- Fortune Cookie Fortune #90705426571

A peacock who cares not for her young,

 Makes a most peaceful and beauteous breakfast companion.

Dynamite Tender

Written as part of an exploration with Tiana Nobile, of the 46-Syllable Chinese Vernacular poems, which were popular during 19th Century Chinese America:

Dynamite Tender

Tendrils of flame grasp,
Mother's hand-made maps,
Hastily slipped through the trunk's cracks,
promissory notes: Come Back.
Such tender,
Held no sway over him,
For men of steel and fire,
Dreams are but the sparks and ash.

-July 16, 2012

The Occasion For Screaming

The Occasion for Screaming

This Sunday, my brother and I skyped back home, from Riverside to NYC, to wish our mother a happy holiday.  She had just come back, along with my youngest brother, from a dinner for her own mother and sisters.  Excited to hear her sons’ voices and to see their handsome faces, she chastened my father to join the conversation.  Their familial and familiar faces crammed into the space of the chat window, as we made the anxious small-talk typically expected of an Asian family strewn apart by language and history.  The family conversation ended with laughter, over a joke, a witty turn-of-Chinglish, or what, I don’t remember.  At that moment, all I could think about was how far this Chinese family had come, in terms of distance.  We were far from China much like we were far from each other in body and mind.  My mother would probably fall asleep on the couch, as she is apt to do; my father would skype his old classmates in China, as he is apt to do; my brother would march upstairs in our tiny house where he would dream high of better lives, as he is apt to do.  You could say we were materially separated by walls and floorboards of our house – a metaphor that can be easily extended to various aspects.  But if the rats and roaches that skittered around the house, and the prayers and shouts from our Bangladeshi neighbors are evidence of anything, it is that these walls were porous.  I’d like to think we were mediated, rather than separated, by walls just as we mediated each other through our LCD screens.

What occasions me to speak, and perhaps to scream, to create this portrait, is of course the recent appearance of writers like Amy Chua and Wesley Yang in the public sphere.  I will forgo a summary and close-reading of their writing if only for the sake of brevity (Read: sanity).  That being said, these writers are receiving attention for their wholesale portrayal of authentic Asian Americans, whether it is through explicating the conditions that produced them (i.e. Chua’s “Tiger Mom”), or through a psycho-social profile of the limpid Asian penis (i.e. Yang’s “Paper Tigers”).  I am not here to dispute the truth value of their claims and observations; as the outpouring of responses from the Asian American community over Chua’s book (and responses that Yang’s piece will surely garner) illustrates, these writers are speaking to a truth that will continually be contested and supplemented by the spoken experiences of all Asian Americans, self-defined or otherwise.  

No, my intended audience is not those who want “the truth”, but those who want to discuss what underpins this truth, how it is made, and how this might inform the creation and dissemination of our own truths and knowledge to our communities.   My audience is my fellow Asian Americans who imbibe a healthy dose of skepticism, of hermeneutical suspicion, who cannot help but desire participation in this conversation despite their alienation from the constructed images and histories put forward by these writers.  So forgive me in advance if I do not speak to your experience.  I am but a product and actor of my times.

Notes on the Green Hornet (2011) pt. 3

This is the conclusion to a 3-part series on The Green Hornet (2011).  This part focuses on the film's play with masculinity and heteronormativity.  You can find part 1 here.  And part 2, here.

3.
My previous exploration, survey, and playful theorization on the cultural politics that surround the figure of Kato and Britt Reid in the The Green Hornet (2011) suggest that we cannot reduce the epistemology (the film’s “meanings” and our desire for a particular meaning) to the level of visual representation – the “finished” product given-to-be-seen on the screen.  While certainly perceptible that The Green Hornet (2011) engenders positive screen representations of Asian American men, this “reclamation” of representation – to be more specific, a reclamation of a viable and virile yellow masculinity – the film also forces us to consider how the global and transnational connections that pervade both the films narrative, production, and source material necessitates a reconsideration of yellow and white masculinity.

Notes on the Green Hornet (2011) pt. 2

This is part 2 of my working paper on The Green Hornet

You can find pt 1 here.

2.

Might we consider the characterization and performance by Seth Rogen of Britt Reid in The Green Hornet as a rhetorical articulation of failure?  That is to say, The Green Hornet performs an aesthetic of failure in its attempt to meet all the political, artistic, and commercial demands imposed by the film’s paratext – the politics and discourse surrounding its production.  Rogen, while not necessarily omnipotent, certainly feels the discursive weight it attaches to his body.  After all, he is the palpable persona –co-writer AND lead actor- a veritable shorthand and reference for all the political and artistic decisions in constructing the narrative, as well as the body receiving the majority of criticism.  Despite the ostensible degree of control he has over the remake, I believe Rogen, not “Seth Rogen” but Rogen our discursively imagined auteur, acknowledges his lack of artistic autonomy in the production of The Green Hornet, which can only lead to failure.

Notes on The Green Hornet (2011) pt. 1

This essay is part 1 of 3 mini-essays on the Seth Rogen's remake of The Green Hornet (2011)

This Mask Was Made In China
Notes on Seth Rogen's The Green Hornet (2011)
and
Meditation on the Aesthetics and Excesses of Failure

1.

Much of negative criticism that The Green Hornet (2011) has garnered typically attributes the failure of the film to its infidelity to the source material and the hegemonic standards that determine “good” (commercial?) film.  Film critics questioned Rogen’s casting of himself as the Green Hornet, his tried and tired spoken-to-be-funny dialogue, his choice of director, Michel Gondry, and the film’s last-minute conversion to 3D spectacle/craze/commercialization.  Most concluded that while the remake failed in totality some gems could found between the frames. One such gem was the character of Kato, who alone was, in one critic’s own paraphrased words, “worth the price of admission”.
 

Not Your Daddy's Asia, and Was It Ever?

Film Review: Jiang Wen’s “Devil’s on the Doorstep” (2000)

I cannot forget the last twenty sixty minutes of this film. They are burned into the whites of my eyes, escaping the black hole of the iris. As if I was reading Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking for the first time, again I became a witness to the atrocities committed against the Chinese during the Sino-Japanese war; conventionally known in Amerikka as the Pacific Front of World War II. The scene, a wholesale and indiscriminate massacre of Chinese denizens in Rack-Armor Terrace by the occupying Japanese forces evoked a rage that shook me to the core. Still, I had to ask, was I even entitled to it? Entitled to a historical legacy that continues to this day, found in the continued denials by the Japanese government that anything happened? I cannot rightly say I am, yet I cannot explain the searing sensation on my flesh: was the memory forever etched onto my DNA, a pain transmitted temporally through genes and chromosomes?

That is not to say that the scene came as a shock, a sudden fibrillation of a dead valve cultural/social history. One could argue that Jiang Wen builds up to this scene by covering it up with the comedic trope of mis-translation between Chinese and Japanese (languages). The film opens with Da Masan (Jiang Wen) being charged by an unnamed figure, ostensibly a resistance fighter, to safeguard two captured Japanese soldiers until the New Year. It is a task that Da Masan does not undertake with a patriotic fervor, rather he is motivated by the fear of death by the underground resistance force. This undoubtedly places Da Masan and his fellow villagers in a tricky spot. Rack-Armor Terrace is occupied by the Japanese Army, who announced their presence everyday with a bugle call and a routine march through the village. The premise of the film could have lent itself easily to a dramatic mediation of the politics of resistance and collusion among the Chinese during the Japanese occupation, yet Jiang Wen introduces a comedic element through the mis-translations between the two prisoners and the villagers.