Listen to Your Body: Ugly Feelings and the Post-Political Japanese American Subject of Susan Choi's American Woman

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Originally produced in 1975 and re-edited and updated for a second release in 2005, Choy's film aims to tell the “true story” of the often overlooked Yoshimura. While Yoshimura has been generally marginalized within mainstream studies of the Hearst story, her role as a lynchpin of Asian American political solidarity has occasionally been taken up within the field of Asian American studies. See, for example, Grace I. Yeh. While the plot of the novel is clearly inspired by actual events, Choi is not offering a documentary account, and takes historical liberties in her narrative. For historical and biographical information on the Patty Hearst case, see William Graebner, Shana Alexander, and Christopher Castiglia. Nguyen identifies the premise of this discourse as “the assumption that all Asian Americans … suffer from a cultural damage that needs to be healed” (149). Althusser himself suggests that ideology is a practice of the body, particularly in Christianity: If “the individual … believes in God, he goes to Church to attend Mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does penance … and naturally repents and so on. If he believes in Duty, he will have the corresponding attitudes, inscribed in ritual practices” (167). Belief, in fact, results from those practices: “Pascal says more or less, ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe'” (168). For Althusser, ideology is never just ideas—that is to say, language—but also includes a range of affects and physical rituals, which make the body not just the surface for ideology but central to it, and thus to the construction of the subject as we know it. I should clarify that while I wish to rethink Nguyen's application of Althusser in order to discuss the emergence of what I see as a post-political or politically transient subjectivity in Choi's novel, my reading is not strictly Althusserian, either. That is, I am more interested in the ways that American Woman complicates the reduction of so-called bad (Asian American) subjects to explicit political resistance than I am in teasing out the specific dynamics of Althusserian interpellation at work in the novel—not because the latter is a topic unworthy of investigation, but because it is beyond the scope of my argument. While I do not take up this discussion here, another possible paradigm for reading the relationship between Jenny's uncomfortable body and her political subjectivity is that of Freud's hysteric. Freudian scholars have interpreted the hysteric's body as a communicative force: as Charles Shepherdson writes, “In conceiving of the body as a relationship between the signifier and the flesh, psychoanalysis points out that the organization of the body … is accomplished by virtue of a certain relation to language” (21). In turn, Freudian feminists have argued that the hysteric's somatic, female body gives voice to her refusal of patriarchal, misogynistic discourses. For more feminist responses to the hysteric, see Maria Ramas and Jacqueline Rose. This early self-identification on Jenny's part begins to suggest the intentional slipperiness of the novel's title: Jenny was still thinking of herself, rather than any of her white, upper class counterparts, as an “American woman.” Choi no doubt means to contrast Jenny's somewhat naïve self-image with the real-life Hearst's frequent invocation in the media as a former “all-American girl,” while the Japanese American Yoshimura, barred from such a title by her racial difference, was largely ignored. Juan's label for Jenny, “third world,” rather than “Asian” or “Japanese American,” positions her as the subject of 1970s third-worldism, which Juan is eager to co-opt into his own revolutionary agenda. Because he does not regard Jenny's racial difference as tied to a specific country or geographic region, he is able to make her into a metonym for any number of national liberation movements that fit his ideology. Incidentally, Juan's “third world” hail bears a remarkable resemblance to William's assessments of Jenny's radical worth, particularly when William insists that the Vietnamese children whom the American military are bombing “look just like you” (230). For both Juan and William, it is unimportant that Jenny is actually neither “third world” or “Vietnamese”; instead, what matters to Juan is that Jenny's visible racial difference makes her a suitable participant in his radical cause and the same time that her so-called “third world reality” validates that cause. For a reading of the novel's critique of U.S. imperialism, see Peggy Vlagapoulos. And yet, perhaps because both Jenny and Pauline's radical subjectivities materialize vis-à-vis their sexual initiations, and because the lovers who engendered those sexual and political identities are absent when the two women are on the road, their bond becomes for Jenny deeper and more resonant than her heterosexual relationship with William had been. Her “dreams of revenge on Pauline … were really heartbreak—it was possible that this was the first true heartbreak of her life. … [S]he stewed in a pain even worse than she'd felt after William's arrest” (350). With Pauline, she believed she had created a “perfect comradeship … [u]nlike, even, [her] previous life with William, in which she had felt herself struggling to keep his approval. … With Pauline she had never felt that, but that their mistakes they at least made together” (352–53). Even though their connection is not sexual, Jenny is able to achieve with Pauline a sense of equality, far beyond the gendered, racialized, and thus lopsided teacher-student dynamic that she now realizes comprised her union with William. This sense of egalitarianism between the two women, while short-lived, further undermines the cadre's racialized hierarchy in which Pauline is the “publicity princess” and Jenny her “third world” “lesson.” It also by extension challenges the narratives of this period that fail to consider the presence of Yoshimura specifically or the work of Asian American radicals more generally. In particular, the consideration Ngai gives to “minor affects that are far less intentional or object-directed, and thus more likely to produce political and aesthetic ambiguities” (20) than are “grander passions” invites us to pay attention to the connections between the racialized dogma espoused by the three fugitives, Jenny's physiologically ugly feelings, and her eventual relinquishment of her radical beliefs. Jenny's inability to recognize the reality of her father's experience reflects a divide between the Japanese American internees and their offspring who came of age in the 1960s and 70s. Historians like Roger Daniels have described how many Japanese Americans of this generation “questioned the wartime behavior of their parents. They have asked: Why didn't the Japanese American people resist? Why did they go off to camp so meekly?” (58). In contrast to these young people, however, Jenny does not question why her father did not resist. Instead, she wishfully projects onto his past a resistance that perhaps was never there. Jenny fails to realize, as Rogers writes, that “life behind barbed wire in America's concentration camps was not, in the main, a story of resistance or of heroism, but essentially one of survival” (65). While not historically accurate, Jim Shimada's internment narrative is a composite of actual events. In War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps including Manzanar, internees who were suspected by their pro-Japanese neighbors of collaborating with the United States government were routinely threatened, harassed, and beaten for being inu, meaning dog in Japanese; at Manzanar and Poston, the informant problem led to bloody confrontation. In 1943, the WRA distributed a loyalty questionnaire in which internees over the age of seventeen in all camps were required to answer if they were willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States and if they swore unqualified allegiance to the United States. The WRA announced a segregation policy in July 1943: based on the results of the loyalty questionnaire, “disloyals”—those who answered no to both question—from all nine WRA centers were to be relocated to Tule Lake, a camp in northern California. In total, 8,559 persons classified as “disloyals” and their family members were brought to Tule Lake, under the rationale that they would be allowed to pursue a “Japanese way of life” (Smith 321). In actuality, “Tule Lake filled with dissidents, became a strife-ridden camp, and was for a time turned over to the army in an attempt to quell the almost constant disorder there” (Daniels 70). The greater number of interior police and soldiers, the barbed wire fences and tanks, the location in “the northernmost edge” of California (320), and the more limited movement of the internees all suggest that Tule Lake is the inspiration for the “Camp for Incorrigibles” to which Jim was sent, and where he would have learned, in January 1944, of the reapplication of the draft to all male Japanese American citizens of military age. Unlike Tule Lake, however, Jim's prison camp has “no old people or children, no family groups whatsoever” (320). The injuries to his masculinity and body that Jim endures in Choi's single-sex version of Tule Lake inform his view of himself as a Japanese American man, as well as his wariness of Asian American political activism. For more on the history of Tule Lake and the conflicts at the WRA camps, see Roger Daniels, “Life Behind Barbed Wire, 1942–1946” in Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans and World War II (1993 Daniels , Roger. Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans and World War II . New York : Hill and Wang , 1993 . Print . [Google Scholar]); Page Smith, “Segregation,” “Tule Lake,” and “The Draft” in Democracy on Trial: The Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II (1995 Smith , Page. Democracy on Trial: The Japanese American Evacuation and Relocation in World War II . New York : Simon & Schuster , 1995 . Print . [Google Scholar]); and Brian Masaru Hayashi, “The Liberal Democratic Way of Management, 1942-1943” in Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment (2004 Hayashi , Brian Masaru . Democratizing the Enemy: The Japanese American Internment . Princeton : Princeton UP , 2004 . Print . [Google Scholar]). Upon the Shimadas' return to the United States, Jenny, at the age of fourteen, is subjected to a series of “tests of the sort she imagined were given to retarded or incorrigible children” (162). Much like her father, Jenny is assumed by the American government to be an “incorrigible Japanese” and must prove her ability to comply with Americanness. She does not quite adjust, however, as the year of her return marks her first awareness of the war in Vietnam and initial curiosity about her father's internment experiences. Ironically, at this point their shared “incorrigibility” only causes friction between them. It is not until the end of the novel, when they travel back to Manzanar together, that their connected experiences of alienation and injury are recognized and reconciled. That Jenny first learns about the internment, which comes to have such an impact on her American political identity and her relationship to her father, outside of the United States, further broadens the possible meanings of the titular “American Woman.” King-Kok Cheung, for example, reads the protagonist's “warfare … against Chinese patriarchy” (80) through her “development … from silence to voice” (79). For Cheung, Maxine's transition from a mute child to a loquacious writer demonstrates the success of her “feminist strategies” to combat, among other physically oppressive Chinese customs for young girls, the alleged snipping of her tongue. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDeborah Koto KatzDeborah Koto Katz received her Ph.D. in English from Brown University in 2012 and her B.A. from Wellesley College in 2002. She teaches English at Georgetown Day School in Washington, DC.