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

If, as Kim observes, Asian American writers are judged according to their abilities to accurately represent the history (both past and present) of a marginalized group, then why have reviewers of Yew's play consistently ignored or, as is the case with Cummings, side-stepped social and political questions? That reviewers ol Yew's work ignore or elide these socio-political questions indicates a larger trend within Asian American literary studies: the disavowal of non-straight sexualities in Asian American history, culture, and literature. As Dana Y. Takagi observes in her essay "Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in Asian America," "the topic of homo-sexuality in Asian American studies is often treated in whispers, if mentioned at all" (355).

Even a cursory review of recent scholarship in both Queer and Asian American studies reveals the accuracy of Takagi's observation. Consider, for instance, two comparable texts, each intended to define the shape (i.e., methodologies, concerns, archives) of an emergent area of inquiry-The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, by Henry Abelove et al., and Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Min Song's Asian American Studies: A Reader. While the former includes at least nine articles that examine intersections of race and sexual orientation, none of these nine articles directly addresses the historical and political concerns of Asian American gay men and lesbians. In fact, "race" in Abelove's text seems to imply only African-American (which is the topic of six articles) or Hispanic (which is the topic of three articles).3 Anthologies in Asian American studies demonstrate little more commitment to issues of diversity and difference, especially with regard to sexual orientation. Only three of the thirty-three essays included in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader are devoted to the topic of "Queering Asian America," and only two of the thirty-five essays included in Asian American Studies: A Reader are directly concerned with relationships between race and sexuality.4 Thus, with few exceptions, gay/lesbian studies critics tend to posit a monolithic racial identity (i.e., Caucasian), while Asian American critics tend to posit a monolithic sexual identity (i.e., heterosexual). In order to understand the move toward silence and/or disavowal that defines the shape of Queer Asian America, it is necessary first to understand how Asian American identities are constructed and circulated within the American cultural imagination and then to consider briefly how homosexuality figures into these identity formations.

THE (DIS-)LOCATION OF (QUEER, ASIAN AMERICAN) CULTURE

Asian American identities are intimately bound to and largely determined by the specific spatial and geographical locations within which those identities unfold. In Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama, Una Chaudhuri explains, "national and ethnic identities are often derived from or directed toward a geography; there is a location of identity based on race, nation, ethnicity, language.... The construction of cultural otherness is also a mapping of the world" (3). Ethnic and racial minorities often are linguistically linked to social space through the construction of identity categories that foreground the hybridization of national/ethnic (e.g., Asian) and national/geographic (e.g., American) locations. In this way, Asian Americans are identified by both a coherent, somatically perceived experience of the body (i.e., Asian identity) and a materially lived experience of community played out across social space (i.e., America). In addition to identity categories that highlight the constitutive relationship between ethnic/racial heritage and geography, the ways in which "cultural otherness" produces a mapping of the world can be seen in the material distribution of social space. In Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States since 1850, historian Roger Daniels notes that "most immigrant groups in the United States have been geographically and occupationally concentrated" (17), an observation that holds true for Chinese and Japanese American immigrants, many of whom settled in distinct ethnic enclaves like San Francisco's Chinatown and Los Angeles's Little Tokyo.