Epilogue

In pulling together this investigation of Occidentalist representations of the American in Chinese plays of the past fifteen years, the endurance and ambivalence of the stereotype and the complex substance of processes of identification once again emerge as prominent and problematic. This study ends as it began, with considering the subjectivity of the spectator (or actor) who is “othered,” although, as clearly evidenced, articulations of Occidentalism in the plays included here involve parallel processes as well. The range of interpolations of the American Other that occur in these plays, for diverse and sometimes even cross-purposes, reflects the variety of manifestations of such images in Chinese society in general, and their synthesis of both positive and negative essentializations of the foreigner emanating from China’s long history and contemporary proliferation of cross-cultural contact.

In terms of audience reception and identification, the most appropriate model for comparison may be discussions of stereotype and spectatorship in Asian American drama. Contemporary scholarship in this area remains centrally concerned with images of Asian Americans onstage and their effects on spectators of both Asian and non-Asian descent. James Moy’s influential study of displays of Chinese in the United States, Marginal Sights, employs the idea of panopticism and the “anthropological gaze” to describe the visual “othering” practices of Americans during various phases of Chinese immigration and assimilation. He bemoans the trend of contemporary Asian American playwrights to create “laughable and grossly disfigured” stereotypes that are complicit with such outmoded viewing strategies, concluding, “between the cinematic stereotype and this disfigured Chinese actor, little space exists for a new ‘real’ Asian American.”1

This idea of a “real” Asian American is of course, highly illusory (as is the idea of a “real” American that can somehow be represented in China); 226equally problematic is the suggestion of a role-model approach to representation in a postmodern age that calls into question such clear-cut Self/Other paradigms of subjectivity. Una Chaudhuri raises this question in her discussion of Asian American plays, critiquing both the plays themselves and critics like Moy for subscribing to “the narrative of individualism” that proceeds from the “master narrative” of “traditional Western representation.”2 Unfortunately, since she equates this paradigm with association of identity with culture and culture with place, and since this is the basis on which her theory of geopathology is built, she ultimately offers us no exit from this role-model-identification trap of “realistic representation (see me as I really am).”3

In plays like Bird Men, Student Wife, Dignity, and Swing, which present representations of Americans within a theatrically realist aesthetic, the role-model-identification tendency for foreign audience members is virtually inevitable, for, as Chaudhuri suggests, the structure and style of realist plays themselves actively promote such a viewing practice. It is in plays like China Dream, Going Abroad, and Che Guevara, which continually subvert attempts by the spectator to see things—including characters—as they “really are,” that a postmodern spectatorial subjectivity and exposure of the constructedness of stereotypes can emerge.

The closest thing to a solution to this dilemma in Chaudhuri’s study is her command to “acknowledge and accept the pluralism of identity [in] multicultural representation.”4 Clearly, this is easier to do when there are multiple representations to choose from, when there are competing images of the cultural or racial Other within a single play, among plays in a season, or among theatres in a geographical area. It is the lack of such an abundance of representations generated onstage that make the “role-model argument”5 a persistently viable polemic for scholars of Asian American theatre and representation—or its emerging counterpart (foreign representation) in China.

Josephine Lee is one Asian American scholar who upholds ideas of “ethnic identification”6 similar to Moy’s. Though she sets out to deconstruct the acceptance of a white-male gaze as assumed subject position of the spectator of realist drama, her attempt to create a space for subjectivity of an Asian American (male?) spectator serves to reinforce the necessity for identification with an authentic reality:

227She is thus not in disagreement with Moy regarding Asian American representations on stage being distortions of the “real” Asian American but rather suggests that Asian American spectators can salvage a healthy or useful identification with such characters.

A central question emerges here regarding whether this kind of individual identification process highlighted by Chaudhuri, Moy, and Lee is in fact a “natural” or “initial” impulse in the spectator that can be subverted or manipulated, but not entirely eradicated. This in turn points to the larger question of whether such processes of identification are therefore as compulsory for communities as they are for individuals. In other words, is it premature to dispose of the role-model paradigm altogether in terms of the relatively young development of Asian American theatre—and even younger development of foreign self-representation in Chinese theatre?

Lee compares the contemporary efforts of Asian American professional theatres to the early Abbey theatre and the Harlem Renaissance, indicating that Asian American theatre is at an equally formative stage in which attempts to represent the diverse “realities” of Asian Americans (which contest earlier representations by the white mainstream) are crucial to an Asian American cultural and political voice. Implied here is a gradual process that all minority artists must undergo in order to escape domination by a white-majority culture that denies agency to minority subjects as both characters and spectators in the theatre. This paradigm can be transferred to the very recent emergence of American subjectivity in Chinese theatre, both in audiences and onstage, and would help to explain the passionate intervention of foreigners like actors Robert Daly and Matt Trusch and critic Lily Tung (as well as the minority spectator) in their desire for something more “real,” “true,” or “authentic” to represent them in Chinese spoken-drama performance.

This is the very impulse that prompted David Henry Hwang to write his play M. Butterfly:

As James Moy reflects, “Hwang’s hope, then, is to offer a truer view of Asianness within the space created by the tension between the audience’s stereotypical knowledge and his ‘slangy and jarring’ contemporary reality.”9

How can this drive for authenticity be reconciled with the postmodern assertion—and the claim of this book—that identity and its manifestations 228(including strategies of “othering” like Occidentalism) are complex, fluid, often paradoxical constructs that both invoke and resist binaristic expression and interpretation? Karen Shimakawa, in her recent study of Asian American stage performances, runs head-on into this dilemma, attempting to address it through close examination of “abjection” (a term adopted from Julia Kristeva), which she identifies as the process through which the Asian American is determined not as a subject or even object, but as “occupying the seemingly contradictory, yet functionally essential, position of constituent element and radical other.”10 This idea is not neatly applicable to Occidentalism as manifested on the contemporary Chinese spoken-drama stage because the American is clearly never considered a constituent element of Chinese society but rather a consistently radical Other, whatever the specificities of its role and interaction with the Chinese Self. Still, Shimakawa confronts the same conundrum of the “real” versus “fake” image of the Other that faces us here. Responding to the contradictions emanating from “‘fake’/‘real’” approaches (similar to those of Moy and Lee described above, and Frank Chin before them), Shimakawa warns, “in concretizing and endorsing a ‘real’ Asian Americanness in opposition to orientalist stereotypes, a new, perhaps equally fake stereotype of Asian Americanness is erected.”11 This identifies precisely the paradox that marked the failure of Matt Trusch’s goals of presenting a “real” foreigner in portraying Bob in Swing.

And yet, Shimakawa and Chaudhuri are at least responding to a practice in Asian American theatre that has existed for three decades, producing dozens of alternative stereotypes, while in China, even an attempt at contesting Occidentalist images is embryonic. Is it premature to join Una Chaudhuri in calling for alternatives to the “see me as I really am” model when there is still a lack of quantity of plural, multiple representations available for spectator engagement, and when so many embodiments of the Other are created from imagined (rather than actual) experience? How can we find another model that can encompass both this important first step of greater quantity, complexity, and variety of images together with more sophisticated modes of analysis that can transcend the role-model paradigm?

Furthermore, the various repercussions of stage representations of Americans in China clearly go far beyond reception by foreigners, though the latter plays of this study, Student Wife, Dignity, Che Guevara, and Swing, bring this important development into focus. Attempts to articulate new models for reception and new paradigms for consideration of the persistently ambivalent stereotypes that characterize the presence of the American in contemporary Chinese spoken dramas must likewise wrestle with the confining structures of traditional conventions in spectator relationships with Western theatre, 229particularly in terms of realism. Stepping outside these habitual practices is not as easy as proliferation of postmodern theatre experiments in the West would have us believe: our brief investigation of discussions concerning recent Asian American work is evidence of this challenge.

Such efforts are at least as difficult in China, where mainstream audiences associate the imported Western form of spoken drama with its most recognizable manifestation—realism—and take their seats in today’s theatres with a taste for the melodramatic and decades of “socialist realism” in the arts as their internal ideological guide. Asking audiences in China to discover complexity and multiplicity in the limited range of images of the American they see onstage is inviting them to engage in an intellectual activity that is destabilizing and unconventional, but such new strategies are crucial to ensure Chinese spoken drama’s continued growth in a global artistic arena. The intercultural experimentation and binary-blurring of China Dream, the playful absurdism and profound articulations of disorientation in Going Abroad, the intracultural performance juxtaposition and multiple embodiments of Otherness in Bird Men, the retro-Maoist communal creative and performative approach of Che Guevara, and the transnational casting and rehearsal collaboration in Student Wife, Dignity, and Swing all signify participation in this kind of development.

Finally, how can articulation and application of the discursive practice identified here as Occidentalism contribute to this effort? Hopefully, the discussions of plays chosen for analysis have helped to illuminate Zhang Longxi’s vision of Self and Other:

I have endeavored to show in this study that the construction and dissemination of images of the foreign Other in China—particularly of the American Other in contemporary theatre practice—is a varied and complex process utilized for multiple purposes. It is a process that opens up questions of identity and representation rather than advocating a single model or formula.

Occidentalism, as both a performative and discursive process, must be 230recognized as containing this variety and fluidity, which marks one of its distinct differences from its adjacent practice Orientalism. Stuart Hall describes the necessary open-endedness of discourse that I see as central to the discursive process I have identified here as Occidentalism:

Likewise, the persistent and shifting discursive practice of Occidentalism in China “ends” and begins again each time a spoken drama containing an image of the American (be it a character, location, or other representation) closes or opens on the Chinese stage. With each such production, the invitation to reassess China’s complex political and cultural relationship with the United States is reextended, and the resulting unfinished closure forms yet another phase in the newly emergent articulation and analysis of Occidentalism by scholars both Chinese and foreign. This book, then, is one “stop”—one pause for reflection—in an ongoing and infinitely changing discourse, a discourse that has been so long neglected that this pause for reflection necessitated a gathering of previous “stops” from the past fifteen years.

Though rooted in xenophobic impulses originating in China’s imperial history, reacting to oppressions of colonialism and neo-imperialism throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and early-twenty-first centuries, and concurrent with Sino-American political and social relations both prescribed by the CCP establishment and circulating in popular culture, Occidentalism in the form of representing the American onstage in China is also employed as a means of contesting state ideology, suggesting alternative versions of official policy and popular sentiment toward the United States, contributing to construction of national identity, articulating the complex subjectivity and experience of the overseas Chinese immigrant or exile, and fostering artistic innovation and experimentation in the development of Chinese spoken drama.

Acknowledging that representation is inherently an illusory practice, this study maintains that its discursive and performative strategies, as well as the active and shifting contexts of circumstances and participants in those strategies, 231demand our attention and analysis. The emergence of Occidentalism as a representational strategy is both linked to and distinct from its more familiar cousin Orientalism and thus should be considered a parallel, yet not identical, practice. In my discussion of Occidentalism and of its application onstage by contemporary theatre artists in China, I have illustrated both its relatively consistent qualities (reflection of embedded cultural attitudes about foreigners, articulation of prevailing social and political discourses) and its more variable elements (the range of experiences and subjectivities of its simultaneous users, the spectrum of artistic innovations for which it is employed, the diverse receptions to which it is subject), emphasizing that all of these factors are fluid and dynamic, changing over time and in relation not only to shifting circumstances but also to past performances.

I urge readers to thus consider Occidentalism as a self-defining oppositional strategy that is as global as it is domestic and as hegemonic as it is retaliatory. Granted, as explained in the prologue, the experience of being “othered” as a foreigner in China differs tremendously from the denigration of colonized Third World populations by Western colonizers or from the discrimination experienced by Asian Americans and other people of color in the United States. Foreigners in China are most often voluntary sojourners or privileged tourists. Nevertheless, as evidenced in this study, the foreigner—particularly the Westerner, and specifically the American—has long been an object of representation in Chinese elite and popular culture that defines both this Occidental Other and the Chinese Self in relation to it. As such, the foreigner dwelling in China is determined (and overdetermined) by these representations, and in the realm of spoken drama, this practice, though not nearly as prevalent as in film and television, has become increasingly common in recent years. Occidentalism is manifested onstage in representations by playwrights, actors, designers, directors, and producers that change according to prevailing cultural notions and both real and imagined experiences, and is also influenced by casting choices of directors, interventions of foreign actors, and reactions of both Chinese and expatriate audiences. Engagement with Occidentalism as a discursive practice and representational strategy in the theatre is therefore extremely complex and requires examination not only of dramatic texts but also of collaborative processes such as artistic preparations, rehearsal procedures, publicity efforts, and production contexts. My inclusion of all these elements throughout this study is intended to provide a richer, fuller, more complex exploration of Occidentalism, particularly as it applies to the representation of the American in contemporary Chinese spoken drama.

232The closing of a discussion such as this one is necessarily unfinished but finally necessary. I leave it to readers and to observers of future Chinese theatre practice to lead this discussion of American representation and Occidentalism to its next level—the next in an endless series of unfinished closures.