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Journal of Asian American Studies 3.3 (2000) 394-396



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Book Review

Performance and reading, by Justin Chin


Performance and reading, by Justin Chin, at the University of California, Riverside. April 12, 2000.

We meet Justin Chin in darkness. He strikes a match and extinguishes it (strike/extinguish, strike/extinguish) as he narrates a layered tale of grandmothers meeting regularly for "marathon mah jong," consuming snack cakes and gossip about delinquent grandchildren. Chin weaves threads of Japanese occupation and silenced brides bound by arranged marriages. . . . "Wait! That's not me! That's The Joy Luck Club!"

Justin Chin's undoing of Amy Tan's familiar tropes of Asian/Asian American experience sets the tenor for his performance that stages light and dark; he manipulates lightness and darkness first with matches, and later with a glowing light bulb. His relaxed story telling becomes a manipulation of presumed knowledges, debunking conventional narratives and signifiers, made explicit by his claim: "That's not me!" That's not his story. His story relies instead on another set of constellations that constitute his subjectivity as a gay, Asian male artist, refusing what Sau-ling Cynthia Wong calls "markers of authenticity" that mark and gave rise to the popularity of Tan's novels. 1

House lights reveal a wiry Chin, comfortably dressed in t-shirt and jeans, with tattooed arms, manipulating a glowing light bulb that he clasps in one palm; he describes a world of cruising bars and drag queens: a universe of gay male subjectivity. He relates the brief relationship of Matthew and John, who could be "the poster children for gay couples" by their aesthetics of wardrobe and interior decorating. Chin recounts their break-up and his own subsequent and incidental [End Page 394] meeting Matthew; he relates Matthew's visions of God inflected by his HIV positive condition, admitting his weariness and ache; as Chin tells us that he massages Matthew's feet, he wraps a sliver of raw meat around the glowing bulb he has been clutching; he describes the blood that erupts from the lesions on Matthew's feet that cover his hands, invoking the raw pain and reality of disease and humanness of humble touch. According to Chin, Matthew concedes that that encounter "was the closest thing to sex" he had experienced. Chin's narrative becomes a moment of intimacy that has for others served as a site of repulsion. Desire and consummation figure as humble acts of humanity.

Chin's narrative takes a turn from his description of the intimate moment with Matthew, and he begins ventriloquizing a savvy catalogue of sentimental lyrics of popular culture love songs, from the likes of Jewel, Alanis Morissette, Desiree, and Whitney Houston. This abrupt and comical appropriation of these sugar-coated lyrics--having just recounted the encounter with Matthew--on one level, mocks the saccharine quality of the lyrics, but also slyly undoes the sentimentality of the narrative about Matthew. By shifting into sugar-coated lyrics about love, Chin absconds the sincere ground we thought we stood on by Matthew's comment; Chin blurs the distinction between honest confessions of desire and humanity versus saccharine artificial lyrical rehearsals, compelling us to rethink how narratives of love and desire are cast.

We might also consider the pointed juxtaposition as a challenge to the heteronormativity of pop culture song lyrics that exclude--and implicitly invalidate--other sexualities. The wide cultural resonance of the lyrics reminds us of the omnipresence and perpetual circulation of a heteronormative presence in such quotidian spaces as popular lyrics. Chin intervenes the quotidian dynamic with literal rawness, poignant force. He ends his playful buffet of sugary lyrics by stomping the raw meat-clothed bulb, enacting a smashed light (or life), extinguishing the glow as he did with matches.

As he collects the shards of the shattered bulb from the sliver of meat, Chin reflects on Dr. Doolittle stories that had led him to reading and writing, and inspired trips to the library. He also ruminates on his childhood penchant for Readers' Digest where he took particular interest in two sections: "Drama in...

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