Comparative Cultural Studies

Sheng-mei Ma

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781612492087
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Drawing from Anglo-American, Asian American, and Asian literature as well as J-horror and manga, Chinese cinema and Internet, and the Korean Wave, Sheng-mei Ma's Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity probes into the conjoinedness of West and East, of modernity's illusion and nothing's infinitude. Suspended on the stylistic tightrope between research and poetry, critical analysis and intuition, Asian Diaspora restores affect and heart to the experience of diaspora in between East and West, at-homeness and exilic attrition. Diaspora, by definition, stems as much from socioeconomic and collective displacement as it points to emotional reaction. This book thus challenges the fossilized conceptualizations in area studies, ontology, and modernism. The book's first two chapters trace the Asian pursuit of modernity into nothing, as embodied in horror film and the gaming motif in transpacific literature and film. Chapters three through eight focus on the borderlands of East and West, the edges of humanity and meaning. Ma examines how loss occasions a revisualization of Asia in children's books, how Asian diasporic passing signifies, paradoxically, both "born again" and demise of the "old" self, how East turns "East" or the agent of self-fashioning for Anglo-America, Asia, and Asian America, how the construct of "bugman" distinguishes modern West's and East's self-image, how the extreme human condition of "non-person" permeates the Korean Wave, and how manga artists are drawn to wartime Japan. The final two chapters interrogate the West's death-bound yet enlightening Orientalism in Anglo-American literature and China's own schizophrenic split, evidenced in the 2008 Olympic Games.

Chapter One
Asian Cell and Horror

The human body is a cell, a prison house, from which the voice, the speaker of the mind, escapes through the invisible line of a cell phone, computer, or film reel. That umbilical cord to Western technology eases Asian subjects’ atomization, but paradoxically implicates the cell, telephone, and computer user in a web of bondage, a pandemic of evil, as exemplified by Asian horror films and ghost stories such as Ringu (1998), The Eye (Gin Gwai, 2002), Oldboy (2003), Ju-On (2003), and many more. What connects such on-screen horror with the Asian audience and, increasingly, global cinema is a malaise of disconnect. For if the human body is graphed by the coordinates of the x-axis of time and the y-axis of space, then the z-coordinate of the mind ranges far from the two-dimensional plane of daily existence. Among other things, the mind dreams of renewal, of transformation from old to new, hence reversing the flow of time and rejecting the confines of space, albeit temporarily. Transformation is but change, the essence of life, speeded up, which would otherwise progress in a gradual and slow-paced manner. In the frenzy of modernization, Asia desires to fast forward alteration. A case in point: many Chinese believe that China has completely bypassed in recent decades the phase of household telephones in Western history, moving directly from no household phones to cell phones (Mendoza, “China: Mobile Superpower” 374). Yet such leapfrogs are so gigantic and swift that one feels torn, as if leaving behind one’s heart, the thin thread of attachment ripped. Nostalgia for what one has lost invariably shadows forward-looking, even futuristic, sentiments, except melodramatic tears are now replaced by horrified screams. While reveling in the new, the self secretly conjures up the old, either female ghosts (Ringu and The Eye) or buried memories (Oldboy). The horror genre thus returns to modernity’s repression, or Asia’s ghost. To cast in the metaphor of human dichotomy again, the millennial Asia in the precocity of modernization acquires a mature, full-grown body, while the mind dangles between a wayward child and a traditional patriarch, between what is to come and what refuses to pass on, between, in Jagdish Bhagwati’s words, the PC (personal computer) and the CP (Communist Party) (“Made in China” 25). Far from Asia bashing, the figure of speech simply subscribes to the truism of the discrepancy between biological and psychological age. In such a schizophrenic divide, China’s meteoric rise as the twenty-first century’s factory is plagued by environmental devastation, a disparity between rich and poor, human rights abuses, gender inequity, minority repression, and a mishmash of childish willfulness and moribundity. This disconnect is not unique to Asia: rarely is the infrastructure or hardware of a developed, postmodern society supported by comparable software; egotism and self-interest rather than altruism and compassion appear to drive civilization. In the Asian horror genre, this disjunction finds a metonym in the cell phone, which echoes Forster’s plea: “Only connect!” (Howards End 214).

The cell phone, in effect, becomes a surrogate or mirror image for the human body. The human body and mind contains a universe within, characterized by incalculable biochemical and biological linkages, which the Wachowski brothers visualize in The Animatrix (2003) in the image of transmission of points of light on a computer’s circuit board. Stephen King dubs it “organic circuitry” of the brain in his 2006 sci-fi thriller Cell (158), hence erasing the romantic separation of the organic from the mechanic. Placed as it is, the body is the thinnest of placenta, porous to boot, that separates the universe within from the universe without, until death, some say, releases the one inside the placenta to merge with the one outside. Ditto the cell phone, whose plastic shell holds a constellation of networks whenever it reaches out to the cosmos beyond. Technology has indeed yoked infinity and infinitesimality: while its size continues to shrink, the cell dazzles in multitasking in telephone, text message, camera, internet access, daily planner, address book, calculator, timepiece, alarm clock, and whatnot, so much so that a cell user develops a near dependency. As a cell phone is misplaced, the user feels incapacitated without his or her familiar (soul?), stricken with grief. Consistent with Freud’s insights in “Mourning and Melancholia,” losing one’s cell equals losing oneself, for the cell is the self, or dream self, which, despite its smallness, does big things.

Such an externalized dream self claims a virtual, at least auditory, community. As a cinematic device in Korean television serial dramas or the Korean Wave rippling throughout Asia and Asian diasporic communities, cell phones justify the ubiquity of shot-reverse shot editing. Wherever and whenever the characters happen to be, they are, by means of cells, perennially face to face, even intimate close-ups for each other and for the viewer. This no doubt reflects the wish fulfillment of the millennial Asian diaspora where fans frequently seek to reach characters of another culture, another language, and another time. Yet this essentially global, diasporic dream suggests that the cell user may shy away from being alone with him- or herself, placing such calls to virtual voices in place of actual voices from actual bodies, a symptom of deep-seated neurosis. That the virtual community is flimsy at best is born out by the recurring nadir in the Korean Wave. The dramatic felicity courtesy of cell phones routinely vanishes at the heart-wrenching moment for lovers when the “heart” or memory chip of the cell phone is removed by one party in an attempt to end the relationship. The “heartless” cell user formulaically turns depressed and catatonic, whereas the other user, agitated beyond words with each thwarted call and unanswered message, tries frantically to give his or her heart. The former is resigned to solitary confinement; the latter strives to break it.

Largely following this pattern, Daniel H. Byun’s 2004 thriller The Scarlet Letter features a memorable reversal: an egomaniacal police officer talks to his lover, a blues singer played sultrily by Eun-ju Lee, on the cell as they thread past and greet guests, including each other, at a reception in honor of the officer’s cellist wife, who has just completed her solo performance. The cell’s dubious nature emerges unequivocally with this brilliant scene. The cell places the user in two communities, simultaneously, with respect to reception guests and to a disembodied voice. Parallel communications take place in a mutually exclusive fashion, unless the cell user chooses to relay the message. Yet this mediation is never transparent: in The Scarlet Letter, it is downright duplicitous. The officer’s supposed dialogue may well be a monologue insofar as his wife is concerned, who is not privy to that low whispering in his ear. The suspicious wife wonders whether he responds to the “inner voice,” oblivious to or because of the presence of the public. Among other attractions, the cell intrigue is no doubt one of the selling points to garner international distribution. An adept cross-cultural communicator, Byun fashions a tie-in between a Korean product and the global market. The commercial aspect notwithstanding, the match between the Christian paradigm and the Korean psyche of crime and punishment is well-nigh perfect: the namesake of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Puritan allegory; the opening epigraph of the original sin; and the refrain of guilt, confession, and repentance. The plot twists are somewhat contrived, though, in the relentless sensationalism—passion, murder, mercy killing, liaison, and lesbianism. Unknown to the officer, his lover and wife were once involved in a lesbian relationship; the triangular love is far more complicated than what he conceives. Straddling the genre of thriller, with scenes portraying carnal desire, and the genre of horror, particularly the two killings splattered with blood, Byun succeeds in flirting with the transgressive fringes of Korean sensibility.

One and one-half casualties, however, never return from his project of far-flung overreaching. Eun-ju Lee received scathing criticism for her daring performance baring her body as well as the character’s mental instability. Compounded by family debts and personal problems, the 25-year-old Lee hanged herself on 22 February 2005, one in a rash of celebrity suicides in South Korea in recent years. Serendipitously, the double entendre of Asian cell for cell phone and prison cell converges in her final moments on screen. Her passionate lovemaking with the officer locks them in a car trunk, their death trap, perhaps a subconscious maneuver to possess him, even if it means twin suicide. As they wrestle in love and, subsequently, with death in the coffin of the trunk, his cell vibrates on the dashboard, his present wife and her ex-lover hoping in vain to reach them. Rather than an ascent to stardom, Lee’s escape from Korean social roles into bluesy plumbing into Eros and Thanatos alienated her to the point that she parted from herself. Yet another casualty of sorts is Hyeon-a Seong, whose character beats her husband’s head to a pulp with the statuette of the Virgin Mary. Seong used to have a beautiful round face, yet her cheeks are now shaved off by cosmetic surgery, popular in South Korea and neighboring countries, leaving a long, slender, and stylized Western face. Seong’s “old” body embodies a cocoon, from which she emerges a butterfly in the image of the West. Successful self-transformation for Byun, Lee, and Seong involves the trapping of Western modernity, from the glamorous, Hollywood-inspired surface of the film and of the half-face to the explosion of pent-up Korean libido. A tinge of unease, nevertheless, haunts this flight from the cell of Asianness: Western opera, classical music, and blues punctuate transgressions against social mores and law, all unfolding within chic upscale apartments, and the Virgin Mary, of course, is the weapon of choice. In particular, a panning shot from the back at the two nude lovers recalls the traditional Korean ritual of the bridegroom carrying the bride on his back, which has become almost an obligatory scene marking the climax of love in contemporary Korean television serials. (Instead of the pop song lyric, “Sealed with a Kiss,” Koreans seal their vow with a portage.) Avoiding frontal nudity, Lee sits on the poolside, her right knee drawn up, leaning on the back of the officer, who turns out to be standing in the pool and clipping her left toe nails. This tableau recreates, momentarily, the traditional ritual, which only accentuates the tragic trespasses of adultery and nudity. The longing to be one with the lover, with the West, and, paradoxically, with Koreanness is doomed from the start. The void left by Lee’s nude body and Seong’s round face is the true, Conradian “The Horror! The Horror!”—which is renamed and aestheticized as the genre of horror for mass entertainment.

While the cell phone and other vehicles of mobility or communication are designed to enable connectedness, alienation has always been a spell cast on modernization in the wake of the industrial revolution. For producers of modernity, as Karl Marx theorizes, labor in the modern era reifies laborers. Charlie Chaplin’s worker character bears out Marxist prophecy in lapsing into a mere cog in the assembly line of Modern Times (1936). For the masses, the machine in the garden, in Leo Marx’s terms, causes a disturbance to pastoral ties to nature and human nature. The engine to progress and the master narrative of modernity, reason, and science ameliorate as much as they estrange human life, in part because they suppress alternative discourses, such as religion, belief in the supernatural, and other myth-making efforts. Peter Brooks’s pioneering The Melodramatic Imagination (1976) has maintained that melodrama and the Gothic give voice to what is repressed during the Enlightenment. Amid the rational and secular mid- to late-eighteenth century, the need for transcendence, for the supernatural, and for sentimental excesses is satisfied, Brooks asserts, by such genres. G. Richard Thompson agrees that “Gothic literature may be seen as expressive of an existential terror generated by a schism between a triumphantly secularized philosophy of evolving good and an abiding obsession with the Medieval conception of guilt-laden, sin-ridden man” (The Gothic Imagination 4-5). The Gothic tradition metamorphoses into horror and sci-fi in the modern West. Isabel Cristina Pinedo sees postmodern horror film as manifesting a general mal-aise, casting in doubt “temporal order and causal logic” (96). Almost nihilistic in its unremitting violence, the horror film exposes, maintains Pinedo, “the terror implicit in everyday life: the pain of loss, the enigma of death, the unpredictability of events” (“Postmodern Elements” 106). Such logic sees horror as a working out of modern and postmodern repressions. One figure associated with this angst is what Noel Carroll calls the “overreacher” or mad scientist, whose demise is invariably caused by the hubris of playing God. The scientist’s will in this psychodrama within the West drives experiments, causing self-alienation in the end. Whereas science and technology inflate the ego unduly, infringing on the Creator’s domain, they are seldom viewed as alien invasion from another part of the world. After all, the machine roaring across the idyllic countryside initiates the industrial revolution, part of the history of modern West. Likewise, the mad scientists—Drs. Faustus, Frankenstein, Jekyll, Moreau, Strangelove—are all part of “us.” (The only doctor who is one of “them” is Dr. Fu Manchu, the archetype of the Yellow Peril, who, you will agree, does not belong here.) The ensuing colonialism of the East by the West comes about as a result of the differential pace of technological development. Accordingly, Asia is thrust into modernity, an awkward embrace even for Japan, perhaps the most successful of Asia’s modernizing efforts. Japan, needless to say, is the only nation in the world with the bitter taste of atomic bombs, the “pinnacle” of modern science.

Ringu

Water exists in three states—solid ice, liquid water, or vaporized steam—and so does a telephone—transmitting, ringing, or dead. Any electronic device, for that matter, is either operating or not, with a brief moment of warm-up or wind-down between the two more durable states. In human terms, that sliver of space between living and dead is inhabited by shadows of ghosts. Even when humans are “solids,” 60 percent of the human body consists of water. Even when humans are gone, they flow through loved ones’ memories like currents of water. Despite its elusiveness, water or ghost (watery ghost in Ringu) is the secret of life, the hidden passage that either end goes through before reincarnation. Ringu fully deploys such symbolism of water, from the film’s rain-soaked aura to the genesis of life in the ocean and in the oceanic womb. However, as the ghost in Ringu resides in the well, the vagina or birth canal turns out to issue death from the earth’s womb of subterranean water. The telephone calls to the hotel guests staying right above the well in Ringu constitute a wicked umbilical cord from the ghost to her “stillborn.” In such a grotesque reversal of life, the telephone ring symbolizes a Keatsian pregnant moment between connection and disconnection, or connection under erasure. In and of itself, every telephone connection is already a disconnection. While the telephone, especially the cell, demolishes all spatial and temporal prisons, it presupposes a dissociation of the physical body from its voice. Even on a Skype web cam, the split between the physical body and its image persists. The cell, pun intended, rarely captures a whole person—body and mind—as we would like it to, only parts, which, fetishistically, metamorphose into that person. Given that face-to-face communication often involves less than a whole person as well, since one may be distracted and not all there, the cell comes to encapsulate the wish to connect and the ultimate failure of doing so. This argument based on a hypothetical whole person begs the question of what a person is. In point of fact, one may well contend that only fragments of the self exist at any given moment, not unlike water under the proverbial bridge. That the bridge is fixed does not mean water or thoughts ever are. Short of an ontological thesis refuting the self altogether, I merely submit that the cell and other communication tools serve to highlight the limitation of contact.

The futility of “only connect” haunts even Walter Benjamin’s utopian mechanical reproduction, the lynchpin of modernity. Benjamin celebrates the emancipatory potential of machine use, which evolves into Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern simulacra, copies without an original. Benjamin and Baudrillard dispense with the question of the machine maker or of the original, relishing instead the horizontal or rhizome network. Their playful, quasi-apocalyptic stance posits, nonetheless, an originary absence, a void schizophrenically displaced onto popular culture, from Gothic monsters centuries ago to specters in contemporary horror. Rather than retracing human origin back to the Creator, as medieval predecessors used to do, horror films constitute a genealogy of evil parallel to the lost lineage. Yet horror hinges on the void of good, which evokes, like memory, mental images rendered powerful by virtue of their absence. For instance, the female ghost Sada (short for Sadako) at the core of Ringu comes from a mysterious origin, while her name (chastity, virginity, or virtue) implies an immaculate conception from the devil. Commercially, such a pan-Christian motif lends itself to Western remakes and global cinema. Conceptually, the perversion only comes into being vis-à-vis the existing Christian and Japanese orthodoxies. The failure to unite with a missing God prompts reaching back to origin of another kind. That Sada’s story is told over and over again—from Koji Suzuki’s 1991 misogynist, paranoid novel to Hideo Nakata’s 1998 more politically correct Ringu to Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake The Ring to Nakata’s Hollywood debut of the 2005 The Ring Two and to more—suggests the global audience’s need to revisit primal fears, each remake harking back to antecedents, ultimately to the mystery of Sada or death. Similar to the symbiosis of good and evil, the mystery of death links inextricably with that of life, each deriving its meaning from the other.

Into this stormy marriage also go East and West. Since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan has succeeded in mastering Western technology. The identity of the modern West is constructed on the basis of science and technology. Even technological glitches in Western horror films, such as those perpetrated by mad scientists, rarely discredit technology as a whole. In fact, technology often provides redemption for humanity in sci-fi postnuclear holocaust. (What Neo and Trinity need in order to rescue Morpheus is “Guns! Lots of guns!”) On the contrary, in modern Japan, technology acquires a duality standing for, on the one hand, the essence of modernity of the self-anointed “Robot Kingdom,” and for, on the other, a part of the self that points ambivalently to the Western other. A classic example comes from Junichiro Tanizaki’s “Terror” (1913), which presciently opens with the protagonist’s “railroad phobia” that comes to infect even nature itself, now transformed into industrial images of “blast furnace” and “movie screen.” A doctor with a Western-style moustache remains blind to the protagonist’s inner malaise and perceives only his strong physique. About to be conscripted into the military and the machinery of expansionism after a near century of Westernization, the terrified protagonist escapes into whiskey, a Western import. Western technology is a net that interpellates modern life so seamlessly that the net is invisible to the protagonist. Tanizaki pinpoints the Japanese “conundrum,” to borrow from The Ring, of a highly developed nation ill at ease with its own technology, of ancient Japanese myths (re)possessing ordinary modernity.

Contextualized by this ambiguous relationship with Western technology, the director Hideo Nakata adroitly combines the technology of quotidian life with supernatural ghosts and ancient haunting. Before this point, the twins are usually separated. Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954), for instance, features the telephone as a mere prop for malicious intent; the telephone does not embody, as it does in Ringu, malice itself. The other extreme manifests itself in The Matrix, where old-fashioned telephone landlines offer the escape routes for freedom fighters. By contrast, Ringu manages to vest in modern technology the Japanese tradition of female ghosts and repression—with classic long black hair, white gossamer gowns, and the setting of a drowning well. All three characteristics derive from traditional ghost stories. The long black hair reflects not only the long hair worn by East Asian women of old but also the fact that one’s hair lives on after one is dead. In 1769, Uyeda Akinari thus gives the ghost of a faithful wife, “tousled hair tumbling down her back,” in “Homecoming” (Ugetsu Monogatari 10), which inspires, together with Lafcadio Hearn’s Orientalist Kwaidan (1904), “black hair” in Masaki Kobayash’s avant-garde film, Kwaidan (1965). The white gossamer robe, on the other hand, has come to be a stylized feature of female ghosts, as Izumi Kyoka in “The Holy Man of Mount Koya” (1900) imagines one such waif in “gossamer gowns as sheer as butterfly wings” (59). Finally, drowning in the well and hanging account for most female suicides in traditional Asian texts. (This is echoed in Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern [1991]. Due to the location, Zhang changes the site of suicide from the family well in Su T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Digging to China (or America)
• Chapter One Asian Cell and Horror
• Chapter Two Asian Diaspora Does Vegas
• Chapter Three Diasporic Authors of Children’s and Young Adult Books
• Chapter Four A Child’s Passing into Asian Diaspora
• Chapter Five yEast for Modern Cannibals
• Chapter Six Bugman in Modernity
• Chapter Seven Kim Ki-duk’s Nonperson Films
• Chapter Eight Nakazawa’s A-bomb, Tezuka’s Adolf, and Kobayashi’s Apologia
• Chapter Nine Orientalism Goes to War in the Twentieth Century
• Chapter Ten Hyperreal Beijing and the 2008 Olympics
• Works Cited
• Index