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I “The subject of Asian American sexualities is more complex than any of the names we give it,” writes Russell Leong (1) in his introductory chapter to Asian American Sexualities, a seminal collection that reflected the growing importance of queer and sexuality studies within Asian American studies in the 1990s. This complexity arises from, firstly, the ethnic and cultural “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity,” to use Lisa Lowe’s formulation (L. Lowe 67), of Asian America; secondly, the fluid and multivalent possibilities of sexual desire, identification, and practices; and, thirdly, the cross-hatching of ethnicity and sexuality, where ethnicity informs and/or constrains sexual desire, and sexuality disturbs and/or rewrites ethnic identity. This interpenetration of ethnicity and sexuality is particularly significant when one considers, for instance, the history of the Chinese in the United States, where anti-Chinese immigration laws from 1882 to as late as 1965 have summarily engendered male-dominated populations in Chinatowns across the country.1 A compulsory heterosexuality became both an ideological and material urgency in these communities, as reflected, for example, in Louis Chu’s Eat a Bowl of Tea.2 The post-1965 shifts in US immigration policy opened the gates to a diasporic influx of Chinese migrants, which further deepened the heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity of what constituted Chinese cultural identity in America. Not only did immigrants arrive from the Chinese mainland, but ethnic Chinese from the Chinese diaspora also joined the migratory flow, many coming from countries such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. “Diaspora” as a critical trope accrued 8 Diasporic Desires: Narrating Sexuality in the Memoirs of Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Li-Young Lee Kenneth Chan 140 Kenneth Chan cultural and intellectual significance, as Asian American scholars began to use it to track the shifting complexities of Chineseness and the way global mobility, transnationalism, and globalization inflect its meaning. The complexities and complications that diaspora brings to Chineseness in the context of Chinese American politics have a powerful impact on how sexualities and sexual desires are consequently formed and deployed in the narration of cultural and national identities. As Benigno Sánchez-Eppler and Cindy Patton observe of diaspora’s effect on sexuality and its representation: Sexuality is not only not essence, not timeless, it is also not fixed in place; sexuality is on the move. With this new clarity, we are in a better position to analyze the valences of body-in-place and consider the transformations in sexualities that move between— indeed, may have been produced at—the interstices of specific geopolitical territories. Translocation itself, movement itself, now enter the picture as theoretically significant factors in the discussion of sexuality. (Sánchez-Eppler and Patton 2) My purpose in this chapter is to deploy Sánchez-Eppler and Patton’s critical focus to attend to the representation and rhetoric of sexuality and sexual desire within the narratives of two Chinese American diasporic autobiographies: Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s Among the White Moonfaces: Memoirs of a Nyonya Feminist (1996) and Li-Young Lee’s The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995). Both Lim’s and Lee’s texts seem deeply conscious of how sexual desire mobilizes diaspora, and how diaspora, in turn, informs sexual desire. But these texts also reveal anxieties of how to narrate sexuality in diaspora, particularly in the crossing of national and cultural boundaries, in both cases dealing with ethnic Chinese diasporic subjects moving out of anti-Chinese originating homelands to the United States of America. Lim uses her Malaysian Peranakan cultural background and her academic intellectual emplacement to analyze her sexual choices, while Lee turns to his Indonesian-Chinese identity and his familial connections to Protestant Christianity to frame his sexual relationship with his Anglo-American wife. Significantly, and probably not coincidentally, both narratives wrestle with looming father figures and the powerful shadows they cast on the sexualities of the protagonists, creating conflicted relationships between parent and child. While both Lim and Lee empathetically identify with their fathers as emblems of ethnic minority persecution, they also resist them as signifiers of Chinese patriarchal oppression that paradoxically work through the “universalizing” narratives of sexuality, which are Freudian psychoanalysis in Lim’s case, and Christian theology in Lee’s. Yet, despite this resistance, both texts still anxiously find themselves embedded in and invoking the very discourses they strive to reject, with Lim’s intimations of the [3.133.12.172] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 02...

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