The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity

3. Ethnic Supplementarity and the Ornamental Text: Asian American and Asian Australian Diasporic Literary Production

Ethnic Supplementarity and the Ornamental Text 113 All discourses … would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur. We would no longer hear the questions … Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? … Instead, there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all of these questions, we would hardly hear anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking? – Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” [The history of most women is] hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence. – Virginia Woolf This chapter examines how diasporic Chinese femininity, as translated through cross over films in Chapter 2, can also be produced through mimetic forms of reading and writing. Mimesis can be defined as “an intentional construction of a correlation”.1 It corresponds to some form of identification, and in this sense is distinct from the concept of mimicry, which emphasises the physical rather than necessarily identificatory aspects of a correspondence. By examining how ethnicity is produced both within and across different diasporic contexts, it also becomes possible to see how it is over-produced, 3 Ethnic Supplementarity and the Ornamental Text: Asian American and Asian Australian Diasporic Literary Production 114 Ornament and accumulates meaning through each subsequent ‘copy’. In the first half of the chapter I explore how ethnicity functions as a supplement by interrogating the detailing of heterosexuality as a way of reproducing and perpetuating ethnic identity. The second half focuses specifically on the Asian Australian example to show how whiteness operates as a particular kind of detail — an ornamental detail — that works in tandem with discourses of heterosexuality within a specific regional context. The first three chapters plot an epistemological decentring of mainland China through the ex-centric tropes and representations of diasporic Chinese modernities; the second half of this chapter argues that the insertion of whiteness produces a further shift of the Chinese exotic into an Asian exotic, a shift that will be elaborated on in the following chapter. Although my focus remains on diasporic Chineseness, the terms ‘Asian American’ and ‘Asian Australian’ will be used to discuss two particular literary categories that are currently in circulation in the fields of popular (consumer) culture, publishing, and academia. These categories participate in a form of regional mobilisation that I will further discuss in Chapter 4. It is not my intention to provide a broad overview or summary of the current or historical scholarship in Asian American literary studies but to trace a specific theoretical approach concerning the strategies, excesses and requirements of ethnicity production in relation to authorship within this field. I am concerned only with popular fiction, memoirs, and autobiographies written by diasporic Chinese women in an Anglophone context — those which feature on bestseller lists, win awards, and are taught in institutions such as universities — in order to interrogate the extent to which these mass consumed texts need to be produced and marketed uniformly as exotic in order to be successful. While there is always some level of homogenisation in marketing, I am more concerned with locating structural homogenisation within, and between, the genres of autobiography and diasporic literature produced in the region ‘Asia’ and its various diasporas.2 Although there are also autobiographies and fiction published by diasporic Chinese men, they are nowhere nearly as successful as the life narratives written by women. Popular Fiction, ‘Autobiography’ and Mimetic Desire, or, ‘What Difference Does It Make Who is Speaking?’ A particular scene of mimetic desire in Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha provides an opening into the concerns of this chapter.3 The scene occurs in a Japanese teahouse between the protagonist geisha, Sayuri, and her two Ethnic Supplementarity and the Ornamental Text 115 patrons (and suitors), Nobu and the Chairman. The story is a first person account of the life of a celebrated geisha, Sayuri, from 1929 to the post-war period. Rivalling with another geisha, Hatsumomo, for Nobu’s attentions, Sayuri attempts to dislodge one of her hair ornaments so that it will fall into Nobu’s lap. When the ornament falls, creating an awkward silence, Nobu...