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

The constitutive relationship between race/ethnicity and geography is perhaps most powerfully realized in the theatre, a site at which the racially marked body of the Asian American actor that many contemporary critics identify as one primary locus of identity'' is necessarily displayed and charted through space. In plays like David Henry Hwang's The Dance and the Railroad and Laurence Yep's Pay the Chinaman, for example, the American West is inscribed with the paradoxical experiences of immigrant Chinese American laborers in the mid- to late-nineteenth century-a history that, as David L. Eng notes in Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America, simultaneously conveys "the U.S. nation-state's economic need to recruit cheap and exploitable Chinese immigrant labor and its political refusal to enfranchise these racialized laborers as citizens" (36).

Other plays-like Hwang's Family Devotions and Golden Child, Velina Hasu Houston's Kokoro (True Heart), and Jessica Hagedorn's Tenement Lover: no palm trees/in new york city-share a complex imagining of Asian America as a hybrid, or hyphenated, experience engendered by immigration and rendered psychologically traumatic by the impossibility of a return home to the characters' native land. Set in the space between home and abroad, these plays emphasize how a history of immigration has fractured the sense of geographical rootedness, both past and present, among Asian American characters. And in plays like Frank Chin's Year of the Dragon and R. A. Shiomi's Yellow Fever, ethnic enclaves like San Francisco's Chinatown and Vancouver's Powell Street "ghetto" are imaged as stable, coherent spaces built and maintained through a strong affiliation with ethnic and racial heritage. So, whether Asian American identity is linked to a specific region of the United States (e.g., the American West), an imagined homeland abroad (i.e., Asia), or an ethnic enclave in North America, it is often used to convey a sense of order, coherence, stability, and even manageability among conceptions of space and identity politics.

There are compelling and important reasons why marginalized groups use theatre (and other forms of cultural production/representation) to imagine a coherent sense of social space and, by association, racial identity.6 Given Yew's choice of subject matter, it is important that he abandons this common practice and instead chooses to characterize Asian America as a nomadic, unwelcoming terrain for his gay character. This is so because the difficulty of delineating a stable identity construct is a cultural condition intensified when Asian American identity is cross-cut by factors other than racial/ethnic heritage. For gay and lesbian Asian Americans, for example, identity is experienced as a kind of schizophrenia. As Tom Lee notes in his article "The Gay Asian American Male-Striving to Find an Identity," "To be gay and Asian is at most times a contradiction. Ethnicity and sexuality, while vastly different concepts, run parallel in terms of self-identity and societal acceptance." In large part, the sense of schizophrenia, the lack of coherence and stability, that gay Asian males experience derives from the fact that to be part of this group is to claim allegiance to two competing and equally oppressive identities, to speak from the position of "a minority within a minority": gay and Asian. As one twenty-two-year-old gay college student of Chinese descent told Lee, "When I hear 'gay community' I automatically think 'white.' Being gay seemed like such a white thing. It never occurred to me that you can be Asian and gay. Even though I'm Asian and gay, I just never associated the two. It was always one or the other." Gay Asian American masculinities, then, exist at the interstices of multiple, overlapping, and discontinuous histories and experiences of oppression, thereby resisting the many current frameworks of identity politics that explain identity through an either/or essentialism.