-
Introduction: The Chinese Exotic
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Gong Li, poster girl of Fifth Generation Chinese films, swore after being lampooned by the media for her first Hollywood film Chinese Box, that she would never again star in another American production. With a further three English-language films released, and more in production, her comment to the Chinese media appears to have been all but forgotten.1 In these new roles, playing strong and successful women, Gong Li seems finally able to relinquish the unforgettable image of herself as the lipstick-smeared forsaken lover of Chinese cinema, which she burnt onto the screen in Wong Kar-wai’s 2046. Gong Li has reinvented herself. Just over a decade after adorning the cover of Rey Chow’s Primitive Passions (with an equally arresting still from Zhang Yimou’s Judou), Gong Li is no longer ‘primitive’ but now articulates another mode of representation that I define as belonging more accurately to the diasporas. For almost a decade now, I have anticipated, often with delight although sometimes with horror, my favourite Chinese stars appearing in lead roles in Hollywood films in seemingly eccentric casting choices: Gong Li as a ChineseCuban leader of a drug cartel in Michael Mann’s remake of the US television series Miami Vice, or with Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi as rivalling Japanese geisha in the screen adaptation of Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha. Similarly, when Maggie Cheung appeared in Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep, her first role outside Asia, the question “Why a Chinese actress?” asked by everyone on the set in Paris, was echoed in the minds of critics, reviewers and audiences around the world. In the field of literature, Amy Tan’s novel 1 Introduction: The Chinese Exotic 2 The Chinese Exotic The Joy Luck Club, was published to astounding success in the United States and spent forty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 1989. Two years later, Jung Chang, a Chinese woman living in Britain, gained unprecedented international attention with her family memoir Wild Swans. Translated into thirty languages, the book sold over ten million copies and spent sixty-three weeks on Great Britain’s bestseller list. While there is a long history of Asian representation in the cinemas and literatures of the West, what was now appearing seemed very different. Why indeed are Chinese actresses being used to ‘update’ popular television series like Miami Vice and Charlie’s Angels? And how these new representations producing (if not being produced by) a changing landscape of popular culture in the West whereby, from the early 1990s, items such as Chinese boxes (drawers, chests, as well as take-away food containers) became almost ubiquitous in fashion magazines, furniture stores and trendy restaurants? What seemed particularly distinctive about these new representations was how they represented a modern diasporic femininity. This new mode of representation, which I call the Chinese exotic, is a product of the emergent diasporic Chinese modernities in the Asia-Pacific. These modernities have been produced through the rapid economic development of nations in the region over the past two decades. The Chinese exotic can be distinguished from earlier representations in that it is self-consciously connected to the capitalist success of the region. Within this regional development, China is also playing an increasingly major role. No longer seen as ‘backward’ or ‘rural’, China is arguably being ‘centred’ again in cultural understandings of Chineseness. Rather than replacing one centre, the West, with another, China, my aim is conceive how we might utilise a diaspora politics, informed by the West (including the history of the West in Asia), and by China and Asia, to locate the new intersections between these various sites in the context of a regional development. In an attempt to account for these (often eccentric, often messy) movements constructing the Chinese exotic, I employ four related tropes: the fold, the cross over, the ornament and the region. These are not mutually exclusive but work in tandem to explain the phenomenon of the Chinese exotic from different perspectives; the exotic is always a question of point of view, although it no longer belongs only to one perspective, that of the dominant West, or to a re-centred China. Instead, the Chinese exotic shifts between perspectives to displace the ‘self’ and ‘other’ binaries assumed in orientalist understandings of the exotic. Although exotic discourses now appear in new, updated forms, their orientalist underpinnings haven’t entirely disappeared. What have appeared are sources of potential empowerment, or agency, in these representations...