East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave

4. Structure of Identification and Distancing in Watching East Asian Television Drama

Structure of Identification and Distancing 73 Flows of television drama series across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries in East Asia are by now a routine affair. The presence of imported TV programmes in every urban location within the region is now so ubiquitous that they are no longer ‘remarkable’ as they have become part of the daily diet of television audiences throughout the region. This ‘East Asian’ media space has been ‘characterized as a self-aware but non-consensual force field articulated by the region’s mixed postcolonial experiences, negotiation with globalization, and interacting media cultures’ (Tsai 2005: 102), with uneven and unequal directions of flows. The predominantly ethnic-Chinese locations of the region — Taiwan, Hong Kong, mainland China and Singapore, which has a 75% ethnic Chinese population — has its own long history of exchanges of pop cultural products in different Chinese languages, constituting a subset that may be called ‘Pop Culture China’ (Chua 2000). There is scant flow of TV programs from Pop Culture China into Japan and Korea. For example, Hong Kong TV dramas have never been shown in Japan.1 In the 1980s, the main current was of Japanese trendy dramas flowing into the rest of the region. Since the mid-1990s, with the South Korean government’s conscious economic strategy of transforming pop culture into an export industry (Shim 2002), the Korean current has become more prominent. Given the, albeit, uneven flows of TV dramas I want to address in this chapter the question, ‘How does an audience watch/read an imported cultural drama series?’ It is common place to suggest that meaning of a text of print or other media is not transmitted straightforwardly from the author to the reader/ 4 Structure of Identification and Distancing in Watching East Asian Television Drama Chua Beng Huat 74 Chua Beng Huat audience. The consumption of a text is not simply the direct apprehending of the author’s intended meaning. This does negate the fact that the author intends and encodes certain meaning in the text; the encoded meaning may be said to be the ‘dominant’ meaning of the text. However, in ‘decoding’ the text to derive meaning from it, a reader/audience brings one’s own context to bear on the text and, in the process, the intended meaning may be appropriated, modified and resisted.2 Furthermore, it is necessary to note that the text is not consumed exclusively as a coherent whole, but also in a fragmentary manner, i.e. different textual components may be treated differently by the same audience. Analysis should therefore be sensitive to this fragmentary reading. In the present analysis, an additional dimension needs to be added to the general reception process, namely, the ‘foreignness’ of the TV drama programme to the audience. Significantly, the by now canonical texts on audience reception have paid almost no attention to the ‘foreign’ elements of imported programmes.3 Considering the global domination of American TV programmes, this is rather surprising, since American programmes would be technically ‘foreign’ in all locations but the US. Yet, this foreignness is seldom problematized in Western audience analysis, perhaps because of the absorption under the generic sign of the ‘West’ or the idea of ‘English’ as the global, universal language. In contrast, the ‘American-ness’ of American pop culture is a constant source of public discourse in Asia, with reference to the effects of ‘Westernization’ and ‘cultural contamination’ of the local (Chua 2000). Conceptually, the ‘foreignness’ is central to the idea of border-crossing of cultural products. Substantively, ‘foreignness’ is very much foregrounded by the audiences as part of the reason and pleasure for watching imported programmes. The ‘foreignness’ of imported TV drama series for different East Asian audiences thus motivates the research question, ‘How does an audience watch / read an imported cultural drama series?’ Circulation Paths of Imported TV Programmes in Pop Culture China Before we examine the reception of imported drama series, one significant peculiarity of their circulation in Pop Culture China should be noted. Different Chinese languages dominate in different ethnic-Chinese dominant locations: Mandarin in the mainland China and Singapore, especially in the latter because all Chinese languages other than Mandarin are banned from Structure of Identification and Distancing 75 the mass media; Cantonese in Hong Kong; and Mandarin and Minnan ( ) / Taiwanese, a language of Fujian ( ) province in southern China; the three main Chinese languages may be mutually incomprehensible to a monolingual ethnic-Chinese...