By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display – the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard.
Hélène Cixous “The Laugh of the Medusa”(1975)
During the course of development of feminism in both the West and East Asia there has been evidence that the call to return to the physical body engendered a large corpus of writing dedicated to the explorations of the female corporeality. This “proliferation of writings concerning the body” can be attributed to the impact of feminist thoughts that insist on a closer and more intimate examination of the female body and its real nature (Gatens, 227). When Hélène Cixous forcefully and poetically commended women to “write your self” the emphasis is clearly put on explorations and celebrations of woman’s sexuality and bodily pleasures. The enthusiasm with which women writers responded to Cixous’ “call” to create écriture féminine is easily understandable: the body has been linked and equated with women negatively in western history for centuries.1 Western feminists have written extensively on the need of exploring and “healing of a classic Western patriarchal bifurcation: body/mind or body/spirit” (Mairs, 471). They see a deeply ingrained and problematic discourse that favors man as spirit and condemns woman as body. Since the body has been considered the “prison of the soul, a miserable container that constrains the freedom of its far more valuable contents”, by the same logic then “woman is accident to man’s essence” (Finke, 403). Woman as body thus entails a tremendously negative connotation. To put it simply “the body is seen as the source of all the undesirable traits a human being could have and women’s lives are spent manifesting those traits” (Spelman, 39).
Gendered Transcultural Romance: Subversions and Problematics
LI Lisa Yinghong
Key words： interracial relationships, gender, body, orientalism, occidental longings
Body is thus closely connected to women’s oppression and has recently become the “site of contestation” for women to inscribe their protests.2 Through writing, women are able to free the body and its excessive bodily matters from a long history of abuse, neglect, ridicule and censorship. Explorations of bodily pleasures and desires have thus become part and parcel to feminists who see sexual liberation as key to achieving women’s liberation. Sexual identity is seen as offering women an alternative to their gendered destiny and full of promises of a new kind of freedom and satisfaction that have been denied to women. Although the mind/body, man/woman dichotomy criticized by western feminists is absent in the East Asian intellectual tradition, it can be argued that women and their sexuate bodies are equally oppressed. In the west “(w)hat philosophers have had to say about women typically has been nasty, brutish, and short” (Spelman, 32). Likewise Confucius had supposedly said very little about women in general. Yet the remark that equates women with xiaoren (a person with vile character) attributed to him has had undeniably damaging effect on the public’s perception of women. Clearly women as a category of being designate some kind of baseness and inferiority, and are better to be avoided or dismissed. Like in the west, women are simply not considered as men’s equals.
As in the west, in recent decades rigorous studies have been done in order to re-examine women’s relationship to history and restore female subjectivity in East Asia. There has been a consensus that East Asian women suffer from being victims of tradition and in particular Confucian ideas of gender patriarchy. While contemporary scholarships have made effort to correct this “simplistic” view (Ko, 1), it still holds true that many studies on East Asian women’s issues, especially in regard to more modern times, will point to the lasting effect of Confucianism in two aspects: its enforcement and guarantee of male dominance over women and its focus on a system of moral ethics which in essence “promotes women’s greater oppression through its insistence on virtues specific to women” (Yuan, 2).3
Feminists in East Asia have been angered by the sentiment promoted in Confucian texts such as Nujie (Admonitions for Women) in China and Onna Daigaku (Greater Learning for Women) in Japan. According to the didactic teachings of these books, women must abide by a set of moral codes which form “a systematic ethical theory of engendered virtues” (Yuan, 10). Among strictly prescribed virtues, chastity and obedience stand out as particularly oppressive because they restrict women’s freedom in regard to many aspects of their lives and physical actions. Women are forced to submerge her sense of being and individual agency. In order to free women from patriarchal control and for them to assert an independent identity away from the designated gender roles of mother, wife or widow, women have sought different routes to protest. It is no wonder then some women writers turn to the field of the corporeal
female body to voice their discontent. After all what can be more shockingly “repulsive” and therefore aggressive than the leaky, messy and filthy female body? There is no other metaphor more powerful than the body to signify a deep urge for vengeance and attack. In this way body writing can offer the potential to subvert a conservative ideology that enforces women’s oppression. In reality, however, this potential is not so easily realized. In fact, there is a strong presence of ambiguity and compromise which tend to weaken the political intent that early feminist writers have attached to écriture féminine, or women’s writing.
Three contemporary East Asia women writers have written stories about Asian women searching for an identity different from those permitted by patriarchal gender rules. They write candidly about women’s relationships with men emphasizing strongly on the physical and the psychosexual dimensions of the relationship. What’s more, they experiment with a post-colonial interracial romance that subverts the archetype text of this genre, i.e. the extremely popular
Madame Butterfly.
Amy (or Eimi) Yamada (born 1959) is a Tokyo native known for her “hardcore” interracial stories such as “Bedtime Eyes” (first published in 1985). Wei Hui (born 1963) is a Shanghai native who became an international bestseller writer after her “infamous” novel Shanghai Baby (published in 1999) was banned by mainland Chinese censor authorities. Xiaolu Guo (birth year unknown but likely in the 1980s) is from Zhejiang in mainland China and now lives and works in London and Beijing as a writer and filmmaker. She has published several well-received novels and short story collections, some written in her adopted tongue English. Her popular novel A Concise Chinese - English Dictionary for Lovers was written in English and came out in 2007. One of the reasons that these three women’s works have received much attention is due to their bold depictions of transcultural affairs that still seem exotic to the ordinary reader. Their popularity might also relate to the fact that their texts are filled with extremely explicit descriptions of female sexuality and corporeality.
In the increasingly globalized twenty-first century, the sentiment expressed in the famous “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet” seems hopelessly anachronistic. Yet national stereotypes have existed in different forms consciously or unconsciously for a long time. Scholars well versed in the critique of colonialism will not fail to point out the Orientalist undercurrents in texts like Madame Butterfly, a story that has gained worldwide popularity despite of that fact.4 As poignantly scrutinized by Marina Heung, the story of
Madame Butterfly, popularized by Puccini’s opera, is “in many ways a foundational narrative of East West relations, having shaped the Western construction of ‘the Orient’ as a sexualized, and sexually compliant space that is ripe for conquest and rule” (Heung, 224-5). At the center
of this Western Orientalist imaginary, or fantasy, is the woman Cio-Cio-San/Madame Butterfly who epitomizes an “exoticized” and “subservient” Asian femininity. The ultimate stereotypical image of Cio-Cio-San as the passive, obedient, and easily disposable (her “honorable” suicide) oriental woman has not been challenged literally for close to a century. Yet its relevance still remains. A recently published book about contemporary Japanese women and their views on sex and marriage is entitled Goodbye Madame Butterfly.5 This clearly indicates the presence and ever lasting effect of this oriental burden.
Besides from being a “master text of Orientalism”, Madame Butterfly is also romance fiction, belonging to a popular genre that has been well-loved by women and, until fairly recently, neglected by feminism for wrong reasons (Heung, 225).6 As pointed out by Heung, in the various texts that originated from Pierre Loti’s Madame Chrysanthemum, Puccini’s Madame
Butterfly included, the story is dominated by the trope of the family romance. In this romance the interracial relationship is layered over by a family drama that centers on Cio-Cio-San as the mother figure who redeems herself through “a sacrificial act committed for the good of her child” (Heung, 231). This brings in the crucial “maternal sacrifice theme”, a theme that works to reaffirm both western and oriental patriarchal definitions of femininity. The interracial romance and maternal melodrama combine to double Cio-Cio-San’s oppression as a victim of orientalism and patriarchal power politics.
From the first performance of Madame Butterfly in 1904 a century has passed. During this time women’s liberation movement has seen the progression of the first-wave feminism, the second wave feminism, and now has received the arrival of the so-called postfeminism. The latter in comparison is perhaps a less extreme and more flexible ideological position that focuses less on liberating women as a singular entity but embraces diverse and even contradictory ideas pertinent to women.7 What kind of interracial romance (perhaps a better term to use is “transcultural romance” if we were to avoid the problematic implications of the term “race”) would women write now? The transcultural romance written by Yamada, Wei Hui and Guo will provide different models which change many fundamental assumptions in that colonial text. These narratives have several commonalities: they are all set in distinctly contemporary urban situations; they are first-person narratives told from a young woman’s point of view; they explore the relationship between an Asian female and her western lover primarily through the bodily pleasures and the sex act (especially true for Yamada and Wei Hui), they completely forgo the marriage plot (more apparent in Yamada and Wei Hui), they end when the relationship proves unsatisfying or even tragic. Finally all three writers experiment with the use of a de-nationalized language.
Yamada’s Internationalist Woman
Yamada’s story “Bedtime Eyes” was a bestseller as well as the recipient of the prestigious Naoki Prize in Japan. It was written at the time when the Equal Employment Opportunity Law was yet to be implemented and what is referred to as “akogare (longing) for America” has sent armies of young Japanese women traveling abroad seeking careers as well as sexual adventures with foreign (white) men (Kelsky, 26). Anthropologist Karen Kelsky gives a compelling account of what she calls “narratives of internationalism” by following the real life stories of many Japanese women that formed this phenomenon in the 1980s and early 1990s. In this narrative, the west is seen as progressive, enlightened and in direct contrast to Japan, which is basically sustained by “feudalistic” men (Kelsky, 4). Kelsky analyzes this phenomenon as Japanese women’s “exploiting their position on the margins of corporate and family systems to engage in a form of ‘defection’ from expected life courses” (Kelsky, 2). By detaching their subjectivity from the Japanese nation-state, these women envision the foreign realm as the “site of professional opportunity, personal liberation, and romantic or erotic self-expression… the means to radically challenge persistent gender ideologies that make authentic Japanese womanhood (and the stability of the Japanese nation) contingent on women’s continued subordination to Japanese men and ‘traditional’ gender roles” (Kelsky, 2-3). Clearly these women were looking for opportunities to form alternative identities that offer liberating potential for the female self. Sexual identity seemed to be the most promising choices for understandable reasons.
Yamada’s interracial model is similar but also very different from the oriental woman/white man paradigm and consequently brings in a set of new issues. In most of Yamda’s fiction, the object of the young Japanese woman’s akogare is an African American male. There are several aspects in this model that defy the colonial romance of Madame Butterfly. First of all, Yamada’s main characters, male and female alike, tend to be the types that occupy lesser social positions. Kim of “Bedtime Eyes” sings pop jazz numbers at various nightclubs catering to businessmen in Tokyo. Ruiko of “The Piano Player’s Fingers” lives a free-style life hunting African American males as sex preys from Tokyo’s hot party hangouts. Kim’ lover Spoon is an African American soldier based in Tokyo. Ruiko’s black lover Leroy is a jazz pianist struggling to establish his music career. A postcolonial discourse enables these texts to indentify with the marginal.
Yamada’s discourse of oriental femininity also differs from that of Madame Butterfly in several ways. The likes of Kim are brought up not by traditional type of education that emphasizes women’s virtues and need to comply with female gender roles. For post-war generations of Japanese, American values centering on democracy, independence and
individualization have become part of the public consciousness although the internationalist phenomenon delineated by Kelsky clearly suggests that women are still expected to conform to conventional gender roles and behaviors prescribed to them. Yamada’s female Tokyoites have a peculiar penchant for American pop culture, especially blues and popular jazz music. They also have an endearing relationship with American street-gang language, with a command of a variety of impolite cursing words: the “f - ” word, for example, appears with a very high frequency. These strategies of subversion distance Yamada’s texts from the “grand narrative” of Japan as a nation-state sustained by the pure yamato male spirit, and from the stereotypical image of Japanese woman as the polite and quiet oriental girl.
The most likely offensive feature of Yamada’s “bad girls” is perhaps their ease and pride when they display and pursue their sexual jouissance.8 Comparing to other Asian cultures such as China and Korea, eroticism has enjoyed a more tolerant view in Japan. Even so explicit delineation of female sexuality by serious-minded women writers has not been permitted or welcomed until not very long ago. In fact that might be one of the reasons that Yamada herself was surprised upon receiving the Naoki Prize for her “Bedtime Eyes”, a piece over flown with detailed descriptions of the naked bodies in the sex act and especially the seductive foreplay.9 This is further magnified by the intimacy and directness of the first-person narrative point of view that belongs to the female protagonist.
Scholars examining women’s issues in Japan often point to the strong association of the female body with impurity, which has also been a taboo topic. Early Japanese feminist activists fought very hard to bring this topic into the public sphere.10 The history of modern Japanese women’s literature contains interesting examples. It was merely 50 years ago that Setouchi Jakucho (formerly known as Harumi Setouchi)’s story “The Stamen”, which explores the reproductive and sexually active female body, was criticized as pornography and banned.11 Indeed it was not until the 1970s when female sexuality became “a major focus of the women’s liberationists” in Japan and open discussions on virginity, femininity, prostitution, women’s bodies, marriage, the family system and sexuality became acceptable for the general public (Mackie, 159).
Yamada’s sexually marked women form a sharp contrast to Madame Butterfly, in which the oriental woman’s charm is precisely connected to her “invisible and concealed” body. The multilayered kimono renders her person as diminutive, fragile, easily manipulated and certainly mysterious – the fundamental component of oriental exoticism. Most importantly, Cio-Cio-San is not given her own “sexual agency” (Chow, 73). Her identity or sense of self comes from her designated roles within the family structure and society at large, but never relates to her own
physical body or psychosexual realm.
In the postcolonial interracial romance of Yamada’s the “maternal melodrama” is also displaced (Heung, 227). The marriage plot is never part of the general plan. Yamada’s female protagonists in fact never seem to have any familial ties either. There is never any indication that their relationship with their man is leading toward the conjugal. In this sense, Yamada’s model is very much feminist – taking women out of marriage and into singleton has been pursued actively by western feminists who regard marriage as institutionally oppressive.12 It is not clear the reasons why Yamada’s heroines choose to forgo marriage in the stories. What is clear is these women seem appalled by the deficiency of the Japanese man who maintains a consistent absence in almost all of Yamada’s interracial romances. Occasionally the Japanese male makes his presence felt only through casual remarks form his countrywomen who, as a rule, have nothing positive or flattering to say about them. He appears only as the negative image reflecting all the more powerfully the gloriously embodied African American male.13 In Yamada’s interracial narrative the west is symbolized by a sexualized African American masculinity rather than the supreme white colonial patriarch. This move certainly destabilizes and shifts the typical orientalist paradigm. Yet at the same time it unknowingly re-establishes or at least becomes a suspect of a problematic Occidentalism, or a different form of “racialism” (Cornyetz, 425).14 On the surface Yamada’s focus on African American males seems a plausible choice. Identifying with historically oppressed and disadvantaged minority groups such as the African Americans gives Yamada’s texts a progressive potential in this East-as-Woman/West-as-Man discourse. However, a closer examination reveals a conservative ideology that is very insensitive to the history of oppression that has been systematically inflicted on the African descendents in America. The typical African American in Yamada’s stories is portrayed without depth and even offensively. He seems forever doomed by a lack of self-confidence and esteem, suffering from a deeply ingrained inferiority complex or victim psychology which is manifested by a disjunction between a statuesque body accentuated by an overpowering male genitalia and a vulnerable or even pathetic interiority.15 The suffering and tragedy afforded to Spoon or Leroy or Nick (of her full-length novel Trash) somehow invoke comic, or repulsive, rather than sympathetic response from the reader. Partly this is precisely due to the fact that the female characters are immersed entirely in their pursuit of sexual jouissance they have unconsciously and successfully objectified their male partners.16
This occidentalist tale in which the Japanese female exoticizes and eroticizes the body of the black male who in essence is full of negative personality traits relies on a process of othering or objectifying which has been commonly utilized in typical orientalist texts. It is also no
mere coincidence that when Yamada’s interracial stories were sold as best sellers the African American image, male and female, was used as hot selling points for commercial products. In the discourse of global capitalism, culture is bought and sold to indulge the consumer’s fantasy. All the fascinations with the African American men and culture that enrapture Yamada’s women thus become suspiciously commodified.17
Wei Hui and Shanghai Women’s Sexual Liberalism
The publication of Shanghai Baby in 1999 brought its writer Wei Hui international fame, wealth and numerous titles. Initially categorized as a writer of fiction that is just “outside the mainstream” (linglei, another kind; alternative), she was later referred to by a term more gender related and rather lucrative: as a “beauty writer” (meinu zuojia). Other terms used by media on her include writer of “body fiction” or “private fiction”. All of these commercially appealing terms have something to do with the content and nature of Shanghai Baby as well as many other stories Wei Hui wrote around the same time. Like Yamada, her stories are mostly interracial urban sex romances between a Shanghai woman and a western man who is usually white. Also matching Yamada’s adoration of the physical body Wei Hui’s texts are sexually charged with “hardcore” descriptions that obviously incite mainland China’s censor authorities.18 At the time of Shanghai Baby’s birth, Shanghai’s urban youths were pursuing many forms of pleasure that the new economic policy was beginning to promise. Sexual adventures seemed particularly hot with the highly educated urban youths, male or female.
In China, matters that suggest licentiousness have been strictly negated and treated as taboo: “sex equals filth and impurity” is a commonly accepted ‘truth’ (Zheng, 209). In 1994 a mainland woman writer was ostracized by writing a few paragraphs that describe the female protagonist engaging in masturbation. Accusations of her writing pornography became a widely followed controversy with the result that the crucial passages were taken out.19 In was not without irony that a year later in 1995 the World Women’s Conference was to be held in Beijing and in order to commemorate this event, publishers rushed out with several series of writings by women writers. The 1990s was a decade when the frenzy to marketize took mainland China on a roller-coaster ride that accelerated to nearly being out of control. By the time when Shanghai
Baby came out at the end of the decade, a new genre of writing that caters to the hunger of the sophisticated and westernized urbanites has firmly established a large territory within the by now fiercely competitive and commercialized publishing industry. “Private Literature” (which is interchangeable with “body writing”, “writings by beauty writer”) became phenomenally popular and profitable.20
The key interest or selling point of this female genre is the combination of an autobiographical and confessional appeal of the first-person narrative with the sexually adventurous female body revealing its most unabashed seductive secrets. In Wei Hui’s case the exotic foreign white male’s body adds more stimuli for the young Chinese urban reader who up till the 1990s hardly have had any first-hand experiences with interracial romances. The foreigners that appear repetitively in Wei Hui’s stories are the successful corporate soldiers with seemingly unlimited amount of foreign currency at their disposal (the main character of Shanghai Baby is a wealthy German business man “properly” named Mark). The locations where the seduction game plays out between the Shanghai girl and her hunt are the trendy places that the expats hung out.21 All of these combine to make this text a fantasy that fulfills a kind of “occidental longing” similar to the case in Japan which identifies with the western capitalism and individualism.
It also subtly treats China as a counter discourse obviously less attractive and weak. Like Yamada, Wei Hui’s Chinese men have very minor presence or are simply absent. Impotent, undisciplined, weak, feminized are words that easily come to mind to describe them. They are adolescent and amateur when it comes to romance in comparison with their western counterparts. As in Yamada, there is an obvious idolization and even fetishization of the foreign white male body, which is admiringly perceived as a beautiful beast. Actually military and animalistic metaphors are used to enhance their sexual prowess throughout the text. Also recalling Yamada, Wei Hui’s Chinese women take pride in their own audacity to explore their bodily jouissance in all its varieties – the naughty “bad girl” image is cultivated carefully to put the subservient and invisible oriental girl to shame. Indeed in the newly constructed discourse of the urban youth culture there is hardly any room left for the passé virgins. In her study critiquing Chinese exoticism Olivia Khoo observes that as a new mode of representation this discourse posits the oriental/Chinese woman in both “subjective and objective positions” and as such it differs from the colonial or imperial exoticism that casts the woman only “in the object positions” (Khoo, 17). In contrast to Cio-Cio-San this femininity is anything but passive and mysterious.
The new oriental woman, however, retains her exotic feature, willingly to be cast under this light for the sake of her western lover who obviously is still hung up on the old colonial charm. We hear the pingtan (ballad singing in Suzhou dialect) music playing as background music to love making; we hear the sound of qipao (China dress) tearing to tantalize the lover; we see ancient sex rituals performed onto her genitalia; we see her being the queen winner of a trophy present after a bidding game in which the wealthier western white male defeats his Chinese counterpart in public. “Self-orientalizing” is uncannily infused with a colonial nostalgia of
a Shanghai in its per-liberation glories (Khoo, 22).22 There is also an undeniable suspicion of the third-world woman’s desire for “upward mobility” in this discourse of cosmopolitanism (Robbins, 1994, quoted in Kelsky, 17). Wei Hui’s women’s “allegiance to the West” mirrors Japan’s internationalist women in their perception of western modernity “as eroticized and racialized power and the desire for the western white male as fetish object of modernity” (Kelsky, 4). As such this Chinese “occidental longing” offers liberating potential: it can be transgressive and transformative.23 Yet like with the Japanese internationalist women, this longing is “deeply compromised” (Heung, 4).
Xiaolu Guo’s Transnational Female Bildungsroman
Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese - English Dictionary for Lovers delineates an interracial romance set at the beginning of a new millennium and in her adopted home London. The book is a hybrid novel that uses the dictionary format with entries of English words. It is also travel literature with romance as the central structure. Written in bad English that improves to comply with the heroine’s identity as a student in London it also develops as a postmodern female
bildung, a journey of self-discovery that ends with an abortion and a failed marriage plot and the return to native land. Comparing with Wei Hui and Yamada, Guo’s first-person narrator seems incredibly old-fashioned and unsophisticated. A virgin with post-Mao small town peasant background, Z (she chooses to use this as her name because it is impossible for the foreigners to pronounce her real name Zhang correctly) is vulnerable and innocent. Yet precisely because of this less mature and experienced state Z is able to search and form her own agency through a process of development much de-emphasized in contemporary romance. Because of this initial innocence Z’s romance with the much older white British man who is a former hippie and artist, bisexual and vegetarian has a more earnest and serious tone – a lack of “hipper than thou” attitude. It does not start out as a sex game but gradually forms into a deeply touching romance filled with pages of explicit sexual and physical explorations as well as intellectual adventures. Unlike Wei Hui and Yamada whose female subjectivity is constructed on a separation of the womb from the woman, Guo’s Z suffers severe consequences from her sexual tryouts – an abortion in a foreign land on a student visa surely is ironic in this search for western-style freedom. In this sense Guo’s examination of modern women’s relation to their own maternal body is less conditioned by gender-role fulfillment as with Cio-Cio-San, or presented as a safe fantasy like those shown in Wei Hui and Yamada, but is underscored by the female body’s vulnerable reality. The feminine discourse does not map itself out as a maternal melodrama that glorifies self-sacrifice or complies with “hooray for the singletons” ideology that rejects
marriage categorically (Wheleham, 173-190). On another level if we consider the numerous abortions enforced on women by the Chinese government this incident then highlights the issue of the subjection of women’s body to state control. Incidentally this abortion episode was nearly chopped out in its American version where it is marketed as “chick lit” fiction.24
Guo’s transcultural romance reminds us of Yamada: it indentifies with a marginal male subjectivity despite the whiteness. Z’s lover may have a beautiful body in her eyes, he is poor, old, disillusioned and intensely uncomfortable with the mainstream society. Here Guo clearly differentiates her narrative from the success-driven and status-conscious affairs typical of the “chick lit” glitter and charm. Unfortunately this subversive potential is undermined by the ultimate function he serves in the text: as an “intellectual agency” to Z’s bildung (Chow, 73). The poor oriental girl relies on the western male as guidance for sexual and worldly matters, not to mention an education of enlightenment. In other words it is through his lens that Z forms her sense of self. At times their relationship feeds upon his paternal kind of love mixed with a deep sympathy for the inexperienced oriental girl.
It is to Guo’s credit that the west is portrayed in a more nuanced reading. Unlike Wei Hui or Yamada, there is no sexual aggrandizement or financial upper hand. Guo does not appropriate the foreign male body for female jouissance or objectify it as a mockery to shame the feminized and incompetent fellow countrymen. The western male subjectivity is seen as equally vulnerable though wise, generous yet not totally compromising, charming yet not intimidating – it is these gentle qualities that allow the oriental female subjectivity to mature in a more organic way. Indeed rather than a beautiful beast he is presented as a gardener, an organic artist who is rooted in earth.
Guo’s Z proves to have more depth than Wei Hui or Yamada’s women despite her peasant background. Less obsessed with her sexual identity, but nonetheless equally adventurous, she truly grows during the course of the story into a full-fledged individual sexually, intellectually, and emotionally. She is thus able to see the image of the west she receives from the Chinese media or official discourse as misleading or simply untrue. With her defective language ability she communicates with the west in a much more substantial way. By the end of the novel Z settles in Beijing as a potential writer. Her maturity allows her to see the false consciousness encouraged by the ruthless zeal for capitalism that enslaves all those around her. Ironically here in Beijing she becomes more aligned with her London lover (who remains nameless) as a marginal outsider within a newly formed power structure who feels intensely anachronistic. Z’s ability to form such a liberal stance has much to do with her London lover’s position of anti-capitalism and anti-materialism. This political dimension gives the “occidental longing” a
critical edge that is important and obviously missing in Yamada and Wei Hui. Guo constructs a mature female agency not simply conditioned by a psychosexual dimension but with a sociocultural alertness progressing toward a transnationalism that has the potential to transcend the problematic longing for identification with the powerful west. By contrast, with Wei Hui and Yamada the interracial relationship ends with the sexually empowered female subjectivity showing strong signs of emotional and psychological dependency. Their female self suffers from a split of consciousness that tips her off balance – it reveals a fragile foundation upon which their newfound identity stands.
Conclusion
The interracial narratives of Yamada, Wei Hui and Guo subvert Madame Butterfly in many ways that are obvious. The oriental woman in this new paradigm is no longer passive or meek to the point of self-diminishing. Her womanhood is no longer constructed through her sexual fidelity and willingness to fulfill social roles. She is fully in charge of her own being. Enlarged and empowered, there is no mystique associated with this independent and performative femininity. Nor is there place for the crucial element that supports the western male’s fantasy for Madame Butterfly, a fascination with the pure sacrifice of the oriental maternal body, i.e. the “beauty of Cio-Cio-San’s death” (Chow, 131). By demystifying the fantastical element and structuring the interracial romance in reciprocal terms these new texts take away a foundational strategy of Orientalism.
Yet it seems difficult to view these new narratives as “inherently subversive”. The East - West encounter is still constructed as a heterosexual relationship that “conflates exoticism with eroticism” (Khoo). Except in this new model the parameter has shifted so that exoticism and eroticism are no longer associated only with the oriental woman. They have been “appropriated” onto the occidental male. This encounter is explored in more balanced terms but far from being unproblematic or fully equal. Mixed discourses of othering, or objectifying, and unconscious “self-orientalizing” keep the East and the West in their separate realms. Clearly the gendered identification with the west through uncritical acceptance and admiration as “better than” and “stronger than” the native land remains a problematic consciousness in East Asia’s discourse of modernity. This only confirms how important it is to address the issue of the body, female or male, as a site onto which power and knowledge relations are contested.
Endnotes:
1 Western feminists have examined the negative effect contained in the mind/body dualism on
the general view of women in western intellectual history from different perspectives. For two representative studies refer to Elizabeth V. Spelman who critiques misogyny and somatophobia in Plato, and Laurie A. Finke who examines this issue from the perspective of medieval Christianity.
2 As western feminism precedes into postfeminism, the focus on the feminine as less than fully human
has shifted to a view of the body as less than a fixed given. For a comprehensive summary of how female embodiment is analyzed in western feminism, see Shildrick and Price’s article in Feminist Theory and the Body.
3 Recent scholarships examining East Asian women’s oppression have yielded different opinions
regarding how to view Confucianism. For efforts that intend to go beyond a “simplistic” and “monolithic” view of Confucianism see Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. The opposite opinion can be seen from Reconceiving Women’s Equality in China.
4 For background information about various texts that relate to “the myth of Madame Butterfly”, refer to
Interracial Intimacy in Japan, pages 167-181.
5 For details of this book, see Kawakami, Sumie. (2007). Goodbye Madame Butterfly: Sex, Marriage
and the Modern Japanese Woman. Seattle: Chin Music Press.
6 In recent decades, western feminist critics have re-examined popular genres such as romance to see
if they in fact offer potentially liberating alternatives for women. For one comprehensive study on this issue refer to Joanne Hollows. (2000). Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
7 For more detailed exploration of this progress see the introduction essay “Openings on the Body: A
Critical Introduction” in Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, 1-14.
8 For a study of the impact of various groups of Japanese “bad girls” see Miller, Laura and Jan Bardsley,
eds. (2005). Bad Girls of Japan. New York: Palgrave.
9 See Mulhern, Chieko I. (1994). Japanese Women Writers: A bio-critical Sourcebook. Westport:
Greenwood Press, 459.
10 For Japanese feminists’ efforts to liberate the female body refer to “Liberation.” Feminism in Modern
Japan, 144-173, especially 158-59.
11 For more information refer to Jan Bardsley’s essay “The Essential Woman Writer” in Copeland,
Rebecca L. ed. (2006). Woman Critiqued: Translated Essays on Japanese Women’s Writing. Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 53-60.
12 For western writings by women that celebrate this singleton position see Whelehan, 173-90.
13 Yamada’s treatment of the Japanese man raises many questions. For one in-depth analysis refer to Nina
Cornyetz.
14 Critics tend to have negative views in regard to how the trope of the black male sexuality is treated
in Yamada and agree that there is some form of racism at work. Kelsky, for example, simply reduces Yamada’s works as “little more than soft-core pornographic novels that capitalize on the hoariest racist notions of black male sexuality” (Kelsky, 137). For a more balanced analysis of this issue refer to Nina Cornyetz.
15 In an essay published earlier in a publication from International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan, I
examined Wei Hui and Yamada’s writings focusing only on the relationship of writing and women’s body. I did not examine their texts from the lens of interracial romance. See Yinghong Li, “Writing
the Female Body: Ambiguities and Challenges in the East Asian Context”, Asian Cultural Studies, 34, (2008), 215-230.
16 Nina Cornyetz has argued that Yamada’s characters “objectify and dominate each other, reproducing a
discourse of colonization”, 453.
17 For one study on commodification of the black image in Japan see John Russeel, “Race and Reflexivity:
the Black Other in Contemporary Japanese Mass Culture”, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Feb. 1991), 3-5.
18 For background information regarding the Chinese publishing industry in relation to the publication of
Shanghai Baby see Kong, 109-119.
19 That writer is Lin Bai. A detailed account of this incident can be found in Kong, 103-109.
20 These “beauty writers” have been promoted as the Chinese equivalent of the extremely popular western
genre “chick lit” writers. For details see MoDougall.
21 To see how the post-Mao young Shanghai generation opens up to the west and how they view sexuality
refer to Farrer.
22 Chinese women intellectuals responded differently to this novel. For an interesting analysis see Zhong. 23 For a powerful analysis on how the discourse of Occidentalism has been constructed in modern China
see Xiaomei Chen.
24 Guo herself has resisted strongly to be labeled as a “chick lit” writer. See Wenche Ommundsen, “From
China with Love: Chick Lit and The New Crossover Fiction” in Robert A. Lee, 327-345.
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