Teaching on storyworlds rather than Chinatowns this term.

But given that the recurrent question of our course is how the stories we tell (and are told) shape the world we see (and don't see) around us -I spent today addressing the latest non-random violence against Asian women.
A detour from our current unit on fairy tale storyworlds, yet grimly apropos. After all, in their original tellings, evil is as omnipresent as virtue, and stories oriented towards 'happily ever after' can easily be detoured by suffering and death. Not unlike immigrant stories.
Trumpian 'China virus' 'Commie spy' disease-vector discourse certainly fanned the flames of this current wave of violence, but the shorthand worked because it easily indexed stories that this country has long told, via laws, policy, & culture, about Asians, women, immigrants.
Asian immigrant fairytale: the country is a meritocracy; racism is American backstory and prologue, not present and future; here is always better than 'back there.'

Plus: being a 'good immigrant' (well educated, upwards striving, white-adjacent) exempts you from violence.
Asian immigrant historical reality: Asian men 'imported' en masse to be cheap labor source AND bulwark for western industrialists fearing newly-emancipated Black labor & newly-unionized white labor; Asian women, from the Page Act of 1875 on, barred and restricted and sexualized.
And another, harder to address, necessary condition (pumpkins, midnight) for the immigrant fairytale: one is more secure when one disassociates from 'bad immigrants' ('not legal'; refugees, sex workers, even general Chinatown denizens) and other, louder, people of color.
Asian immigrant historical reality: most early Chinatowns resulted from racist zoning laws and as a result of workers congregating for safety. They were also where early white hipsters went to 'slum it' - gambling, whoring, opium dens - sites of contagion, vice, addiction.
To sum up the fairytale: Asian laborers (Chinese, Korean, Filipino, 'Mongoloid') were ineligible aliens; Chinatowns and similar ethnic neighborhoods were illicit, but also thrilling and enticing; Asian women in these neighborhoods were prostitutes, to be exploited or rescued.
A *critical* escape clause (fairy godmother, royal parentage) to this story from the very onset: for the most part, racist exclusion laws did not apply to students or diplomats or merchants.
Stark divisions not only of natl origin but of class, were baked into Asian solidarity.
Any surprise that respectability politics, class division, distrust of fellow immigrants, the pitting of Asian men against Asian women - are still currents that interfere with Asian solidarities? These are not random stories but are baked into the legal contours of Asian America.
Also not a surprise that 'China flu' invective was so easily understood and accepted. An old and familiar storyline, with villain roles and plot-twists in place.

And an Asian woman sexworker to the killer: no longer a person, just an overdetermined trope, to be eradicated.
Let us revisit our stories - not just the ones in film and fiction, but the ones made by law, by founding national myths - and see how we have been delimited by them. Even the 'benign' fairytales.

Let us work together to write new stories.

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More from @chowleen

2 Jan
The great pianist Fou Ts’ong 傅聰 passed away last week in the UK, from covid. Many first encountered him not as a lyrical, brilliant interpreter of Chopin (he was), but as the young recipient of extraordinary letters from his father Fu Lei that were later collected: 傅雷家書.
In the sort of happy accident that young autodidacts (avant-Google) often have, I was separately a fan of both father and son without learning of their connection.

Fu Lei 傅雷 was the emblematic Shanghai Francophile: writing on and translating Romain Rolland, Balzac, Rodin.
As a young Francophile myself - stemming from my desire to better know my grandmother, Hsiao Tsong Rang, who had lived and studied in Paris as Fu Lei did - they in fact moved in the same circles there - Fu Lei was of course a legend to me.
Read 9 tweets
1 Jan
Returning to Mary Shelley and her *other* tale of loss, written right after her husband’s death, its title from her diary entry: “Yes I may well describe that solitary being's feelings,feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race,my companions extinct before me.” Image
And it was more than Percy that Mary Shelley had lost: her father-in-law forbade her from using the family name.

Hence, “The Last Man” is merely the work of “The Author of Frankenstein.” It is a story of radical solitude, by an author bereaved and effaced. As apt now, as then.
“I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety.”

-Mary Shelley, The Last Man
Read 7 tweets
27 Dec 20
Winner of 2020’s new kanji contest in Japan: the character 座 (seat), ingeniously redesigned as a neologism for “social distance.”

Note the two 人(person) radicals in the original 座are now positioned farther away from one another!

Runners up: sousaku-kanji.com/?fbclid=IwAR2q…
I love this one from a 15yo entrant: the character 画 (picture, image) rendered 3-D and folded - to make the neologism for laptop/notebook computer! 😍 so clever.
I like this one because it is a bilingual visual pun - a 76yo entrant transformed the bottom half of the character 会 (meeting) into a “Z” to make...you guessed it, “web conference”

(This could be a greater branding triumph for @zoom_us than even Kleenex or Xerox)
Read 4 tweets
8 Jul 20
Another woman artist - though not Chinese - whose self portraits I return to often is the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907). She died at age 31, shortly after giving birth.

My favorite:
"Self-Portrait on the sixth wedding anniversary" 1906.
We need, in love, to practice only this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

Rilke wrote "Requiem for a friend" over the course of 3 days alone in the Hotel Biron, mourning her death.

[PMB, Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1906]
I can hardly think of any writing by Rilke that does not evoke intense love in me, or at least the remembrance of having loved it once, intensely.

But "Requiem for a Friend" is yet again, something else.
full text at @parisreview theparisreview.org/poetry/3205/re…
Read 5 tweets
24 Jun 20
On the fifth day of the fifth lunar month—#端午Duanwu—we commemorate the death of the poet-minister Qu Yuan 屈原.

Exiled from the kingdom of Chu for his fierce opposition to Qin (which did indeed demolish all, in its imperial ambition), he drowned himself in the Miluo River. 1/ Image
Legend has it that fishing boats set out looking for the much-beloved Qu Yuan. When he could not be found, food was thrown into the river to prevent fish from consuming his corpse.
Hence Duanwu is also known as the #DragonBoatFestival & sticky rice packets (zongzi) are eaten. 2/ Image
'The Songs of Chu' 楚辭, attributed to Qu Yuan (but more likely by multiple authors) are densively allusive poetic laments dating from the 3rd c BCE collapse of the Chu kingdom.

To quote David Hawkes, Chuci 楚辭are the poetry of tristia and itineria —the laments of exile. 3/ Image
Read 7 tweets
19 May 20
@ourobororoboruo @intewig quick response to a fascinating question! 文人 wenren is of course the older term, but had a whiff of disrepectability to you - 賣文為生 was not a positive descriptor. Li Yu of the Ming Dynasty is most famous of a self-consciously professional class of writers - Patrick Hanan's +
@ourobororoboruo @intewig book on Li Yu is excellent if you are interested. 作家 is an older binome that becomes repurposed in the 20thc once the term 專家, and -家 for expertise, become common - I assume it is a Japanese reconstruction of kanji for a modern purpose.
作家 as profession is also gained +
@ourobororoboruo @intewig via translation - with late Qing Lin Shu translations of Dickens, Dumas, et al., they become published as 世界作家. But progressive May Fourth writers were never fully comfortable with the term, bc of its association w commerce - doubly so when Mao basically posits 作家 and 革命+
Read 4 tweets

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