Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage, and: But Still, Like Air, I'll Rise: New Asian American Plays (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage, and: But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise: New Asian American Plays Gregory Choy Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage. By Josephine Lee. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise: New Asian American Plays. Ed. Velina Hasu Houston. Foreword by Roberta Uno. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. With the publication of Performing Asian America, by Josephine Lee, and But Still, Like Air, I’ll Rise, edited by Velina Hasu Houston, Temple University Press adds to its rapidly expanding Asian American History and Culture series. It is a valuable addition as Lee’s book is the first critical study to cover the broad scope of Asian American drama. In six of her seven chapters, she offers engaging analyses of no less than seventeen works by a dozen Asian American playwrights. Her analytical focus at first glance seems ambitious, almost overarching, if not altogether evasive. The imagined common ground of Asian America—as it’s envisioned in the plays examined in this book—is not located solely in resistance [End Page 303] to racist stereotypes. Nor does it reside in similar historical experiences of immigration, racism, or assimilation, or in a shared cultural background. Instead, these plays presume a more complex imagining of how ‘Asian America’ is performed, individually and collectively. (p.19) Must one assume, then, as have other critics within Asian American studies, that the previously mentioned “imaginings” are shopworn and shallow? Does “a more complex imagining” promise new and deeply theoretical gleanings in Asian American drama criticism? Lee unfolds her strategic answers to this question in chapter one which illuminates the ties between Asian American history, the founding and formative years of Asian American theater, and the development of “a newer pan-Asian sensibility” as Asian American theaters were “forced to cope with new questions about the nature of individual and collective identity.” As a result, “the many different ways in which ‘Asian America’ can be conceived provide a tension that drives theater practice” (p.17). One of the ways Asian America has most noticeably not been conceived, at least by those engaged in the practice of Asian American drama criticism, Lee claims, is as an audience. Lee addresses the concept of “The Asian American Spectator” in the second so titled chapter. The cleaving to dramatic realism by Asian American playwrights and critics raises questions about who is watching the plays and creates a stricture by which plays are praised on the ambiguous merits of “authenticity” or “realness.” The “masculine spectator’s privileged position,” (i.e., that of the historically presumed audience in theatrical realism) critiqued by feminist theorists Laura Mulvey and Jill Dolan, and modified in James Moy’s seminal work as “the persistent desire for the Other and the subsequent commodification of Chinese bodies made into spectacles for the American public” (p.40), is a paradigm that leaves no room for the Asian American spectator without making such a subject position complicitous in its own oppression. Lee raises a series of critical questions in an attempt to realign, if not subvert, the a priori constructs of realism: How do Asian American dramatists rework the existing paradigm of realism to suit their own needs? What dimensions of their use of realism might be considered strategic and political? How must some of the existing arguments regarding realism, spectatorship, and power be revised when dealing with Asian American versions of theatrical realism? (p. 36) [End Page 304] In formulating her responses, Lee adopts as her test texts Frank Chin’s Year of the Dragon and David Henry Hwang’s Family Devotions. Chapter three, “The Chinaman’s Unmanly Grief,” recapitulates and recontextualizes Frank Chin’s attempts to redeem the image of the Asian American male in a comparative reading of his The Chickencoop Chinaman and R. A. Shiomi’s detective mystery Yellow Fever. Interestingly, though Lee is all too keenly aware of Chin’s masculinist posturings, she resists the urge to simply pinpoint his misogyny and have done with him. Chin is aware, more so perhaps than any of the playwrights whose works Lee analyzes, that his audience is composed...