Ty, Eleanor. The Politics of The Visible in Asian North American Narratives.

Zhang, Benzi

Ty, Eleanor. The Politics of The Visible in Asian North American Narratives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 227 + xv pp. $24.95 (paper); $4500 (cloth).

In this learned and intriguing book, clearly the fruit of broad-ranging read ing and deep reflection, Eleanor Ty sets herself the task of throwing some new light on the complex of social conditions and cultural assumptions about the "birthmarks--the visible hieroglyphs--of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians. "We have lived in and been part of North America for centuries, but have remained in the shadows," says the author in the beginning of her work. "We have been invisible, yet we have been branded as 'visible"' (4). Rather than an introduction to Asian North American narratives in general, this closely argued study seeks to examine the politics of the visible with cogent references to nine well-selected Asian American/ Canadian texts in various forms ranging from autobiography, fiction to film. Drawing upon recent discussions of ethnic studies, post-colonial theory, and women studies, Ty explores the entangled historical reasons for invisibility as well as the contemporary politics of visibility, and provides comparative analyses of different ideological and cultural imaginaries not only between the East and the West but also among different ethnic subgroups within Asian America/Canada. Her painstaking research shows how Asian North Americans negotiate the paradoxical relationship between the visibility of their physical features and their invisibility in mainstream public and cultural spheres. Ty's vast expertise in the subject is apparent throughout the book, and her brilliant capacity to present intricate arguments in plain language makes her work feel more like a dialogue with the reader than a studious exposition. Simple in its style yet profound in its approach, this impressive book, which contains both source-based accounts and in-depth theoretical elaborations, makes a substantial contribution to our understanding and appreciation of Asian North American narratives in a way that demands the attention of scholars and students alike.

After brief musings on her own experience as a "visible" Asian Canadian Professor of English, Ty embarks upon an extended account of the racial politics in Canada and the United States and an informative overview of the recent debates on the issue with references to scores of scholars. "In my use of the term," writes Ty, "the 'politics of the visible deals with the effects of being legally, socially, and culturally marked as 'visible; and, paradoxically, with the experience of being invisible in dominant culture and history" (11-12). In pursuing the argument, she is at pains to make a few points clear in her comparative study of Asian immigrants in American and Canadian histories. "The United States and Canada, Ty notes, "mirrored each other in the way their governments and communities both made use of and yet discriminated against Asians in this period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (14). The situation can be compared to what Ralph Ellison portrays in Invisible Man, as the effects of invisibility result from the function, or rather malfunction, of people's "inner eyes" that only see what they have been ideologically accustomed to perceiving. Although the contemporary racial politics has become much more complicated than before, "the construction of categories and ordering of things, as Ty shows in the book, "is still predominantly appearance or the scopic drive" (8), and it will take many years to undo the Orientalist images of Asian Americans and Asian Canadians. The politics of the (in)visible, therefore, is closely related to how things are represented in history and has strong impact upon one's subjectivity. Ty does an admirable job of detailing and comparing historical and ideological reasons for invisibility, and the historical framework that she creates in the introductory chapter provides a solid ground for her subsequent textual interpretations.

The three chapters in Part i are developed around the topic of "visuality, representation and the gaze." The chapter on Denise Chong's The Concubine's Children is copiously researched and well written. Ty reveals her strength and passion when offering close readings of Chong's memoirs and photographs of her grandmother and other family members of older generations. Treating it as an example of historiographic autoethnography, Ty's reading shows how Chong's narrative challenges "the voyeuristic gaze of Western eyes" and de-exoticizes the stereotyped images of Oriental women "by tearing away the veil and revealing the suffering beneath the 'painted' faces and perfumed bodes of the waitresses" (ca). Chong's autoethnographical narratives, therefore, re-present Asian North Americans in a way not readily seen by the gaze of the dominant culture and thus "rescript the hieroglyphs of their bodies by reworking people's perception of difference" (12). The argument is pushed further in the second chapter in which Bienvendo Santos's The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor examined in the context of Filipino immigrants' quest for new identity in America. Ty compares the protagonist, Sol King, to Prufrock, not because the book makes implicit references to T. S. Eliot, but because King and Prufrock are similar in that their romantic ideals fall short of reality. Against the background of U. S. cultural and ideological prejudice, Ty studies the estrangement and isolation of Filipinos who are fooled by the American dream. The last chapter in this part is about Mina Shum's Double Happiness, a film that resists the scopic drive of mainstream Hollywood films. Special mention should be given to Ty's discussion of the performativity of the racialized and gendered subjectivity, by which Shum negotiates the dominant culture's gaze and highlights a new mode of representation that asserts the agency of the gazed.

Despite the disadvantaged position that the "visible minorities" occupy in American and Canadian societies, their visibility is not always without power. The discussion in Part it, "Transformations through the Sensual," Illustrates how the Asian Americans/Canadians transform their outward visible signs into things of power. As Ty observes in Chapter q, Shirley Lira's Among the White Moon Faces "reveals the way in which a diasporic Chinese subject has triumphed and survived the shifts and changes of the transnational world"; "by remaining flexible, by constantly rescripting her subjectivity, and by reconstituting her community, Lim has been able to look back and to 'make sense' of her 'birthmarks" (100). Transformation, in other words, is no longer a way of assimilation, but rather a strategy of creative empowerment. As Ty points out in the chapter devoted to Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, the visible signs--even the most common activities such as playing mah-jong and making a meal--become symbolic gestures that "signify resistance and survival" (102). The last chapter on the issue of transformation is a crisp and incisive study of Wayson Choy's The Jade peony in the context of Canadian multi-racial and multi-cultural society. One of the most valuable observations in this chapter is about the instability of ethnic and cultural differences. In Ty's words, "cultural identities transform when they encounters other cultures, and the identities themselves depend to a great extent on the perceiver, as well as on the subjects in question" (131). As a result, the transformation of the visible reveals a new dimension of Asian North American identity, which is to be defined in a "mirror" space where the gaze and the self-gaze interact--a complex and reciprocal interaction of various cultural and ideological forces.

Insofar as Asian North American identity is concerned, Ty's discussion in Part in, "Invisible Minorities in Asian America," is intended to move beyond the limits of a pan-ethnic picture to explore different ethnic subgroups and their diverse expressions of a wide range of experiences. The narratives Ty chooses to study in Part in, therefore, "all struggle with multiple layers of invisibility as a result of the subject's position within the dominant culture and within Asian American culture' (28). Her instructive interpretation of Cecilia Brainard's When the Rainbow Goddess Wept traces the dialectical relationship between personal and collective loss experienced by Filipino Americans. Positioning herself relative to critics such as Edward Said and Sun Juan whose ideas regarding imperialism and nationalism provides a critical perspective in which she builds her own analysis, Ty attempts to bring out the point that Filipinos and Filipino Americans are not simply the dispossessed but "people with powers of resilience and resistance" (151).In this sense, Brainard's book effectively makes visible what has been obscured by largely American hegemonic versions of the past" (151). Similar to Brainard's narrative, Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms is a remarkable piece that "moves against the grain in its insistence of difference" and tends to "reconstitute the Orientalist gaze, presenting new articulations of Japanese Canadian identity that refuses to be "stuck there forever" (168). In the last chapter on Bino Realuyo's The Umbrella Country, Ty examines a number of interethnic problems that Asian immigrants have to face in America, arguing that there is no uniform, monolithic version of Asian American experience, since there are many different ways of articulating Asian American identity and selfhood across various political, racial, national and cultural borders. "Within those large categories," Ty opines, "are others that render disaporic or ethnic subjects marginal and invisible even in their own community" (183).

The obvious strength of Ty's work is the lucid insistence with which she evokes the invisible dimensions of Asian North American identities, which accompanied by a paradoxical recognition of the visible. To a certain degree, Asian North American writers often inscribe a self-reflexive and self-analytical perspective in their narratives upon what is hidden behind their visible birthmarks. "Many of the authors examined in this study," writes Ty at the end of the book, "aim to get beyond the screen of the visible in order to locate and reconstitute a self and/or a community that has been displaced or rendered invisible" (185). Ty's perceptive observation suggests interesting lines of investigation into Asian North American narratives, leading us to see through the visualized corporeality to grasp an incorporeal cultural experience. Moreover, it points in the direction of ore general concern that demands us to re-read the visual markings of Asian American/Canadian identities and to re-examine what kind of impact the ideological forces of old stereotypes prescribed by the dominant culture upon their contemporary articulations. More important, however, rather than thinking in binary terms of the visible/invisible, Ty also highlights in her study the multifaceted mirroring effects of various cultural and ideological imaginaries, and observes the necessity to have "a re-evaluation and a reimagination of relationships between us all" (187). In this sense, this valuable volume serves well as a prolegomenon to further study in this area, encouraging us to find new ways of comparing and theorizing Asian North American literary tests "in a rapidly shifting transnational society" (186).

Benzi Zhang

Chinese University of Hong Kong