Enacting Asian American Transformations: An Inter-Ethnic Perspective

It is clear that the work of art cannot itself be asked to change the world or to transform itself into political praxis; on the other hand, it would be desirable to develop a keener sense of the complexity and ambiguity of that process loosely termed reflection or expression. --Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious Using Asian metaphors or images such as the woman Warrior, the butterfly, the monkey, and the floating world to dramatize the transformation of the central character(s), in both psychological and physical terms, has been a key narrative strategy for Asian American writers. The double, reversing metamorphosis at the end of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly, for example, evokes emotional responses from the audience: after Song Liling reveals "herself" as not only a spy but a man, Monsieur Rene Gallimard sadly turns himself into the Butterfly by putting on a kimono and committing suicide. Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey narrates a story equally compelling, if not as heart-breaking. Struggling to avoid being fixed in any single category, Wittman Ah Sing chooses to be the Monkey King, a popular half-animal and half-divine trickster figure in Chinese mythology, by attempting to stage, presumably, as many as seventy-two identity transformations. These drastic changes of character, tragic, comic, or tragicomic, signify consequences of difference with regard to culture, gender, race, class, sexuality, and ideology. As a narrative strategy, employing Asian metaphors to enact character transformations to convey important thematic messages, particularly for authors such as Hwang, Kingston, Amy Tan, and Cynthia Kadohata, has proven quite effective. However, the tendency to "misread," "appropriate" and "co-optate" Asian American materials for mainstream consumption, observes Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, sometimes reaches an unbearable degree: "even those works that attempt to break free of constraining expectations are constantly in danger of being read just for their `difference'" (4, 211).(1) Meanwhile, the emotional charge from within Asian American communities that some writers, catering to the dominant culture's expectations, have "faked" Asian traditions and "perpetuated" racist stereotypes, raises further questions about how to read and interpret Asian American texts from different reading positions.(2) Although the waves of charge and defense, a few years ago appearing to polarize Asian American communities, now seem to have ebbed, the same debate may erupt any moment when major Asian American critics are introduced and the issue of "cultural authenticity" enters classroom discussion. The critical and pedagogical task in a multiethnic setting, therefore, requires communal efforts to cross the "thresholds of difference," as Barbara Johnson puts it, and to register "the dynamics of any encounter between an inside and an outside" (318). What has happened in Asian American studies actually reflects the various and often controversial dimensions and directions of American ethnic studies as a whole. Indeed, the so-called "minority literatures," African American, Asian American, Native American, Latino/Latina American, etc., share much in common. An inter-ethnic perspective is only natural and certainly helpful in dealing with the complexity of some Asian American controversies. In studying Asian American narratives of transformation, for instance, it is potentially fruitful if we bring across the "thresholds" of "Asian America" the ever-changing image of the African American Signifying Monkey. It is amazing yet not simply accidental that the African American Signifying Monkey finds counterparts in Asian American fiction, particularly in the case of Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey. A careful comparison of the Tripmaster Monkey with the Signifying Monkey ought to shed light on other Asian American metaphors symbolizing the "uncertaining of being,"(3) and on similar phenomena in reality and literature that challenge American ethnic studies in general. …