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In her novel China Men, Maxine Hong Kingston provides a genealogy of America’s wars in Asia in the latter half of the twentieth century. In a chapter near the end of the novel entitled“The Brother in Vietnam,”Kingston charts how World War II, the Chinese civil war, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War rendered successive groups of Asians and Asian Americans as the new enemy, the new gook. This string of U.S. interventions in Asia is thematized as the “The War” by Kingston’s young Chinese American narrator in a composition , but her teacher corrects her by asking,“Which war?”1 Yet in grouping the multiple wars under the singular sign “The War,” Kingston turns our attention to the continuity of U.S. intervention in Asia during the Cold War. This continuity is one not only of enduring historical time, but also of Cold War Manichaean logics. Indeed, as I will be discussing in the next chapter, 2 The El Dorado of Commerce China’s Billion Bellies China has not been a nation for Americans, but a metaphor. To say “China” is instantly to call up a string of metaphors giving us the history of SinoAmerican relations and fifty years of “China watching” by our politicians, pundits, and academics: unchanging China, cyclical China . . . who lost China, containment or liberation . . . whither China-after-Mao . . . bruce cumings, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American– East Asian Relations at the End of the Century Grandmother and the aunts wrote letters on the deaths of every last uncle. If the uncles could have figured out what the Communists wanted of them, they would have complied, but Communism made no sense. It was something to do with new songs, new dances, and the breaking up of families. Maybe it had to do with no sex . . . maxine hong kingston, China Men 63 64 The El Dorado of Commerce World War II bled into the Cold War in Japan, and as I analyze in this chapter , the “loss” of China to communism in 1949 would haunt and overdetermine the Korean and Vietnam wars. The epigraph immediately above is Kingston’s young narrator’s distillation of the family stories she has heard about communism in China. The intersection of American anticommunism and the anticommunism of the narrator’s own family (residing both in the United States and in China) emerges as a problem of knowledge. Just what is this strange new development in China called “Communism,” and why does it make“no sense”? Attempts to make sense of it come through cultural metaphors and metonyms—as “new songs,” “new dances,” and possibly as “no sex.” As Bruce Cumings encapsulates in the first epigraph, within the logics of U.S. global capitalism and of Western capitalist modernity more broadly, this metaphoricity of China long predates 1949. Indeed, to imagine China has been to imagine a metaphor, trope, or figure, most famously signi fied as an “open door” for the West’s market interests. What is different about the metaphoricity of Communist China, however, is the very “closing” of China’s door for capitalist interests.In the wake of this economic and political closure, there lies as well a closure or gap of knowledge about“Communism ,”and the symptom of this gap appears through another set of metaphors. In this chapter, then, I focus on what could be called the metaphorics of America’s long career of “China watching,” saturated by the desire for the fabled Chinese market and its Cold War “loss” in 1949. On the one hand, the mesmerizing longing for the fabled Chinese market and its possibilities has exceeded its material realization. On the other hand, China’s growth and increasing openness to and competitiveness within capitalism in the post–Cold War conjuncture have seen this longing transform into a squeamish fear of the awakening of a “sleeping giant.” The ambivalent registers of this historical longing and contemporary fear have of course temporally overlapped in some instances, but they can also be seen as bookends for 1949, the year of America’s “loss.” This loss would overdetermine Cold War logics and geopolitics in Asia, as the specter of a“Red Asia”—a merger of the historical“yellow peril” and “red menace”—catalyzed attempts to “save” the rest of Asia from communism. In my analysis of this specter of a Red Asia, I examine how cultural productions make visible the metaphorics of America’s simultaneous longing and fear as an imperialist and gendered racial...

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