Rice: Explorations into Gay Asian Culture + PoliticsAuthor: Song ChoGenre: Gay / Lesbian Publisher: Queer Press Released: 1998 |
A Review by Stephen Murray
10/29/2003
After recounting the experience of going to gay bars in Ottawa and
"feeling like I was drowning—the whiteness was so complete," Cho expresses ongoing frustration at being lumped together with those of other backgrounds in the category "Asian": "To internalize 'Asian' as my identity is to see myself as an outsider would see me, where the rich cultural and historical specificity of my Korean culture is homogenized and erased, while permitting the oppressor to dwell in his cultural ignorance." Whether it is the fault of white people failing to differentiate among Asian/Pacific backgrounds or those building pan-Asian/Pacific identities, organizations, and politics, Cho does not specify.
The best-known of the contributors, Justin Chin, seems to blame his unhappiness on white gay men for either desiring him or not desiring him. It seems that the latter is slightly more painful, but clear that Chin regards his pains as coming entirely from white gay men. He really goes off on one who tried to address his anger. (As usual, Chin does not address his status when he was growing up in Malaysia and Singapore as the privileged son of an ethnically Chinese doctor.)
After heavy doses of victim rhetoric from Cho and Chin, and the inclusion of what might be read as a fantasy of slicing up white men from Kirby Hsu, who also contributes a story of rice queen suicide to end the volume on a very 1950s "the fag must die" note along with the more contemporary triumph of "sticky rice" (Asian-Asian coupling), it is a relief to read Richard Fung (whose "Looking for my penis," first published in 1988, is the foundational text for claims of invisibility/emasculation of gay Asian/Pacific Islanders) note major differences between Gay-Asian/Pacific-Islander (GAPI) visibility and self-confidence in cities with large API populations such as Vancouver and San Francisco and places such as Ottawa that are overwhelmingly white.
Still, none of the earnest GAPI writers register that many US cities have large black and Latino populations and that images of extreme masculinity (machismo) generally attach to nonwhites (black and brown gangsta-types are far from invisible). The equation "white=masculine" seems spurious to me. (And racist in rendering blacks and Latinos invisible. That's how Cho, Fung, et al, judge Asian invisibility, so why not judge what he does by the same standard?) Asian Americans may appear as neutered when they appear in US movies and TV programs (though I wonder about the API newsmen, particularly local sportscasters), but Asians do not and have not. During my long-ago youth, Toshiro Mifune and Bruce Lee did not come across as lacking masculinity. Before kung-fu movies were popular, the Second World War Japanese soldiers, particularly in prison camps, were portrayed as brutal, not as geishas with their penises strapped back, mincing about and catering to butch white men. Growing up where there was no one of API descent, my image of Asian masculinity was Toshiro Mifune. No one messed with him!
Cho, Chin, and the round-table interlocutors are obsessed with images in pornography. They are wrong that there are no "Asian" tops in mainstream gay pornography (Brandon Lee, for instance), and I am dubious that the audience for Thai and Japanese pornography is white men (knowing some GAPI men with extensive collections of Thai and Japanese porno films that are not even playable on American video players). All I could do was to laugh at Cho's claim that whiteness is what is eroticized by tan lines of white porno actors. The contrast of untanned "private parts" to tanned limbs and torsoes seems to me to focus attention on those parts rather than on their lack of color. Moreover, there was status in pallor in Japan and China when they were closed societies, before they were forced open by US and European gunships, and there are many gay men of Chinese and Japanese descent/origin whose skin is lighter than southern Europeans. GAPI men can have tan lines. Many do, some of them very carefully cultivated for their erotic value—the erotic value of making their "private parts" contrast when they are undressed.
There is one chapter by an Anglo Canadian, Tim McCaskell, which points out that "rice queen" (someone specializing in GAPI sexual partners)
is not a nice category. It's not said with pride. Not an honour. Not a badge to be worn proudly. Asians often distrust and dislike those known as rice queens.... Even rice queens don't like rice queens. There is very little solidarity exhibited. There are lots of groups for gay Asians. There are lots of groups for Asians and friends. But can anybody think of a group for non-Asians who like Asians? For one thing rice queens are competing with each other. For another, the stigma involved means that everyone wants to show that he's not like the rest of them. Rice queenliness stands out as a practice, but it seems to be having difficulty emerging as an identity.McCaskell also notes that "the market forces are shifting. The sexual significance of 'race' is every day less saturated with the old relations of colonialism and imperialism."
The very interesting round-table discussion (recorded in 1995) includes recognition of differences between localities depending on the size of API population and a glimmering of recognition of the different experiences and valuations those gay men of API descent born in Canada and the US have in contrast to those born and raised in API societies. Wayne Yung, who characterized Richard Fung's analysis "tired," notes that "blaming white guys and not doing anything about it sounds like you're expecting them to fix it." But even he does not complicate the picture with any attention to the eroticizations of blacks and Latinos and the attitudes of blacks and Latinos to Asians (gay or not). Popular culture, a focus of the attention of these GAPI intellectuals, is very far from being all-white, but they seem not to want to address the visibility of other kinds of nonwhite persons or the attitudes of blacks and Latinos to Asians and Pacific Islanders.
© Copyright ToxicUniverse.com 10/29/2003
