politics of representation in Asian American literature, The

College Literature, Fall 2002 by Lape, Noreen Groover

In the first chapter, for example, Eng considers Kingston's China Men in light of Chin's Donald Duk. Both works make reference to the famous Golden Spike Ceremony photograph which commemorated the joining of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads. Eng contends that this photograph, in which Chinese railroad workers are notably absent, signifies the erasure of the Chinese from American history. Calling attention to his unorthodox pairing of Chin and Kingston, Eng argues that Kingston, through personal memories, and Chin, through dreamwork, make readers "look awry" at what the photograph wants us to see in order to recuperate a lost Chinese American history. Eng then discusses how the two writers diverge on the question of how racial difference intersects with sexuality. Chin, for example, holds that the feminizing and homosexualizing of Asian men results in a loss of their agency, but he fails to contemplate how heterosexuality and whiteness also limit their subjectivity. Conversely, Kingston conjoins racial difference and homosexuality to "critique American racism" and "heterosexual privilege," imagining "a type of masculinity that could be feminist and antihomophobic as well" (102).

Eng's readings of other texts are equally discerning. His chapter on David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly uses Freud's theory of fetishism to explain how Gallimard could have had a love affair with Song Liling and not have known she was a man. Eng posits that Gallimard experiences a "reverse fetishism" when he fails to see a penis on his lover, symbolically castrating the racialized male. Through a defensive splitting of the ego, Gallimard does not see on a conscious level what he may have acknowledged on an unconscious level. Further, to uphold the norms of the colonial system in which Gallimard has secured certain privileges, he symbolically castrates the Asian male in order to maintain the heterosexual norm that undergirds the system and thus empowers him. In the end, Eng reads "Gallimard's state of divided belief through both of these possibilities: a failed heterosexuality in the face ol whiteness and an occluded fantasy of homosexual desire" (159).

Eng's densely theoretical Racial Castration, touted as the first book-length study of Asian American literature from a psychoanalytic perspective, promises to reinvigorate Asian American literary criticism. Yin and Ma, through historical survey and popular culture studies, broaden-even challenge and question-the boundaries of the Asian American canon. Unlike Yin and Ma, however, Eng frees himself from the evaluative and prescriptive brand of criticism that the incendiary Chin has provoked in his "war of words" with Kingston and other Asian American writers. At the 2000 Western Literature Association conference, at a session at which Chin was the respondent, he pulled from his bag a copy of"The Ballad of Fa Mu Lan." Waving it in the air, he challenged everyone in the room to read it and determine for themselves whether or not Kingston was being authentic. An Asian American woman on the panel asserted that when she teaches Kingston, she has students read "The Ballad of Fa Mulan" and Chin's criticisms. She agreed that Kingston revised the myth but made a distinction between mythic revisioning and insidious misrepresentation. While scholars should by no means disregard issues of authenticity or eschew the analysis of stereotypical representations, a too strict attention to the "real" and the "fake" is potentially paralyzing for writers and critics of any ethnic literature. As WJ.T. Mitchell reminds us, "Every representation exacts some cost, in the form of lost immediacy, presence, or truth, in the form of a gap between intention and realization, original and copy" (21).