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25 Chapter Two Asian Diaspora Does Vegas When Asian diaspora plays, it oftentimes comes to Las Vegas or a casino or venue with gaming devices. Las Vegas and the like provide the culmination of Asian diaspora , which is, in essence, taking risks in casting oneself out of home and into the unfamiliar, a gamble in view of all the variables and pitfalls. The euphoria of possible winning is always haunted by the keen or repressed sense of loss over homeland, identity, or even youthful dream on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. Metaphorically , every facet of diaspora resembles gambling, with the high stakes involved in speculation with one's money and life and the uncertainty of return, pun intended. The wager gets increasingly steep, from one's possession (weekly or monthly wages) to one's body (indentured laborers or illegal aliens) to one's identity and soul (e.g., sham marriage as a Faustian exchange). The parenthetical examples already illustrate that material transactions alchemize into psychological, even spiritual ones. From Marx's Das Kapital to Freud's head or capita, the Marxist economy of gamble turns Freudian in that throwing the dice or whatnot come to represent wish-fulfilling dreams. Gamblers are dreamers, whose inhibitions recede in their daydreaming, contextualized by Sin City, giving free rein to the Freudian id, particularly greed and lust for money and sex. Hence, the title alludes to gambling as well as to the slew of adult films, XXX Does Vegas. For Asian gamblers, dreaming of gold is never far from wet dreams. Etymologically , Las Vegas is wet: early settlers named it Las Vegas, or "the meadows" in Spanish, after the magical spring and wetland three miles west of the downtown area that have since been depleted by population growth. Once upon a time, though, the spring must have suggested the opening of the earth's life-giving womb in the middle of the Mojave Desert. That association with female anatomy continues unabated today in terms of the highest urban consumption of water in the US and of the city's identity, wryly dubbed by Maia Hansen as the "Skin City" (Fox, The Desert of Desire 103; Rothman, Neon Metropolis 210; Littlejohn, The Real Las Vegas 8; Hausbeck, "Who Puts the 'Sin' in 'Sin City' Stories?" 338; Williams, "Looking into a Dry Lake" 293). Although human life is routinely divided into work and play, theAsian diaspora at play—particularly those holiday working-class gamblers from metropolitan ar- 26 Chapter Two eas, whether bused into Las Vegas from Los Angeles or into Atlantic City from New York—does not so much play as work with a near-pathological intensity in hope of neutralizing the deficits accrued in a working-class life. The demand on a blue-collar immigrant's life collapses the separation of work and play, absorbing the latter into the former. (The thriving convention business in close proximity to the sex industry and the Las Vegas Strip also combines business and pleasure for white-collar conventioneers , American or international.) Play or obsessive-compulsive betting at the slot machine or the stock market is symptomatic of Asian diasporic dissatisfaction with the other half of life—work—or with life in general. Georges Bataille associates the realm of play in this binarism with transgressions against taboos and imbues it with religio-psychological significance, which quenches the thirst beyond physical and material want (Death and Sensuality). It appears ironic that in this mirage of what Hal Rothman calls a "Neon Metropolis" of sensory overload in the middle of a desert, Asian diaspora should be seeking spiritual rejuvenation, as Moses, John the Baptist, and Jesus once did in the wilderness. Nonetheless, the night-blooming city amid total darkness and aridity perfectly exteriorizes the human desire for magical deliverance from the fate of a nobody out of nowhere amounting to nothing. The biblical gamblers who repeatedly won silhouette and ultimately mock the urgency of the gaming motif in trans-Pacific literature and film, ranging from the earliest wave of nineteenth-century Cantonese dreaming of striking it rich at the Gold Mountain (Gumsan for San Francisco or the US more broadly), to the wave of wartime and postwar sojourners whose lifelong itinerary revolves around gambling houses, to a classic in the contemporary Korean Wave which opens and ends with Las Vegas, and finally to the reverse flow to the mushrooming, Vegas-affiliated casinos in the Macau Special Administration Region in Southern China, dubbed by journalists "the Vegas of Asia...

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