BEYOND THE SILK ROAD: STAGING A QUEER ASIAN AMERICA IN CHAY YEW'S PORCELAIN

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2004 by Diehl, Heath A

POLITICS VS. POETICS: HOW TO REVIEW A "QUEER ASIAN AMERICAN" PLAY

Many of the critics who have reviewed Porcelain (both in performance and in book form) have concentrated their efforts on explicating the formal features, such as imagery and dialogue, that distinguish the chamber play genre. In a review of the Grove Press edition of the play, a Daily Variety critic describes Porcelain as follows: "A crime of passion sets the stage for a gripping, gritty, graphic voice poem about alienation. Riveting writing.... Every word and every image is as vivid and visual as the audience's imagination allows" ("Chay Yew"). Like the reviewer for the Daily Variety, Wendy Caster, a reviewer for Lambda Book Report, emphasizes Yew's use of language and imagery-both formal criteria. Caster writes, "A benefit to reading [Porcelain], as opposed to seeing [it] performed, is taking time to appreciate the language. Yew turns even hatred into poetry... It is astonishing how much Yew accomplishes with few words and how emotionally involving some dialogue on a page can be" (29-30).

I find it interesting that reviewers of Porcelain, a play so riddled with questions of social and political import, tend to emphasize the generic, or literary, qualities of the text, especially since, as Elaine H. Kim notes in her seminal study Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context, "reviews of Asian American literature by Anglo-American writers reveal that the criteria used to judge the literary merit of Asian American writing has not always been literary" (xv-xvi). Reviewers of minority literature, Kim contends, often concentrate on the non-literary aspects of a text: the social history shaping a specific historical moment, the representativeness/authenticity of a particular cultural production, the ideological shifts undergirding an historical event, or the systemic regimes of Sinophobia marking specific cultures. But for reviewers of Porcelain, these sociological and historical questions seem too difficult to pose, let alone answer. Scott T. Cummings's review of the SpeakEasy Stage Company's production of Porcelain, for instance, reads, "Yew uses ... murder to depict the existential double jeopardy that traps any man like Lee, whose sexuality and race both make him the object of scorn and prejudice. Ironically, racism and homophobia do not bear all that directly on what turns out to be, at root, a crime of passion." Cummings concludes by suggesting that Porcelain is "more of a plea for understanding than an indictment of society." Cummings begins his review by commenting on the frameworks of racial and sexual oppression that give shape to the play's action, but he quickly shifts from a discussion of systemic social oppression and its relation to the play's central themes to a discussion of circumstantial personal angst and its relationship to the play's poetic language. In doing so, the reviewer posits a false binary between individual experience and social critique (as well as between discourse and politics) and clumsily side-steps the fact that individual experiences of race and sexuality are always and already socially and politically inflected.