Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity

Chapter Five: yEast for Modern Cannibals

62 Chapter Five yEast for Modern Cannibals Much ink (computer printers' blood) has been spilled by Western critics on Dracula and his dark horde, by Asianists on Lu Xun's "Diary of a Madman" and the Korean Wave's cannibalistic motif, and by Asian Americanists on food pornography. My argument herein, however, proposes a dinner table of three, each guest drawn to the host of yEast, the construct of East or Orient, including self-Orientalizing, as the agent for selfhood. The gathering of blood-sucking and flesh-eating cannibals reveals a communal interest in modernity, which is but a veiled, sublimated form of monstrosity, a projection of one's own neuroses, a self-amputation and -consumption to conceive and satiate the modern self (see Kristeva, Powers of Horror; Wang, The Monster That Is History). Freudian anthropophagic metaphors betoken the liminality inherent in all three, dwelling as they do in the limbo between self and other, which segues into tensions between West and East, man and woman, and life and death. The East has always been the yeast for the West's psychodrama of hegemony since imperialism. The yEast serves, as does any fungus agent or any seasoning in food preparation, the paradoxical functions of transforming qualitatively the taste, smell, color, and size of food while remaining invisible, unnoticeable. As trivial as a pinch of salt or a tablespoon of soy sauce, the yEast is vital to Western culture in concocting its identity, a chain reaction that brings to mind Paul's warning against "the old leaven . . . of [sexual] depravity and wickedness," for "a little leaven leavens all the dough" ("The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians" 5: 6-8). Indeed, the "y" in yEast suggests the subordinate yet indispensable "yin," or femininity, to the dominant West's "yang." In this Orientalization, not only the Orient but Asian America suffers a "racial castration," as David Eng argues in Racial Castration (2001) when he points out that Oxford English Dictionary defines "Oriental" as "submission," "weakness," and "woman" (1). By making possible the autoerotic, masturbatory fantasy of the masculinist West, the feminized yEast becomes the West's wet dream, an assemblage of mental constructs, albeit illusory, essential to orgasm, or fulfillment of desires. Yet sexual and dietary desires satiate biological as much as psychological need. Eating, lovemaking, and other forms of interpenetration erase boundaries yEast for Modern Cannibals 63 between subject and object, allowing a blur of self and other. As Freud notes in "The Direction of the Psychical Personality," psychic "identification has been not unsuitably compared with the oral, cannibalistic incorporation of the other person" (56), both in terms of food intake and intercourse. This theory of "cannibalistic incorporation " lies at the heart of the Oedipus complex. In Totem and Taboo, Freud links the complex with "cannibal savages," whose incestuous transgression remains implicit: "one day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father . . . Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength" (141-42). If one accepts, in symbolic terms, Freud's daring reconstruction of prehistoric evolution, then the Oedipus complex entails not only the slaughtering of the victim but the partaking of and substituting for it. The feasting of flesh allows one to literally become the other. Not only in Freud but in myth, folktale, and children's stories can we find human-eating ghouls: Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cyclops, just to name a few from the Euro-American tradition. In Greek mythology, cannibalism of the Olympians, especially of an oedipal strain, taints the very origin of civilization. Cronus devours all his offspring, until Zeus escapes to usurp the power of the father. Euripides's The Bacchae dramatizes the revenge of a scorned Dionysus, who tricks Agave, in a frenzied state, to dismember her own son Pentheus. Centuries later, Shakespeare articulates anti-Semitism in the character of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, the Jewish usurer who demands a pound of flesh close to the heart if the debt is unpaid. Characterizing Jews with the twin sins of usury and cannibalism, Shakespeare masks Christian resentment against Jews, whom George Steiner calls the...