Even Gordon Gekko now agrees that Wall Street is a fraud.” This caption marks the conclusion to a debate that started in 1987 between economist and soon-to-be labor secretary Robert Reich and Asher Edelman, a New York financier who inspired the character of Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street. More than three decades ago, the two men publicly disagreed on the merits of deregulated markets on an episode of PBS NewsHour. When Reich likened US capitalism to “a casino game,” Edelman replied that “your idea of a casino sometimes is my idea of a very efficient business.” Revisiting this discussion in the light of recent developments, Edelman conceded that the aggressive business culture shaping US finance and management since the 1980s turned out to be detrimental. According to his updated view, “various instruments were rigged. […] It was all nonsense.” Coming from a cult figure of Wall Street, […]
Continue ReadingHaunting History: Gordon Chang’s Writing History without Documents: Chinese Railroad Worker Ghosts and American History
The building of the Transcontinental Railroad in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) was a symbol and achievement of unification, of future imperial growth. In his USSO Book Hour Talk, Writing History without Documents: Chinese Railroad Worker Ghosts and American History, Stanford historian of Sino-American relations Gordon Chang stated that so much of American history is railroad history. Most railroad history as American history is nationalistic, triumphalist, and technologically driven, focusing on ‘great white men’ and machines. In the name of Western expansion and “civilization,” technology changed Americans’ understanding of time, space, and distance. Paradoxically, the railroad simultaneously united and divided, connected and disconnected. A technologically advanced America in the late-nineteenth century was also the America of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Railroad history simultaneously involves the building of infrastructure and the ways in which a post-slavery America remained segregated after Reconstruction (Zoom 1:08:00-1:13:00). Moreover, it is also a […]
Continue ReadingGolf and Trump’s America
While America might seem tied up in that tiny white golf ball, it hasn’t always been this way. Golf is another of the New World’s ‘Old World’ borrowings. According to the OED the game is of “considerable antiquity in Scotland”. It lends power, lineage, and legitimacy, and so it lends presidency. Trump, despite his usual twitter-friendly lexicon, recently used the definition to his own ends at the Trump National Golf Course in Sterling, Virginia, where he went to play after President-elect Joe Biden’s projected win.[1] It’s one thing for a President to play golf, but what does it mean for a President to turn to the sport in the immediate aftermath of his failure to regain office? The usual claims that golf offers respite from reality, a smooth deflection from abrupt decision-making, or a strategic space to strike up business deals all take a sinister twist. Was Trump trying to […]
Continue Reading“MATTER IS THE MINIMUM”: Reading Washington, DC’s BLM Memorial Fence
In the early evening of Monday, 1 June 2020, following a weekend of national protests against the extra-judicial killings of Black people by the police, US federal troops aggressively moved on demonstrators outside the White House in Washington, DC.[1] Using flashbangs and chemical weapons, the US military forced demonstrators from the grounds of Lafayette Square Park, clearing the way for President Donald J. Trump to walk through the park and cross the street, so that he could have his photograph taken in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church whilst holding a Bible upside-down. Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead (c) 2020 The following day, temporary non-scalable chain-link fencing was installed around the perimeter of the park—both physically and symbolically separating the populace from the President’s residence. The original fencing and concrete barricades were removed within weeks, only to be re-installed later that month, following protesters’ failed attempt to […]
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