East-West Montage: Reflections on Asian Bodies in Diaspora

Notes

Notes Notes to Pages xi–xxii / 257 Establishing Shots 1. P.Quigley discusses the significance of Chinese ideograms to these Westerners in “Eisenstein, Montage, and ‘Filmic Writing’” (2004). While focusing on Eisenstein, Quigley creates a “genealogy” that includes thinkers such as Freud and Derrida. Quigley sees Freud comparing “Chinese writing, and pictographic writing in general, to the activity of the dream-work, a comparison Derrida fully approves as ‘the writing of dreams exceeds phonetic writing’” (pp. 159–160). 2. See Eisenstein’s “Yermolova”: montage is “not so much the sequence of segments as their simultaneity: in the consciousness of the perceiver” (p. 86). He adds that “various elements are simultaneously seen both as separate independent units and as inseparable parts of a single whole” (p. 86). 3. David Bordwell traces the etymology of “montage” to the French word meaning “‘machine assembly,’ in the sense of ‘mounting’ a motor” (The Cinema of Eisenstein 1993, p.120). 4. AmorerecentcaseisCharlesFrazier’sCivilWarnovelColdMountain(1997), in which the title and epigraph come from the Tang poet Han Shan, literally, Cold Mountain. See also translations by Gary Snyder and others of Han Shan. 5. See Peter Connor’s “The Emptiness of Intelligent Questions” (2000). 6. “Diaspora” is a term coined by academe to manage globalization in the same way “multiculturalism” has been used to manage civil rights movement and ethnic divisions. For a critique of the politics of multiculturalism, see David Palumbo-Liu’s “Introduction” to The Ethnic Canon (1995). 7. Think of Norman O. Brown’s prophetic pronouncement at the conclusion of Love’s Body (1966): “Everything is a metaphor; there is only poetry” (p. 266). 8. According to Freud, the mind is divided into the tripartite montage of id, ego, and superego, the union of all three becoming the Self that is qualitatively different from any one of the three. 9. See Lavina Dhingra Shankar and Rajini Srikanth’s A Part, Yet Apart (1998) for a critique of Mukherjee’s Brahmin status. 10. Cf. C.T.Hsia’s term from A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961), with David Wang’s in Wang’s Afterword to Running Wild (1994). Chapter 1: Anal Apocalypse 1. Ernest Becker likens human beings to mobile digestive systems in Escape from Evil (1975). 2. Far more prevalent than wearing the mask on the buttocks is the performance convention of wearing the mask on the back of one’s head, a practice found in many cultures, ancient and modern, around the world. In Edward Yang’s 2000 film Yi Yi, the ingenious boy protagonist captures the back of his subject’s head in his photographs . Perhaps Yang should have made his character more outrageous by having him shoot people’s bottoms, which are actually about at the boy’s height. 3. The Italian version of the golden egg story is entitled “The Ass That Lays Money.” See Stith Thompson, One Hundred Favorite Folktales (1968), pp. 248–251. 4. Norman O. Brown cites St. Augustine’s Latin phrase “inter urinas et faeces” to suggest the proximity of reproductive and excretory organs (Life Against Death 1959, pp. 187–188). 5. See Judith Kovacs and Christopher Rowland, Revelation (2004), pp. 42, 53. 6. Freud’s analyses most relevant to anal eroticism are in “Character and Anal Erotism,” (1908), “The Predisposition to Obsessional Neurosis” (1913), “On the Transformation of Instincts with Special Reference to Anal Erotism” (1916), and “Anal Erotism and the Castration Complex” (1918). 7. In Chinese slang, the anus is pigu yan or piyan, literally, the anal eye. Lu Xun’s “The Divorce” (1925) inscribes the corrupt, superstitious feudalism in the practice of the anus-stop, a piece of jade inserted into the anus of the dead (pigu yan) in ancient Chinese burials to prevent the body from deteriorating. 8. In 1998, the Association of Asian American Studies gave Yamanaka a fiction award for Blu’s Hanging. The Filipino American caucus protested against the decision and the award was rescinded. The protest took the form of campaigning against Filipino American stereotypes in Blu’s Hanging, but it is really a politicized language veiling the revulsion over characters associated with anality. To be fair to Yamanaka, certain Japanese American characters are just as anal and deplorable as Paulo the Filipino American in the novel. 9. See also James Clavell’s Tai-Pan (1966), a novel of Orientalist kitsch on the rise to power of Scottish opium traffickers. 10. A lascar is a sailor or army servant from East Indies, the former Netherlands Indies, which...