Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity

Introduction Digging to China (or America)

1 Introduction Digging to China (or America) Living is dying, an unscripted, unconscious rehearsal for the premiere of death—one show only for each individual serving the life sentence, cyclical reruns for collective humanity. In similar denial, modernity has dissociated itself from death and the other, death as the other. Modernity is a dream posited on the dialectical relation between self and other: industrialized West versus pre-industrial East at the turn of the last millennium; Chinese metropolises versus the rural hinterland at the turn of this millennium. In both and many more instances, the uneven development of technology results in a power binarism where the modern half in any pair is privileged . Modernity prevails because of its alleged immanence of rejuvenation, which is oftentimes but a time-space compression by virtue of advanced technology. As it is less time-consuming to traverse great distances and accomplish arduous tasks, we come to see each present moment as a new beginning rather than an extension of the past. Modernity, therefore, signifies the new in an absolute sense, which means death to the old; the lifeblood for the modern drains from bodies imagined to be unmodern. Since the old and traditional do not die absolutely, merely metaphorically, modernity is not so much a death sentence for "time past" as a death rehearsal inherent in "time present," not so much an execution as a stay of execution. Any such trial run for the ultimate finale or the apocalypse that modernity pretends to be must cast a deus ex machina of sorts, the nonself or the transcendent, to effect a decisive rupture. Hence, modernities, also known as death rehearsals, are born out of where self and other, East and West, living and nonliving, and other dualities intersect, such as in the daily routine in life, which is a barely noticeable process of dying, a steady digging of one's own grave. Beyond the personal level of aging, death rehearsal takes place on the collective and cultural level. Modernity with its Euro-American imperialist underpinnings has routinely propped itself up on the corpses of the other: Africa (Conrad's Heart of Darkness [1898]), Arabia (Joyce's "Araby," [1914], in addition to those detailed in Edward W. Said's Orientalism [1978]), and Asia (not detailed in Said, who focuses on Western representations of the Near East, which overlaps with Arabia). The Triple-A Club, if you will, provides key service to ensure the West's smooth motoring across, or into, the globe. 2 Introduction Dig a hole through the earth, Americans (i.e., US-Americans and Canadians) joke, and you come out on the other side, in China, presumably. Joking aside, the figure of speech suggests the Orientalist thrust that the Orient, crystallized by China , lies diametrically opposed to the Occident. While the modern West fashions its identity by putting an end to the old, its previous incarnation—an empty shell—is shed and transferred onto the Eastern other, an alterity validating and valorizing the West's metamorphosis. As Shu-mei Shih argues, China is part of the peripheral, "non-Western alterity that constituted Western modernism" (The Lure of the Modern 4).Modernity hence arises by vacating the Orient into a void, a state of being on the order of death. It is indeed ironic that in the name of digging to reach the other, the West fails to dig or comprehend the East, and the other way around, too, as implied by the parenthesis, "(or America)," in the introduction title. Amid this mutual misunderstanding , modernity flashes like lightning from culture clashes between West and East, sky and earth; modernity comes to manifest itself through the manna— technology and modernization—falling from the sky since the nineteenth century and the raw materials and human bodies vaporized from the earth. Both positive and negative forces are of course integral to the thunderbolt, which summons the genesis of light as well as scorches the earth. As modern colonialism lays waste much of the East, it quickens not only the awakening of life's futility but also new sprouts of human consciousness—such as alternative modernities—from the charred earth. As the West digs in its Orient for sustenance, the consumed and the consuming unite as one. This impulse toward a mythical, oceanic wholeness underwrites much of apocalyptic modernism, whether in T.S. Eliot's "the fire and the rose" (Four Quartets ) or in W.B. Yeats's "the dancer from the dance" ("Among School Children"). In Totem and...